At the dawn of the last century, two leaders of the freed slaves were engaged in a great debate over the correct path toward attaining freedom, equality and justice in the harsh Jim Crow era.

Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) — the most powerful black leader of his time — preached detente, accommodation and self-improvement, while W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963) — the towering black intellectual — advocated political action and civil rights struggles, leading to the establishment of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

In arguing for social and political changes, DuBois called for a small core group of college-educated Negroes — what he called the “Talented Tenth” — to lead the mass out of the “contamination and death of the worst.” And his fighting philosophy resonated in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

In stark contrast, since our fiery siege in 1992, when the multicultural Los Angeles exploded with anger over injustice and years of economic oppression, there has been neither dialogue nor debate among or within the disparate Asian American communities, the pronouncedly fractious Korean community in particular. And, as if we need reminding, Koreans were the only minority group singled out for destruction in the spring of 1992, thanks to a media-fanned race conflict that pitted blacks and Koreans against each other.

In their century-old diaspora in the New World, Korean immigrants have proven to be individually hardy, productive and even heroic, but collectively divisive, powerless and invisible to the outside world.

Today’s Koreatowns, though outwardly thriving, remain ever vulnerable to flashpoints in the escalating interethnic tensions in the volatile urban centers. The next fire is just around the corner — no ifs or buts — if our past experiences prove any indication at all.

It was in the mid-1970s, in the aftermath of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, I began hearing a series of rumbles in the black papers in New York and South Central Los Angeles about the “invasion” of Korean merchants in their ‘hoods. That’s partly why I left my daily newspaper job in Sacramento in 1979 and settled in Los Angeles’ Koreatown to start Koreatown Weekly, the first national English-language publication for the emerging Korean American community.

Koreatown’s enthusiastic leaders soon reached out not only to black community leaders, but also to Jewish groups, for lessons in ethnic cooperation and coalition efforts. But within three years, the lone English-language Korean American voice folded for lack of advertising and readership, while the city’s two Korean-language newspapers thrived.

After a year of touring major Korean settlements across the continent, I came to bear witness to a remarkable breed of people who seemed to thrive on adversity without rancor. I was also impressed by tens of thousands of American-educated Korean professionals: doctors, professors, engineers, scientists, lawyers, accountants, business executives and civil servants. But I was equally haunted by their painfully conspicuous absence of the spirit of community service.