Respect Life, Farrakhan Asks L.A. Crowd : Muslims: Nation of Islam leader welcomed by record audience at Sports Arena. Talk comes after recent clashes with police, deputies.

Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, welcomed joyously by the largest Los Angeles crowd he has ever gathered, addressed a month of violent encounters between Muslims and law enforcement Friday night by admonishing both his audience in the Sports Arena and the white world beyond it to regain a respect for human life.

Farrakhan, opening his late-evening remarks with a tribute to the young Muslim shot and killed 10 days earlier by sheriff’s deputies, said his message to his 16,500 listeners in the Sports Arena was this:

“Our subject is stop the killing. Stop the killing. There’s so much disrespect for the single gift of life that it is sad in 1990 that someone has to come along and ask us to stop those who have delighted in killing us.

“We can never stop them from killing us until we stop killing ourselves,” Farrakhan said in an apparent reference to gang and drug violence that has shattered parts of the city for years.

“Why can we take the trigger and pull it at each other? We are killing ourselves. In the name of life, we are worshipers of death.

“We now as black people are living in hell, under the very shadow of death. We can’t walk in our own neighborhood. We take a chance walking outside our houses. We take a chance sitting in our houses by the window.”

It is not altogether the black man’s doing, Farrakhan said: “Somebody has told us that we are nothing . . . made us believe we are nothing. If you believe that, you will kill each other.”

And thus he began to speak to the white world beyond the arena, and his voice, soft and commanding, turned fierce:

“You brought us here to give us a job. There was full employment on the slave plantation. But now you don’t need us any more. You have found machines to do what our forefathers used to do. And when something loses its value, you get rid of (it).”

To a standing ovation and an audience bristling with raised-fist salutes, Farrakhan entered the arena at 9:25 p.m. For about 10 minutes, he smiled, waving a fan of dollar bills over his head and applauding as Muslims collected contributions from a crowd growing restless at the wait. He smiled toward the balcony as a group of Crips gang members, more accustomed to retaliating with gunfire than cash, contributed $625 to exceed an earlier $500 donation by some Bloods rivals. The Bloods countered with another $500.

Although the speech had been scheduled since last year, its timing intersects a rising curve of community outrage after a month of strife between Muslims and lawmen. Two incidents between police and sheriff’s deputies each began with routine traffic stops and each escalated into violence.

In one, a 27-year-old Muslim, Oliver Beasley, was shot and killed in what authorities say was a struggle over a deputy’s gun. Beasley’s picture, 15 feet tall, hung behind the dais: “Long Live Brother Oliver X. Beasley,” the banner declared. Farrakhan had spoken at Beasley’s funeral last weekend.

About Beasley, Farrakhan told the audience Friday night: “I didn’t come to Los Angeles to call for black folks to rise up and go crazy. That would have been irresponsible of me.

“I came to Los Angeles to call on the police. Mr. Block,” he said, referring to L.A. County Sheriff Sherman Block, “you want to better relations, and then you turn right around and defend the officers.

“If you love Los Angeles,” he went on to massive applause, “do not protect an errant police officer. If he’s wrong, don’t keep him on the force. You will do better to make him an example of someone who went astray. If you cover up the crime, you are adding to a day that’s coming.”

The program began at 8:30 p.m. when Sabir Muhammad, a minister at the Los Angeles mosque, introduced Oliver Beasley’s family.

In the restless wait before Farrakhan spoke, the Rev. Cecil Murray, pastor of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church, scene of Beasley’s funeral service, urged that there be “no division between black Christians and black Muslims,” adding: “Stand, stand for your dignity.”

Farrakhan’s dramatically pitched speech--they have been known to last three hours--rang many of the same themes he has sounded already. It was the mood of the audience that was different--upbeat, receptive, eager to hear the man some black leaders had distanced themselves because of remarks some deemed anti-Semitic and turbulent phrase-making, once calling Mayor Tom Bradley a “black manager in a white man’s store.”

Before the speeches began, two groups of young men on the second tier behind the stage began “throwing” gang signs. As Fruit of Islam security men hustled some of them off, thousands screamed “No! No!” Muhammad, the minister at the local mosque, tried to soothe the crowd with Islam’s message of unity with gang members: “If anyone comes into this auditorium with red on, with blue on, with green on, and they are black, they are our brothers.”

More than 55 uniformed, off-duty LAPD officers, most of them black and Latino, were working around the Sports Arena. There were no reports of trouble.

Of criticism that he is anti-Semitic, Farrakhan said: “I say to those who would label me anti-Semitic, I could not be considered anti-Semitic if I am a friend of Arab people who are a Semitic people. Or do you think you are the only Semitic people?”

The audience erupted.

Times staff writers Charisse Jones, Kristina Lindgren and Patt Morrison contributed to this story.