King’s Message Ignored, Many Fear : Racial Violence in N.Y. Called Part of Pattern

NEW YORK — On what would have been Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 58th birthday Thursday, extra police patrolled the maze of one-way streets flanked by inlets running through Howard Beach, Queens.

In front of the low, red-brick New Park Pizzeria with its pie-shaped neon sign, a foot patrolman stood outside while customers ordered slices. Visitors to the neighborhood were followed by patrol cars or detectives’ cruisers and watched suspiciously by pedestrians.

“We are NOT a Racist Community!” the current issue of the neighborhood newspaper, the Queens Chronicle, proclaimed in a front-page headline over an editorial castigating New York’s Mayor Edward I. Koch, the media and the civil rights movement. “It’s a bum rap and we are getting sick and tired of hearing it,” the editorial said. “We don’t want it and we don’t deserve it.”

One Month Ago

Nearly a month has passed since three white teen-agers were arrested and charged with being part of a group of people in Howard Beach that beat three black men with fists, a baseball bat and a tree limb, forcing one of the victims to flee across a parkway where he was killed by a car.

Civil rights leaders, experts in race relations and the federal government agree that the Howard Beach incident is part of a growing national pattern of racial violence. The Community Relations Service, a branch of the Justice Department, reported this week that “racial/hate incidents” have steadily increased since 1980, when 99 incidents were noted nationwide. Last year, there were 276.

As the nation prepares to honor the memory of King with a federal holiday Monday, many of the Nobel Peace Prize winner’s friends and supporters say they fear that his message is being ignored by young people unfamiliar with his legacy and adults who find civil rights no longer fashionable.

Point to Age Gap

The three teen-agers charged in the Howard Beach incident were not yet born when King was shot to death at dinner time April 4, 1968, as he stood on the balcony outside his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.

Many rights activists say that generation gap is a key factor in the upsurge in racial incidents.

“Complacency set in. We relied too heavily on the momentum of the civil rights movement and on laws,” said Joan Weiss, executive director of the National Institute Against Prejudice and Violence. “We have an awfully large percentage of the population who were not alive during the civil rights era. People have to experience in order to understand. Reading about it is not enough.”

“The law has changed a lot,” added Dr. Alvin Poussaint, associate professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School and a widely acknowledged expert in racial relations. “Howard Beach has awakened people to the fact that incidents like this have been occurring around the country. They are nothing new.”

Copycat Incidents

In New York City, the Howard Beach case has spawned some copycat incidents. Police also have found that on many occasions charges of racism turn out to be something else.

The other day, for example, a 12-year-old black student took the bus to school, but got off at the wrong stop. When she got to class late, she said that she had been attacked by four white teen-age boys and that she had been pelted by rocks.

Police went to the scene of the alleged attack but found no rocks. An officer on duty nearby had heard nothing. The child stuck to her story even after detectives summoned her mother. But finally, the mother, knowing her daughter was deeply religious, took a Bible from her pocketbook and asked her daughter to swear on it.

“No, Mommy, I lied,” said the little girl.

“We are concerned about people making up stories as an aftermath,” said James H. Harding Jr., special adviser to the mayor. “It only exacerbates the situation and makes things tense when they should not be tense.”

Exchange Shouts

On Thursday, more than 20 religious leaders were arrested when they barricaded doors to Citibank’s Park Avenue offices as part of a protest against the bank’s investments in South Africa. During their protest, a white construction worker screamed obscenities at the demonstrators.

“Where are you from, Howard Beach?” the Rev. Timothy Mitchell shouted back.

Separated from the anti-apartheid pickets by a wall of police, the construction worker answered by raising his hands in a V for victory salute.

It is against a background of such tense confrontations that King’s birthday is being celebrated here. Racial bitterness has been openly expressed by both blacks and whites in casual conversations, in letters to newspapers and radio talk shows.

Koch has urged clergy of all faiths to speak out against prejudice from their pulpits and he will address Baptist ministers in Harlem, but he is himself the subject of controversy for his criticism of Howard Beach after the incident.

Critical Editorial

The mayor saw this as “an opportunity to go on TV and improve his image by lambasting a whole community for the senseless acts of a few,” the Queens Chronicle declared.

Koch was also criticized by Wilbert Tatum, editor of Harlem’s Amsterdam News, who charged that the mayor has “polarized the races” in New York through years of insensitivity to minorities.

Aides to the mayor deny both allegations and say that Koch was horrified with what happened in Howard Beach. Since the beatings and death on Dec. 20, they say, Koch has worked diligently to build coalitions within both the black and white communities.

Like racism in the 1980s, the Howard Beach incident is complex. It was complicated by the refusal of two of the victims to testify before a special prosecutor. The victims had charged that police had mistreated them and that a cover-up was under way. They changed their minds about testifying only after Gov. Mario M. Cuomo appointed a special prosecutor.

Others saw their initial refusal as a way of gaining attention for political ends--part of the struggle that often goes on in both black and white communities when newcomers and more established politicians battle for power.

Factors Add to Tension

Civil rights experts say that a number of factors, including backlash over affirmative action programs and over black protests against apartheid in South Africa, can add to racial tension in the 1980s. Such factors “trigger existing prejudices,” said Joan Weiss of the National Institute Against Prejudice and Violence.

But many civil rights leaders insist that the Reagan Administration must shoulder much of the blame.

The President’s policies against affirmative action, coupled with cuts in social programs, have “seeded the clouds with race-conscious acts,” said the Rev. Jesse Jackson. “Now, acts of racism and bigotry are falling like acid rain.”

Reagan Administration officials have repeatedly rejected these charges. And Dennis Wynn, media affairs officer at the Community Relations Service, said that in trying to resolve racial conflicts in communities nationwide, “We have not found that that’s what’s motivating people to act.”

‘Many . . . Have Forgotten’

“I am concerned about the hatred,” said Harding, the adviser to Koch. “Many people in 1986 have forgotten what Martin Luther King stood for and died for.”

As the numbers of racial incidents have risen, so has the difficulty in preventing them.

Charles King, president of the Urban Crisis Center in Atlanta, holds seminars around the country in which he uses confrontational tactics to expose feelings among blacks and whites. “What happened in the last 20 years,” said King, “is that racism has gone beyond the ability of black leaders to interpret it. (Instead,) they react to it.”

He added: “Racism is so subtle that even the purveyors don’t believe they are practicing it.”