Lessons From the Street

He comes across as a badass with a conscience, usually capable of seizing control of a room with his mountain of charisma. But right now, Malik Yoba is in the hot seat.

It’s right before 11 p.m. on a balmy April evening and the 29-year-old actor sits in the Wilshire Boulevard studios of radio station KKBT-FM (92.3) fielding calls on the weekly “Street Soldiers” program. The call-in show, hosted by Joe Marshall and Margaret Norris, is a lethal dose of straightforward and often raw talk about everything from having a spouse locked up to living with crack-addicted relatives. Marshall calls it an “inoculation for ‘hood disease.” Tonight their topic is domestic violence.

About an hour into the show, 17-year-old Jasmine from L.A. phones in and drops a bomb. “My boyfriend has been hitting on me ever since I was 15,” she says in a teary, anguished tone. “He jumped on me and forced me to have sex with him.” Fearing that her parents or brothers would kill her boyfriend, Jasmine is afraid to tell anyone. She’d lied and said her bruises were the result of being beaten up by a posse of teenage girls.

Throughout her plaintive call, Yoba leans close to the microphone, bouncing slightly in his chair, taking mental notes.

“Have you been listening to this show?” he asks Jasmine, referring to a previous female caller who was eventually shot by an abusive boyfriend. “You are 17 years old. Your boyfriend is 19. You guys are the next generation. It might not be a whole lot that we can do for a woman that’s 35 in that situation but you are a very young lady--not even a woman yet. The bottom line is that you know your situation is not the only situation like this.”

To drive in his point, Yoba puts a personal spin on his advice.

“My father [who died two years ago] was abusive of me,” he continues. “I used to get beat with extension cords just about every week. I have scars on my body. One day I wrestled the extension cord from him and pushed him. I was shocked that I even did this, because for 15 years of my life he kicked my ass.

“My mother ran away from my father after 16 years of being married to him. She was 16 when she hooked up with him. She left him after having six kids. He chased her around with a gun. My father kicked me out of the house by the time I was 16. He later saw me and pulled his car over, threatening to shoot me.”

Before signing off, Yoba, who is unmarried, has a special plea for the male listeners who hit their wives or girlfriends. “For all you young brothers out there my age and younger, keep your hands off your women,” he urges. “Keep your hands off each other. Hug yourself. Go hug a tree. Caress an old person or child. We gotta take this pain somewhere and to each other is not the place.”

Yoba, a two-time winner of the NAACP’s Image Award for outstanding actor in a dramatic series for his work on Fox’s “New York Undercover,” has been active in issues affecting young people since he was a teenager. His involvement, say those who know him, is genuine--not the halfhearted pleas of a publicity-seeking celebrity.

Also genuine, they say, is his approach to show business, in which he has shown no reluctance to criticize the direction of the program, the people who create it or the network that markets it. (The program was yanked from the Fox fall lineup but is likely to return at midseason, the network said last week.) His combination of talent and bravado caught the attention of the New York Times Magazine, which last year named him one of 30 young artists who will shape American culture in the next 30 years.

Five years ago, Yoba was working as vice president of the nonprofit CityKids Foundation, a multicultural youth group in New York. Founded by social worker Laurie Meadoff as a place where kids of all backgrounds could share intellectual and artistic energies, CityKids sponsors workshops dealing with issues like racism and drugs. Meadoff’s and Yoba’s work resulted in commendations from the president and a community TV program in New York that was nominated for a local Emmy Award.

He says his commitment to youth grows out of an incident that occurred when he was 15. Walking home from school, he saw a group of boys fighting. He tried to steer clear of the melee, but ended up being shot three times.

“I woke up the next day in the hospital and I had an IV in my arm and a bandage on my neck,” Yoba recalls four days later at a Studio City meeting of TRIBE, a young people’s support group that grew out of CityKids’ former L.A. program. “There are doctors surrounding my bed. You ever seen these images in the movies where it’s fuzzy and from the point of view of the patient? It was that. And they were all looking at me saying, ‘You were so lucky, a quarter of an inch over and you would be paralyzed from your neck down and a half-inch over you would be dead.”

Out of the hospital bed, Yoba says he promised then to devote his life to youth-oriented issues such as securing better educational opportunities for urban students.

“He has always been someone who takes a negative and makes it into something positive,” says CityKids’ Meadoff, who initially befriended Yoba when he straggled into her office as a fast-talking 17-year-old. “One night Malik was at a McDonald’s with some kids and he was falsely arrested. Someone had a water gun and he tried to intervene. Saying he had a ‘big mouth,’ the cops arrested him. And his rage, which might have gone elsewhere in the past, went into CityKids. He said, ‘We ought to train these cops to better deal with the young people.’

“The next day we were sponsoring a workshop in Harlem and the commissioner of the police department was there. And Malik went right over to him and in Malik style said, ‘You need us. You need our training.’ That’s quintessential Malik.”

With CityKids, Yoba crisscrossed the nation, raising money for its programs and fitting in comfortably with corporate presidents as well as the young men patrolling the street corners.

“One of the things I enjoy about my life is that I am a ‘real nigga’ for so many people,” Yoba boasts. “Drug dealers, gangsters and pimps, they love me. I love them. I really felt it at the Million Man March. There was all types giving me love.”

While working for CityKids, Yoba moonlighted part time as an actor, doing extra work for cash. He got his big break when a friend, who knew Yoba did a great Jamaican impression, told him about an open call for the 1993 Disney movie “Cool Runnings.” With no head shot or prior reading of the script, he landed a role in the slapstick story about the Jamaican bobsled team.

After guest stints on “Law and Order” and other programs, Yoba won the role of J.C. Williams, a hip and streetwise detective on “New York Undercover,” which made its debut in 1994. The show, while a ratings loser overall, is No. 2 in black and Latino households (trailing “Living Single”) and is the first dramatic series with two minority leads ever to survive past its first season, according to show spokeswoman Jennifer Price.

Such a following can be attributed to the sex appeal of Yoba and his Puerto Rican co-star, Michael DeLorenzo, as well as the show’s often true-to-life urban story lines. DeLorenzo’s character’s father is a former heroin addict who eventually commits suicide after learning he has AIDS. Yoba plays a young cop searching to make sense of his own life while trying to be a responsible single father.

“People say, ‘I love that relationship with you and your son,’ ” Yoba says about his often difficult battles on the show with his son G, played by George Gore II. “I’ve always looked at my role with G as a continuation of my work with kids. I’ve always been real conscious about the way I play the role. Every scene I play with that boy, I have my hand on him. Oftentimes I’ll close a scene with a hug or a kiss because I never got that. It’s important to show that.”

The set has not been without tension, however. Last July, Yoba and DeLorenzo walked off, claiming poor working conditions and a lack of commitment to the show’s future from Fox and some of its producers. They also wanted raises from their salaries of about $20,000 per episode.

One of the executive producers, Dick Wolf, responded by threatening to write the two stars off the show. Three weeks later, they went back to work, having gained few concessions.

Yoba says he remains unhappy that the show’s producers and the network never acted on a marketing plan he devised to reach out to teenagers and other markets. Wolf declined to comment; producer Reggie Rock Bythewood said Yoba’s idea had merit.

“It was a really great concept and there may have some been some apathy in pursuing action on it,” Bythewood says. “And there may have been a lot to gain. It could have helped the show. But what’s most positive about the show is that it’s been able to tell stories that have never been on TV before.”

Yoba professes not to worry about possible harm coming to his career for being so outspoken. “I fear no one,” he says. “What are they gonna do? Yell at me? Fire me? Kill me? What? At this point I am over the romanticism of what it’s like to be on television. There have been a couple of times when I thought I might be overstepping my boundaries, but one of my roles in this industry is to demystify celebrity. Now that I’m in the game and I see what really goes on, I’m not that impressed.”

Since “Cool Runnings,” Yoba has been taking full advantage of the perks of being a marketable commodity.

Late last year he opened the doors to the Soul Cafe, a now-trendy black hangout near Times Square in Manhattan, which features food from across the black diaspora.

“I knew that I wanted to create a restaurant like Hard Rock Cafe or Planet Hollywood that celebrated not just music or Hollywood, but who we were as people of color, as Caribbean, African, Cajun and Southern people,” Yoba says. Along with live entertainment from artists such as bright, new R&B; singer Erykah Badu, Yoba occasionally steps onstage and belts in a throaty, soulful style.

The actor has two movies due out in the next year: “Cop Land,” in which he stars as an internal affairs investigator opposite Robert De Niro and Sylvester Stallone, and a romantic comedy, “Love Changes,” with supermodel Tyra Banks.

Yoba grew up in a strict Muslim household and was banned from watching television. He and his five siblings were forced to make up games; creativity was nurtured from the get-go. After his final blowout with his father, Yoba sought out his mother.

“He was 9 when I left and then 14 when he found me and came back,” recalls Yoba’s mother, Mahmoudah, who manages and often travels with him. Their relationship, which could be potentially disastrous considering the hazy line between business and family, has worked well, both say.

“He’s just all heart,” Mahmoudah says. “He has the passion that translates into his tremendous generosity. He’s one of the most generous people I know. He’s not a wealthy man at all but he has the understanding that if you give you shall receive. He’s getting the blessings because he gives of himself. And he has shortcomings, because he’s human. And as his mother I see them. Hopefully I can articulate these things to him in a way that helps him grow.”

Yoba recently signed a deal with Doubleday to write his autobiography, an anti-violence book tentatively titled “Yoba, Lessons From the Street and Other Places.”

“A lot of people like Malik in the celebrity world don’t know how they can get involved,” Marshall says. “I want him to feel that it’s OK to have the type of consciousness he has, that who you are as a person is more important than what you have. He exemplifies that. He means more to people than just being on television and that’s why his show is such a big success. The brother is really grounded and that’s rare.”