Young Blacks Looking Up to Malcolm X : Race relations: On his day, Martin Luther King is now seen by many youths as a docile man who was less courageous than the Black Muslim leader.

By ROBERT ANTHONY WATTS

Jan. 17, 1993 12 AM PT

ASSOCIATED PRESS

ATLANTA, Ga. — Growing up in suburban Atlanta, Kenyatta Adeniya says, young people were taught about one black figure who towered above all the rest: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

But when he entered his sophomore year in high school, Adeniya began hearing about another black man. He remembers listening to a song by the rap group Public Enemy and saying to himself, “Who is this Malcolm?”

Now in his second year at Georgia State University, Adeniya recently led a series of sit-ins as president of the Black Student Alliance. The 20-year-old says he still respects King. But Malcolm X, he insists, is the voice of the young generation.

“Malcolm can relate more to the community now,” Adeniya said. “The youth are less willing to actually bow down and let somebody hit them over the head. We come with more of the philosophy of ‘You hit me, I’ll hit you back.’ ”

Nearly 25 years after King’s assassination and nearly 10 years after Ronald Reagan signed legislation creating Monday’s King Holiday, the civil rights leader is settling into mainstream American history.

All 50 states now observe the King Holiday, New Hampshire having joined the rest of the states last Wednesday. Children across the nation study King in school.

But on the streets of inner cities and on college campuses, Malcolm X, the outspoken Black Muslim leader, is the icon now invoked by young blacks.

Young people who hadn’t heard of Malcolm X a few years ago now are wearing “X” hats and clothing, which multiplied with the release of Spike Lee’s recent movie.

But the move away from King began long before the film came out.

Donald Bakeer, a high school English teacher in South Los Angeles, saw a change beginning in the mid-1980s.

Since the late ‘70s, Bakeer had delivered a rendition of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech at a school assembly every year to commemorate the slain leader’s birthday. About eight years ago, he noticed that the speech no longer resonated among the students, who would fidget and talk throughout.

“They just could not relate to Martin Luther King’s struggle,” Bakeer said. “It became something that was in the distant past to them. He became an old people’s symbol.”

The image of King as a docile man who was somehow less courageous than Malcolm X rankles his associates.

Malcolm X didn’t participate in civil rights demonstrations in the South, a fact obviously in the mind of the Rev. Joseph Lowery of Atlanta, a veteran of the movement who heads the King-founded Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

“It was relatively easy to be bad in Harlem--but try Selma,” Lowery said. “Try the country roads of Mississippi. Try the jails in Birmingham.”

Mainstream acceptance seems to have taken the edge off King’s place in history.

“King has become a national symbol. And you can’t become a national symbol and speak for those who are left out,” said James Cone, a professor of theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York and author of “Martin and Malcolm and America,” a book that compares the philosophies of the two men.

In Los Angeles, the site of 1992 spring riots, a total commitment to nonviolence strikes many young people, especially males, as impractical, said 17-year-old Deric Tucker.

“If somebody does something to you and you don’t do anything back, that makes things worse,” Tucker said. “Because they know they can do this to them or that to them, and that’s worst in the long run and you’ll end up dead.”

Many of his friends are instantly attracted to the phrase used by Malcolm, “by any means necessary,” Tucker said. He said young blacks in his community use that phrase to mean “you’ll do anything to get what you want.”

In Atlanta, where King is buried and where the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change draws about 3 million visitors a year, teen-agers who know little else about King react strongly to his stance against violence.

Walking home in his black-and-gray Los Angeles Raiders jacket on a recent afternoon, 17-year-old Mario Berry said he didn’t know a lot about King. But, he said, “The speech he made about don’t do nothing to the whites when they hit you, that was wrong. You should defend yourself.”

Some scholars and activists say young people are misinformed about King and fail to appreciate how radical it was to challenge segregation in the South in the 1950s and 1960s. They say King’s image has been defined exclusively by that August, 1963, “I Have a Dream” speech, which included a vision of brotherhood in which black and white children sit down together in harmony.

David J. Garrow, the author of “Bearing the Cross,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of King, said King became more radical after 1965, when he began turning his attention to poverty and despair in urban ghettos of the North.

“In most King-Malcolm comparisons, King gets essentially trapped within the image of 1963 and the ‘I Have a Dream ‘ speech,” said Garrow. “The King of 1966 to 1968 is a distinctly more outspoken, hard-eyed realist about American society.”

Lowery said young people who criticize King and the civil rights movement as passive are misinformed.

“I never told anyone that if the klan came to my house to attack my family that I would take my family out in my arms to give them to the klan to beat them up. I never said that, nor did Martin say that,” Lowery said.

The civil rights movement and King--not Malcolm X--were responsible for getting the country to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Lowery said, and both are responsible for the 7,500 blacks who hold elected office now.

King’s legacy is felt differently by Adeniya. The college student recalls driving in his car after the Los Angeles riots and listening to Atlanta radio stations quoting King on nonviolence.

“A lot of youth are just tired of being drilled by Dr. King, because people try to use Dr. King as a pacifier,” he said. “A lot of youth look back on Dr. King’s methods and they don’t think they failed. But they think they’re outdated.”