The Community Relations department of CORE came into being toward the end of 1959, when Marvin Rich was employed as director of the new department. Its function was to deal with public relations and the fund-raising aspects of CORE. Although the records begin with 1954, most are dated from 1960 to 1964. Included with this material are records that pre-date the formation of the department, chiefly concerning CORE's financial affairs. Before Marvin Rich took over, James Robinson and Lula Farmer were in charge of finances, and their appeal letters, accounts, and invoices appear here.

Files of the Community Relations Department are groups under these headings: Finance, Legal Matters, Local Chapters, National Projects, Other Organizations, Publicity and Fundraising, Regional Office, and Miscellany.

The largest quantity of material is concerned with the local CORE chapters and with publicity and fundraising for national CORE. Records under the heading “Local Chapters” deal chiefly with public relations problems. However, there is also a large amount of material concerning the chapters' internal problems and local projects. The responsibility for communicating with the local CORE chapters does not seem to have been confined to one particular national CORE department, such as Community Relations, but to some extent belonged to all departments. Therefore, in the correspondence of the “Local Chapters” one may find reports from CORE field representatives, and various other papers which are sometimes more important than the public relations material relating to the chapters.

There is much less material under the remaining subject headings. The correspondence with other organizations is generally concerned with public relations. The legal records, while not numerous, are of some importance since they cover a wide range of topics. The records concerning the national projects of CORE (those co-ordinated through the national office) are especially significant for the information they give concerning the Freedom Rides of 1961 and the Mississippi Summer Project of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) in 1964, in which the Community Relations Department of CORE played an important role.

It should be noted that there is much overlapping material under these subject headings. For instance, if a researcher wanted to study the Student Non-violent Co-ordinating Committee's (SNCC) relationship with CORE, he would have to look in at least three places in the Community Relations department records: under “Other Organizations”; under “National Projects,” Mississippi COFO project, since SNCC was part of COFO; and under various “Local Chapters” headings in Mississippi, since it was impossible to completely separate the COFO records from the local chapter materials.