Activist Says Too Few Blacks on Job : Hiring: Danny Bakewell demands that museum project increase African American participation, which is 4%. Official defends effort to hire minorities.

A gathering intended to tout progress in the construction of the new Museum of Science and Industry took an unexpected turn Monday when an African American activist threatened to shut down the operation because not enough blacks are working on the project.

Danny Bakewell, head of the Brotherhood Crusade, said only 4% of the workers on the next phase of the project are black, a number that he described as “preposterous” and “criminal” given that the museum is in a predominantly African American community where the unemployment rate is about 40%.

“If African Americans don’t work on this project, no one will work on this project,” Bakewell told an audience that, until then, had listened to glowing reports of what the museum’s new science center would be like.

“We are prepared to keep this job from going forward,” he said after the ceremony. “They can’t build over us.”

Bakewell was flanked on either side of the microphone by about 20 supporters , as if to underscore the seriousness of his threat.

Jeffrey Rudolph, the museum’s director, confirmed that Bakewell’s figures were correct. But Rudolph said great pains were being taken to ensure minority participation in the museum’s construction.

Rudolph said he found out only Monday morning that Bakewell and his entourage planned to appear. Rudolph said museum officials decided that it was better to ask Bakewell to speak.

The original intent of Monday’s ceremony was to take note of the demolition and grading work that completed the first phase of the project and to announce that construction of a state-of-the-art science center is about to begin. In addition to the science center, the museum will include an adjacent elementary school and a development center for science teachers. The projected total cost is $265 million.

The celebratory script for Monday’s program was followed for about the first 15 minutes, until the podium was turned over to Bakewell, who is a contractor as well as a community activist. He said that in a contract worth $33 million, only one company owned by an African American was being employed as a subcontractor.

“We can do the work, we just need people working with us to make it come to fruition,” Bakewell said. “We want to call into question what is happening today.”

Rudolph, in defending the project’s contracting policies, said the demolition and grading work had been awarded to Curtom Building and Development Co. of Inglewood, which is run by an African American woman.

“We’ve been extremely aggressive throughout the program to ensure that minority and disabled workers are hired,” Rudolph said. “We have taken significantly greater steps than in most state contracts.”

Bakewell’s threat was another in a series of controversies involving the construction of the new Museum of Science and Industry. Over the last two years, the project has been embroiled in fights over state funding and whether enough of the historical facade of the Ahmanson Building was being saved.

Toward the end of the session Monday, Assemblywoman Marguerite Archie-Hudson (D-Los Angeles) took the podium and said she was glad that Bakewell was keeping “our feet to the fire and making sure we are doing what we need to be doing.”

But she tried to bring the focus back to the science center itself and the fact that “children will never be locked out” just because they happen to live in a poor part of the city. She said the battle had been waged to build the museum in South-Central Los Angeles over the objections of many who did not want it there.

“People don’t like that and we don’t care,” she said.