A Dream Unrealized on King Boulevard

For years, African American comedians have joked that the most Godforsaken streets in the United States are those named after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Indeed, there is a certain tension between King’s dream of a colorblind nation and life on Los Angeles’ King Boulevard.

The street is seven miles of contradictions. It begins in South-Central L.A. with two lanes at a communal vegetable garden where Latinos and African Americans till their plots side by side. It stretches west through a graffiti-striped neighborhood claimed by the 38th Street gang.

The scenery keeps changing: young men, their heads shaved and their jeans sagging, stride past botanicas. The faithful distribute bags of food or walk two by two, holding Bibles over their chests. Ragged travelers sit against crumbling storefronts and abandoned houses.

Then, at the boulevard’s western end in the Crenshaw district, images of poverty are erased by the gleaming Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza.

Depending on where you stand on this street, and whom you talk to, you may bear witness to the fulfillment of King’s utopian vision or decry the tragedy of his dream deferred.

Russell Rodrick still remembers King patting his head when he was 10, while the civil rights leader was walking past a group of children after a 1966 address at a Baptist church in South-Central Los Angeles.

“I knew who he was,” Rodrick says. “But I didn’t know what he was going to become.”

Nor did he envision the abandoned building he now calls home, or lying on a stained mattress surrounded by 40-ounce beer bottles.

Rodrick, a tall, bleary-eyed man with a scraggly goatee, says he has lived on the second floor of this shell of a building for more than a year. He lost his last job in 1994. He knows he drinks too much, but tonight it is cold, he is tired and beer makes him sleep better. Sometimes a woman named Carla, an Ohio native whose boyfriend stranded her here years ago, wanders by, muttering obscenities. Other nights Rodrick watches drug dealers leaning into car windows.

“Some of these people don’t even know what his message was,” he says. But tonight Rodrick bows his head and remembers King’s kind touch.

“I don’t think there’s going to be anyone like that for a long time,” he says.

Once, small, prosperous shops and middle-class homes with manicured lawns lined this street, called Santa Barbara Avenue. Before World War II, most of its families were white, but the introduction of fair-housing laws and integration drew many blacks, triggering white flight. Many businesses along the street emptied faster than blacks, Latinos and Asians could acquire them.

In the 1960s and ‘70s, Santa Barbara was a primarily black avenue. When national pressure began building to declare a national holiday commemorating King’s Jan. 15 birthday and rename streets in many cities after King, Santa Barbara was Los Angeles’ choice. It became Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in 1983, 15 years after the civil rights leader was slain in Memphis, Tenn. Annual King Day parades on the street began three years later.

By then, the heavy flow of Latino immigration had changed the face of the street. Today, like so many places in Southern California, Latinos constitute the largest community along the boulevard. Although a large number of African Americans still live here, their numbers are decreasing, a fact that plays on many black people’s minds whenever King’s dream is discussed.

Juanita Johnson, 58, cradles a coffee mug and beams with pride as she sits in the Blvd Cafe on King, west of Crenshaw Boulevard. Portraits of King, Fredrick Douglass and Malcolm X stare down from a high wall.

“I marched with King on Woodward Avenue” in Detroit, she boasts, after King called on her pastor, the Rev. C.L. Franklin--Aretha Franklin’s father--to lead the march down that city’s largest thoroughfare.

It was a hot, humid day. Some took their shoes off, others fainted from exhaustion. But most strode on singing freedom songs, baptized in the glory of that moment.

“It felt wonderful,” says Johnson, a talkative, friendly woman who lives on 107th Street in South-Central but who often comes to King to shop. “We had people from all over the nation marching with us--white people too. At last we had a black leader.”

Now there is resignation in her voice.

“That time was our time,” says Johnson, who left Detroit for Los Angeles in 1967. “Now it’s the ethnics’ time. We have diversity now, and we all have to learn to live together. That’s what he meant when he said all colors are one.”

Farther east, the Rev. Sylvester Washington recalls the day King spoke from the state Capitol steps in Montgomery, Ala.

It was an ambush.

King’s speech was cut short by the sound of hammering hooves behind the peaceful crowd. Washington, raised in Montgomery, the crucible of racial oppression that molded King, still remembers how sheriff’s deputies on horseback spurred their mounts into the throng. Others jabbed protesters with electric cattle prods. Then came the great fists of water streaming out of fire hoses.

“That was a horrible experience,” says Washington, who now presides over Pleasant Hill Baptist Church on King Boulevard.

At Wednesday morning services, his church’s pews fill up with devoted souls of every hue. Prayers are offered in Armenian, Spanish and English and then, in his rich baritone, Washington leads his congregation singing:

Are you washed in the blood?

Are you washed in the soul-cleansing blood of the lamb?

In the parking lot in front of the church, two vans full of donated food arrive. Volunteers unload loaves of bread, green vegetables, fruit, meat and eggnog left over from the holidays and put them into plastic grocery bags. As the service ends, congregants file out of the doors and line up to receive three bags of food, enough to feed a family for a week or more. The volunteers, from Love Community Outreach, feed about 1,200 people outside the church every month.

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Rosa Kapandjian rides the bus to King Boulevard from Glendale with several other Armenians. The trip takes an hour, each way, but she says the nourishment is worth the trek.

“We come not only for our bodies,” she says. “We come for food for our spirits. Your color makes no difference.”

A bit farther east, a banner-sized commandment hangs from a building across the street: “Demand Black Reparations Now!” Inside the hall where the walls are decorated with photographs of Huey Newton and Malcolm X, leather-jacketed Marxists gather calling each other “comrade” and “brother.”

Shareef Abdu’llah, minister of defense for the New African American Vanguard Movement, formerly the Black Panthers, stands at a podium and reads aloud to a handful of revolutionaries:

“If the church does not participate actively in the struggle for peace and for economic and racial justice, it will forfeit the loyalty of millions and cause men everywhere to say that it has atrophied its will.”

These words, he notes, are not slain Panther leader George Jackson’s or Malcolm X’s--they are King’s.

“This is the King most of us don’t know,” he declares.

A skeptic, sitting behind Abdu’llah, challenges King’s stance on nonviolence and integration.

“We can disagree with Dr. King’s [nonviolent] tactics,” answers Shareef Abdu’llah, “but the brother started something that we’re still trying to finish today.”

In Abdu’llah’s mind, the man whose face graces everything from beer advertisements to T-shirts is not the real King. He reminds his audience that proponents of Proposition 209, the anti-affirmative initiative passed by California voters in November, invoked King’s words.

“The oppressor will even use Dr. King’s argument against you,” he says, his voice booming with indignation.

There is considerable talk about an economic renaissance on King Boulevard. The million-square-foot Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza at King and Crenshaw boulevards, which opened in 1988, employs more than 3,000 people. Another mall, Santa Barbara Plaza, is planned a block to the west.

But the obstacles faced by the mall illustrate the difficulty of achieving King’s dreams of racial justice and economic self-sufficiency. Major retailers often remain skeptical about poor or minority neighborhoods--and residents know it.

When Federated Department Stores announced plans to convert some of its Broadway stores to Macy’s and close the unprofitable ones, community activists launched petition drives and staged a march by 200 neighborhood residents pleading for a Macy’s in Crenshaw Plaza. They won.

“I want to keep the money in the neighborhood,” Juanita Johnson says. “It’s part of our heritage.”

All too often crime betrays that heritage.

Just days before what would have been King’s 68th birthday, two youths dressed in bulky black clothes walk to the Union Pawn Shop on the corner of King Boulevard and Western Avenue, not 150 yards from the Los Angeles Police Department’s Southwest station.

Store manager Igor Razilov, 35, buzzes them in and, in a fateful gesture of salesmanship, walks out from behind the bulletproof shield at the counter to assist them. They are looking for a sound system, they tell him. But when Razilov unlocks the security door to go back behind the counter, they rush him.

A violent dance ensues as Razilov tries to push them out of the doorway. Shots are fired at point-blank range. Blood smacks the wall. Razilov, fatally wounded, sinks to the floor. The killers get away--all under the watchful eye of a security camera.

The day after the slaying, the Rev. Washington leads his Pleasant Hill Baptist Church congregation in a prayer for Razilov’s family. He also offers a prayer for the youths, now hiding from the law: “We pray not that they would get caught, but that they would have a change of heart.”

Later that week, in his office, Washington talks about riding buses with the Freedom Riders and about spending 24 years at this church. What would Dr. King think of this boulevard if he returned, a visitor asks.

Washington grows sorrowful. Deeds like the pawnshop shooting disgrace King’s legacy, he says.

“The people that live on this boulevard are not aware of this history King made. The dream is not being achieved on this street.”