Bradley Lauds Efforts to Dampen Racial Hostility : Violence: He says self-esteem, job classes are needed to fight crime at Jordan Downs, where arson fire killed five.

Confronted with an increasingly turbulent melting pot, Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley met Monday with residents of Watts, where an arson fire that killed five Latinos in a housing project has helped propel the issue of race relations to the top of the city’s agenda.

Bradley at a luncheon praised black and Latino leaders for helping to keep anger over the deadly blaze--which police believe was set by several blacks--from further aggravating racial hostilities.

Later, meeting with residents just a block from the charred apartment of the Zuniga family, Bradley moved to divert attention from the racially charged atmosphere of the past week. The mayor said he supports a plan for self-esteem and job training courses at the Jordan Downs project in an effort to reduce gang violence and other crime.

“We didn’t discuss the fire,” Bradley said. “What we talked about is something that has much broader implications, and is looking toward the future, not toward what happened in the last few days.”

Bradley’s intervention comes at a particularly unsettled time in race relations in Los Angeles--with a level of tension not experienced since the divisive battles over school desegregation in the late 1970s.

The police beating of black motorist Rodney G. King last March by four white officers has focused new attention on race relations throughout the city.

In South-Central Los Angeles, for example, a highly publicized boycott of a Korean market is being staged by black activists who have defied a call by the mayor to end the action. In East Los Angeles, Latinos have picketed the Sheriff’s Department, alleging racially inspired brutality.

“People are more aware of the diversity in the community, and more aware of the tensions that come along with that diversity,” said Eugene Mornell, executive director of the county Human Relations Commission.

Encouraging conciliation, Bradley and other City Hall officials have been working to downplay reports of racial strife, largely blaming the media for fostering hostilities.

Still, some City Hall insiders say race relations are worsening, and the tense environment has exposed the difficult task Bradley and others face in trying to soothe the sometimes uneasy coexistence of multiethnic communities.

“The temperature is rising, and leaders in City Hall don’t know how to provide leadership in this new environment,” said Councilman Michael Woo. “Recent incidents like the tragedy at Jordan Downs, and the problems between Koreans and blacks, are scaring people about whether or not our city is exempt from the racial tensions that are tearing other cities apart.”

Bradley has gained a reputation over the years for maintaining the city’s relative racial calm through largely behind-the-scenes consensus building. Political consultant Joseph Cerrell said officials traditionally have been reluctant to “go public” when thorny racial issues arise, for fear of upsetting the city’s racial balance.

“It is always a touchy subject,” Cerrell said. “It is like walking on eggshells. You are damned no matter what you do.”

For the first time in years, however, Bradley and other city officials have been forced to break from that practice in hopes of finding creative solutions to simmering racial conflicts.

Recently elected Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas, who represents much of South-Central, has been working quietly in search of a compromise between black residents and Korean merchants. Because of long-standing tension between the two groups, reignited last spring by the fatal shooting of a black teen-ager by a Korean store owner, blacks have been boycotting a Korean-owned liquor store.

Bradley made an unusual public appeal last month for racial calm between the two groups after a Korean liquor store was destroyed by arson. The mayor will hold a one-day symposium next week for business owners in South-Central in hopes of improving relations.

Councilwoman Rita Walters, a former Los Angeles school board member, said she hopes to strike an agreement with the school district to help improve ethnic relationships in her central city district. Walters said she would like to call upon district employees, who are trained in bringing together parents of differing ethnicity and race.

“We all have fears of the unknown,” Walters said. “We just have to work against those. When we get to know people, I am certain we will find we are all more alike than we are different.”

Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores, whose district includes Watts and more than half of the city’s public housing units, has been working the past week to bring together residents from several projects to grapple with problems of crime, gangs and inadequate public services. Flores, who is expected to announce formation of the group today, said the problems are common to all residents and supersede any racial divisions.

“The political leadership is trying to emphasize the commonality we share, and de-emphasize the negative aspects of our peculiarities,” said political consultant Richard Maullin, who has advised Bradley and several other council members. “We are dealing with social phenomena that just don’t easily lend themselves to any political figure saying, ‘Why don’t we all behave ourselves and love each other?’ ”

In the case of Jordan Downs, the city’s leadership has been working hard to cast the fire as not racially motivated.

Mike Stewart, Flores’ aide in Watts, has been meeting with residents at Jordan Downs every day since the fire, listening to a multitude of fears and complaints, including criticism that there has been too much talk of racial hostilities at the project. When Flores visited the housing project last week, several groups of residents asked her to help steer media attention away from race and concentrate instead on what they regarded as the real cause of the incident: unchecked crime.

Police said the Latino family that perished in the blaze had been upset with drug dealing and other problems, and some neighbors have characterized the fire as an act of intimidation by area drug dealers.

“I have never felt this way about an incident before,” Flores said. “It really began to eat at me. The (racial) thing became almost more important to the media than the fact that three young kids died and that a whole branch of a family was wiped out.”

Flores said the race angle was “created by the media by taking other things that have been happening in our city and projecting them on this incident.”

On a recent visit to Jordan Downs, Flores said she was astonished--and disheartened--to find two television crews parked in the center of the housing project.

“They were sitting in the middle--just waiting for something to happen,” she said.

At Jordan Downs on Monday, several residents milling around a parking lot where Bradley spoke said they were no longer concerned about racial issues surrounding the fire. They simply want the arsonists caught.

“I am scared,” said Tina Bradley, who moved to the complex six months ago. “I still can’t sleep at night.”