The year before Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, my mother, brother and I moved from New York City, where we had practiced my father's Jewish faith, to Tampa, my Christian mother's hometown. Jewish boys weren't as common in Tampa as they were in New York, and I suppose that's why one of my third-grade classmates, Paul, took pleasure in taunting me. "Jew boooyyy!" he would yell across the playground during lunchtime. "Hey Jew boy! Did your daddy kill Jesus?" That was my personal introduction to bigotry.

About five years later-1972 or 1973-school integration was enforced in Tampa through busing. Tensions ran high as students from different schools and, it seemed, different worlds mixed in my junior high school.

One of my best friends was Mike, an intelligent, witty and thoughtful guy, and we hung out a lot. He also was black. One day after school, we were walking down an outside corridor, headed to the locker room for track practice. The end of the corridor was dominated by a stairwell, which formed a tight, hidden space with the opposite wall. As we passed the stairs, four guys, all black, jumped us. One pushed me out of the way before joining the others. Mike was their target. They had him on the ground, punching him. I was a small kid, so when I tried to help him, one of the bullies just shoved me away. It was over in a minute, I guess, but of course it seemed longer.

Mike's face was bloody, his lip split, his right eye already swelling and turning blue. I helped him to his feet and we started walking to his house in silence. We dared not go to the school office. It was common knowledge that any time an attack was reported, another would follow.

A few minutes after we left the school, Mike said in a barely audible whisper, "I guess they don't like me hanging around with white guys."

That was my personal introduction to racial violence. And for some reason, I thought of Mike when the Decatur Seven made headlines last fall.

Jesse's Crusade

"The Decatur Seven" is a noble-sounding name, but the incident they provoked was anything but. The videotaped scene of mayhem is familiar now: A fight breaks out during a high school football game and quickly escalates into a brawl that travels from one end of the bleachers to the other. Parents, students and young children scatter to avoid the tornado of punches.

It was over in just a few minutes and, fortunately, no weapons were involved and no one was hurt. But within days the school board of Decatur, Ill., expelled the seven Eisenhower High School students who were involved in the fight for two years, without the chance for "alternative education." The board based its decision on the district's "zero-tolerance" policy for violence and drugs. Some mild local protests resulted, but the case didn't cause much of a stir until Rev. Jesse Jackson came to town.

Jackson-protégé of King, founder and president of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, occasional presidential candidate and freelance diplomat-had found another cause. He led groups of protesters against the school board, saying the sentences were too harsh, that the boys were unfairly victimized by Decatur's zero-tolerance policy. He (and the Illinois governor) negotiated on behalf of the parents, and the school board agreed to reduce the expulsions to one year and allowing alternative education in the meantime. The six remaining students enrolled in their alternative programs in November. (One of the expelled students had already moved out of state.)

That was not enough for Jackson, who stayed in Decatur to lobby and demonstrate, claiming the school board acted without due process and that the zero-tolerance policy was inherently biased against minorities. Jackson called for the boys to be returned to school immediately.

The board refused, and Jackson and his followers intensified their actions, even earning a trip to jail by trespassing on school property. Other groups staged counter- protests, one led by a city councilwoman who opposed the long expulsions at first but changed her mind after she viewed the videotape of the incident. The dispute prompted the school district to cancel classes at all its schools for a few days in November. In December a county judge issued an injunction that barred any protestors, including Jackson, from being within 50 feet of the high school building.

Jackson has since filed lawsuit on behalf of the Decatur Seven, accusing the school board of libeling, defaming and discrediting the students by releasing confidential school records. The suit seeks $5 million in damages for each student. He has also requested a federal court to void the district's zero-tolerance policy.

Jackson said the Decatur case was not a "white and black" issue, nor should be; he said his complaint was against the zero-tolerance policy. But he was sending mixed signals, invoking the almost-sacred names of King and Nelson Mandela, comparing the events in Decatur with 1960s civil-rights marches in Selma, Ala., and the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.

But Decatur is a long way from Selma and South Africa, and these half dozen brawlers were not long-suffering victims of legalized discrimination, so Jackson was roundly criticized. "This is a classic example of black 'leaders' who are leading their people to cultural suicide," wrote Thomas Sowell, a black, conservative columnist, in November. "There are few things more dishonorable than misleading the young."

Jackson had his defenders, of course. "Jackson's position is that those responsible for the bedlam deserve punishment," wrote Vernon Jarrett, a member of the National Advisory Board of the Rosa and Raymond Parks Pathways to Freedom Program for Youths. Then Jarrett adds, "If Jackson had not journeyed to Decatur, seven youths, who were never tried with respect for due process, would have been cut from the education process- maybe permanently. Seven new candidates for the University of Penitentiaries." Jarrett noted that Jackson studiously avoided the word "racism" when he protested the school board's actions, but guessed that Jackson was being "tactful."

When I started writing this article, I was convinced of one thing: Jesse Jackson was off base. From the way he stuck his nose into Decatur to defend a group of thugs, I thought he made a mockery of the civil-rights movement, especially when he compared this incident to Selma and in South Africa.

King marched and spoke and went to jail on behalf of working women arrested for sitting in the wrong seat on a public bus. He stood up for nonunionized garbage workers. He encouraged protesters to nonviolently appeal to the U.S. Constitution for justice, even as the officials who were supposed to uphold the law knocked them down with fire hoses and set loose attack dogs on them. Mandela was imprisoned for 28 years because of his fight against apartheid. As Joe Fitzgerald of the Boston Herald asked, "Jackson equates THAT with six punks who spread terror in the stands at a football game?"

Maybe Jackson really did say that those responsible should be punished. If he did, those words were buried under the rest of his rhetoric. By insisting that the school board allow the fighting students to return, virtually without penalty, he overplayed his hand. Fitzgerald spoke for many when he wrote, "Jesse Jackson could not have done a greater disservice to the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. than invoking the latter's name in his self-serving defense of six predatory thugs. And to gratuitously add Nelson Mandela's name ... simply shows how desperate he is to cloak himself in the reflected glory of genuine giants whose shoes he could not fill."

Amen to that.

And Yet ...

On the other hand, Jackson has a valid point: Racism is not dead, particularly when it comes to crime and punishment.

"The anger of Decatur's black community and Jackson's mediation are best read against growing black distress at the compounding inequities in criminal justice," wrote Tom Teepen of Cox Newspapers. "At every step, blacks are more likely than whites to get the short end of the stick in comparable circumstances."

It would be convenient to argue that more blacks are arrested and punished because they commit more crimes. Convenient, but false. Figures from the U.S. Justice Department indicate that black youths (10 to 17 years old) account for 26 percent of arrests, but for 32 percent of juvenile court referrals, 41 percent of those who are detained, 46 percent of juveniles sent to correctional facilities and 52 percent of those transferred to adult courts-fully double the proportion who first enter the system. In other words, although three of four youths arrested are white, more than half who are tried as adults are black.

In addition, the U.S. Public Health Service found that only 14 percent of drug users are black, but blacks account for 35 percent of arrests, 55 percent of convictions and 74 percent of prison sentences. About 65 percent of crack users are white, but a 1992 study found that 93 percent of crack convictions were black.

Then in December a nonprofit organization called the Applied Research Center (ARC) released a study of 10 large school districts. The study found that in the two years since a flurry of zero-tolerance policies were implemented around the country, black students have been expelled or suspended at greater proportions than white students, in some cases at a rate three to five times higher than white students. For example, in Phoenix, African-American students made up only 4 percent of the high school student population but received 21 percent of the expulsions or suspensions. By contrast, white students, who made up 74 percent of the enrollment, received 18 percent of the expulsions or suspensions.

According to ARC program director Terry Keleher, the expulsion figures are part of a larger survey to be completed in February. He said the study's preliminary figures "seem to reinforce what we have been hearing anecdotally-that when white students get in trouble they get the benefit of the doubt, whereas black students are presumed guilty."

Keleher compared two cases to illustrate the problem. In Providence, R.I., a teacher asked a black student to help unjam a computer disk-who was then expelled after he pulled out a small pocketknife to do the job. By contrast, a white student in Danville, Vt., was found with a rifle in school but was not expelled or suspended after he explained that it was hunting season.

Still, there's no evidence supporting Jackson's claim that zero-tolerance rules are aimed at blacks. These policies, after all, were instituted after school shootings at suburban schools with mostly white enrollments. Zero-tolerance advocates, such as Gerald Tirozzi, executive director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, say that zero tolerance is more fair because administrators do not have the burden of deciding different punishments to students. Many principals favor zero tolerance, Tirozzi told the Washington Post, because "it takes them off the hook in making decisions about a kid who is white, black or whatever."

But that only raises the question of why a racially neutral policy has resulted in black students being unfairly singled out. The Decatur school board certainly denies any racist motives, and in today's climate it's hard to imagine any school administrator being intentionally racist.

So why? It may be that racism--or at least suspicions about people of other races--hang in the cultural air we breathe, like residual smog. The pollution isn't as bad as it once was, but apparently there's still enough to cause problems. We shouldn't be surprised when it takes longer than one generation to overcome a problem that was centuries in the making.

Martin Luther King believed that "the depth of racism in American life has been underestimated." He considered racism to be America's "greatest moral dilemma."

King also knew there would be no magical, quick-fix solution. The best any law or movement can do is to promote change by rewarding some actions and penalizing others, but a change of heart can't be legislated. To use a religious word, there must be a conversion.

King didn't mind using such religious language when he talked about civil rights and racial issues. In fact, King based his work on the Bible and the Christian message. No one can read his works for long without running into Christian themes of justice, reconciliation, service and love. For example, in his 1958 book, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, King wrote that it wasn't words like "nonviolent resistance, noncooperation [or] passive resistance" that motivated the actions in Montgomery; he said it was the phrase "Christian love." King wrote, "It was the Sermon on the Mount, rather than a doctrine of passive resistance, that initially inspired the Negroes of Montgomery to dignified social action. It was Jesus of Nazareth that stirred the Negroes to protest with the creative weapon of love."

"Christian love" isn't the first phrase that sprang to mind in Decatur, a point that Reverend Jesse Jackson seems to have missed. He's right to draw attention to how zero-tolerance policies are applied, but he's not going to convert anyone from racism. He should know by now that it's hard to inspire "dignified social action" after a brawl, and the "creative weapon of love" doesn't work in the defense of hate.