Is the Dream Still Alive? : As the nation celebrates the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr., some wonder if the civil rights leader’s teachings are relevant to Los Angeles today.

“Somehow we must be able to stand up before our most bitter opponents and say: ‘We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering . . . Do to us what you will and we will still love you . . . But be assured that we’ll wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom.”

--Martin Luther King Jr.

It is words like these by Martin Luther King Jr.--about tolerance and the use of nonviolence in the struggle for civil rights--that ring in Billy Childs’ memory today.

For the 41-year-old Childs, as with many African-Americans, King is the forefather of civil rights activism. He orchestrated the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott and sit-ins; led the civil rights march on Washington; sacrificed his life for the equal rights of blacks and the poor; and promoted nonviolence as a means of achieving justice and freedom.

On Monday, which is the national holiday to honor King, people across the country will celebrate his efforts and philosophy. But there are some people, including Childs, who believe King’s teachings are not relevant to the social problems facing Los Angeles today.

“The Martin Luther King side--treat everyone with love and can we all get along and all that--was fine then, but I don’t think that will work now,” said Childs as he sold incense and hair accessories outside the Martin Luther King Jr. shopping center in Watts. “People want to see action--aggressive not passive.”

Childs said he identifies more with militant activists such as Angela Davis and Stokley Carmichael and the early teachings of Malcolm X, which he remembers hearing as a teen-ager. However, it is primarily younger people--those too young to remember or those not alive in the 1960s--who have embraced the Malcolm X motto, “By Any Means Necessary,” and the Old Testament credo, “An eye for an eye.”

Many young people said in interviews that they believe blacks and whites will never be able to live together harmoniously. They revere the revolutionary image of Malcolm X, who was brought to their attention in the 1980s through rap songs such as “By All Means Necessary” by Boogie Down Productions.

“Mostly what Malcolm X said is happening today,” said 15-year-old Kontar Singleton as he sold incense at Western Avenue and 41st Street. “. . .If someone slaps you in the head then you gotta slap them back. And be proud of your color.”

Juda Hawkins, a 34-year-old street vendor, agrees with many of King’s teachings. But Hawkins believes they would work in an ideal world, not in real-life Los Angeles, which is punctuated by ethnic tensions and violence.

“Martin Luther King’s message is up against an onslaught of violence, from gangs and just in day-to-day living,” said Hawkins. “After the verdict (in the Rodney G. King beating trial) people didn’t want to hear about tolerance. They were looking to someone who’d reflect their anger and hostility and what they know of Martin Luther King doesn’t reflect that.”

The problem, said Ottis Hendricks, is that no one really knows what King stood for.

“It’s not that King’s message isn’t relevant, it’s very relevant. It’s just that people don’t want to embrace it,” said Hendricks, 46, who grew up in rural Mississippi during the civil rights era.

Hendricks and other King followers say most people do not realize that King and Malcolm X shared some goals. Before Malcolm X’s 1964 pilgrimage to Mecca, he believed strongly in black separatism. But after the hajj, Malcolm X embraced King’s beliefs about the possibility of brotherhood between the races.

“If anybody thinks that King is some wimp who just talked about tolerance and turning the other cheek, they’re ridiculous,” said Hendricks, who lives in Monterey Park and teaches history part time at Inglewood High School.

“This is a man who talked about green power and financial independence, the importance of education (and) social justice with strength and force,” he said. “Who knows that today? They’re not taught that. They don’t read about it.”

On a recent afternoon at the King shopping plaza at 103rd Street and Compton Avenue, no one stopped to read King’s “I Have A Dream” speech etched in the large memorial dedicated to the slain Nobel Peace Prize winner. Some people who passed the monument said they did not have time to read it. Others said they knew what the speech said. Hendricks contended that people only know a few lines from it.

Joe R. Hicks, executive director of the local Southern Christian Leadership Conference chapter, said people have missed most of King’s message because his image has been watered down over the years. King, along with a collection of southern ministers, founded SCLC in 1957.

“So now you have the ideal dreamer who had this naive image of the world,” said Hicks. “The social activist image has been sucked out of what Martin stood for . . . His philosophy is more complex than people perceive it to be.”

Jer-Joe, 30, a member of the Nickerson Gardens Bloods, doesn’t know too much about King’s philosophy, just the bits he learned in school and from his grandmother and preachers. But it was enough to make him believe in King’s push for nonviolence, even though that is not how he has lived much of his life.

“We’re in L.A., in Watts, and sometimes you have to handle violence with violence,” he said. “But I know Dr. King wouldn’t like that.”

LaDoris Jefferson is skeptical about King’s message ever being understood or accepted by today’s youth. Too many have grown up in a violent society and too few are taught about their ethnic history, she said.

“King’s memory will never die, but what of it will remain and how long will people care?” asked Jefferson, 46, of South-Central Los Angeles.

“The sooner people understand and realize the relevance of what King and other civil rights leaders were talking about, maybe the sooner we can start working toward some productive change.”