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In the cold morning mist, Martin Luther King Jr. Drive slowly awakens. The sky is patchy and purple. It's not yet 7 a.m. but already the line spills out the doors of the employment agency that promises cash at the end of an honest day's work.

Up and down MLK, dressed-up women wearing 9-to-5 faces walk to bus stops past men carrying their worldly possessions in backpacks and bags.

In the east, a pale orange dawn bleeds across the horizon.

For better or worse, life on this neglected side of Greensboro will soon take its daily course.

Almost 40 years after his death, MLK — as residents call it — embodies the dream and the dream deferred.

Martin Luther King Drive.

It's a name that offers hope on a street where hope is needed.

"A lot of folks don't want nothing to do with MLK," says Vera Young, a longtime resident of the street. "All you ever hear out of MLK is bad news. Drugs, prostitution, people getting shot. When people think of Martin Luther King (Drive), it's never good."

Yet even as poverty and peril run like an open faucet, the hopes of MLK's residents run strong. They proceed each day — although with more caution than other parts of the city, certainly with a few more troubles — and always with a sobering sense of life's fragility.

Some stay, trapped because they cannot afford to move anywhere else. Some grow up, do better and leave for greener pastures. Then there are those like Rachel Carson, who leave only to return to the place they call home, pulled back by fond memories sifted from the bad.

"There's a spirit to this neighborhood that most people aren't going to let die," says Carson, who moved to Reidsville a few years ago only to return to MLK last year. "There's too much at stake to give up now."

Faith and despair

For those who bother to stop and read it, the flier nailed to an MLK telephone pole offers a message of hope: "Blessed are you who are poor, for the kingdom of heaven awaits you."

Until then, MLK's poor bide their time on a street nothing like what Dr. King envisioned.

A street whose residents are 93 percent black. A street where life and death, faith and despair, peace and violence tenuously coexist within 22 blocks of asphalt.

MLK begins at South Elm Street, stretching from Southside's upscale town houses and boutiques to neon-lighted fast-food joints by the interstate. Along one stretch, MLK is block after block of modest single-family brick homes. Along another, sagging mansions are carved into boarding rooms. Along others, it's winos and addicts, who linger from dawn to dusk.

There's no supermarket on MLK. No shopping mall. No coffee shop or florist.

No dress shops. No movie theaters. No banks or laundromats.

What MLK does have is bulletproof partitions in convenience stores. Iron bars on schools and houses of God.

Blaring sirens. Homeless men urinating in backyards. Men pimping drugs. Women pimping themselves.

Since 2000, 17 people have been killed within a five-block radius of MLK.

From his front porch on the corner of MLK and Dale Street, 79-year-old Zack Browning sees a lot. "I think Dr. King would be so disappointed if he drove down this street today," says Browning, a retired plant engineer at Bennett College. "This isn't what he dreamed of — nobody did."

Browning's street wasn't always named Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, and it wasn't always so vulnerable. Once known as Asheboro Street, the road boasted some of Greensboro's grander homes until nearby Warnersville and other black neighborhoods began to surround the street. White flight hit Asheboro Street hard in the 1950s as many residents, churches and businesses moved to Greensboro's emerging northwest.

By the end of the decade, real estate companies owned much of the property along Asheboro. It was the first ink­ling that the street would be dominated not by homeowners but by landlords and speculators — a pattern most urban planners agree is a prelude to a neighborhood's decline.

By the time the City Council renamed the street after King in 1989, its free fall was complete and nobody seemed to mind what it was called. Nobody, that is, except the street's overwhelmingly black residents, many of whom pushed for Elm or Market streets to receive the honor.

After all, they argued, isn't that what King would have wanted? A street that runs through a city bringing together many of its neighborhoods?

"That's what Martin Luther King preached — cities and countries coming together," said Nettie Coad, another longtime MLK resident and one of the street's fiercest advocates with the city. "Not a tiny piece of road in a black neighborhood."

"The good in people"

Inside the jammed waiting room, patients pass their time reading magazines or watching "Montel" on the TV. Unlike other businesses along MLK, there is no bulletproof glass or intimidating partition.

That's not Dr. Maurice Kpeglo's style, not the way he thinks people in his neighborhood should be treated just because of where they live, just because they're black and poor — the usual suspects.

"I guess I look for the good in people," he says, enjoying a rare break in one of his office's two examination rooms. "People come here for help, not to rob or steal."

As proof, Kpeglo muses over how sometimes his patients run short of cash. Weeks later, long after he has forgotten or forgiven, they return to make good on their debts.

Sometimes they pay him with money. Sometimes it's a bag of potato chips. Just recently an elderly woman brought Kpeglo a jar of homemade tomato sauce.

Retelling the stories brings a smile to his face. "I don't get rich," he says, "but I go home and sleep very well."

It's those glimmers of promise that reinforce why Kpeglo, 59, stays put. Born in West Africa, he came to Greensboro in 1974. His is the only doctor's office on MLK. He sees both its needs and potential.

"The people who live here, they don't want this life any more than you or I would," he says. "A lot of them spend their whole life trying to break from it. Every neighborhood has a few bad people in it. But most of them are filled with people who want to do good. MLK is no different."

Community pride runs deep for business owners such as Kpeglo. Next door to his practice, Vera Patrick runs MLK's oldest beauty salon.

Patrick, 60, opened The Perfect Look Salon in 1993. Six years ago, when her business outgrew her shop, she moved to a bigger place on Holden Road, only to come back to MLK in 2005.

"The best place in the city for my business is right here," Patrick says.

She wants more development all along MLK. Not just at the tip, where Southside's tony development houses young, hip and overwhelmingly white professionals. All those pretty houses and fancy boutiques are somewhere over the rainbow for the rest of MLK's largely black residents.

"I'd love to see more black-owned businesses like restaurants," she says. "It's not that (blacks) don't want to open a business here. It's just that it's so much harder for minority businesses to get funding. Minorities have to do so much more to get ahead."

Darius Washington is one of them. He's lived on or near MLK his entire 22 years. He's a mason by day, cook by night.

He sees the dealers standing fearlessly on street corners. Doesn't condone that life, figures it is something you come to accept when all you've ever known is the lure of a fast buck that comes with selling crack.

Of course, it doesn't have to be that way. As a teenager, Washington dealt drugs out of his aunt's home on MLK. He was arrested once. That was enough to scare him straight.

"Drinkin' and drugging. If you're lucky, you get tired of it and quit before it pulls you down," he says, laughing. "Some people like me learn that and the others. ..." Washington shrugs his shoulders.

He's thinking about taking some computer classes at GTCC in the fall but doesn't know what he wants to do with his life. But he knows what he doesn't want to do.

"There's two lives out here. There's this one," he says, pulling a paycheck stub from his pocket, "and there's drugs."

He laughs again, only this time he's dead serious.

Staying put

Where some might see a vacant lot, the Rev. William Wright sees the seeds of MLK's transformation.

Wright is pastor at New Zion Missionary Baptist Church. There are two other churches and a mosque on MLK. Dozens more nearby.

Still, Wright sees a spiritual hole on the street. In many churches in black communities, he sees a preoccupation with building bigger places of worship, with membership drives, with foot-stomping services inside while outside lost souls wander the streets, oblivious to any message of hope.

A few years back, Wright and his flock decided to move eight miles across town to Merritt Drive.

The decision wasn't made easily. New Zion had watched over MLK for more than four decades — and had the scars to prove it. Duct tape covers bullet holes in the church's stained glass, and Wright constantly runs off drug dealers in his parking lot. It seems Wright can't turn around without burying a member of the community whose life ended violently.

Still the church, 850 strong and growing, had outgrown its home. Members liked the idea of a new, bigger church. That is, until it dawned on them they would be one more group turning their backs on MLK.

"This community has had enough people and businesses abandon it," Wright says. "They didn't need a church to leave, too. Whenever churches or schools close, that's when you see a community take a downward spiral. MLK's seen too much of that already."

So, Wright changed their minds. He and his flock are staying put to toil in what they see as a vast, ripe vineyard. Later this year the church expects to break ground on a $27 million project at the corner of MLK and Bragg Street. Where weeds and trees and litter are now, New Zion plans to build a bigger church, a family life center and some street-front shops.

Wright says the project won't be an extension of Southside, just a few blocks down. "The poor, the working class folks who are hanging on to life by their fingernails. Those are the ones we want to serve," he says.

"Who knows what this will spark? A corner store here, maybe some new homes there. The next thing you know people are on the street talking to each other and MLK's a community again."

Dream, reality collide

Nettie Coad has a dream.

An eclectic mix of houses and businesses line Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. Children play in Dorothy Brown Park and the only crime is what residents hear or read about somewhere else.

"A place where people are friendly and relaxed," says Coad. "Safe — like a home."

Coad is the longtime MLK resident who has pressed the city for years to help her and her neighbors clean up the street. Only these days her dream collides with reality every night on MLK, where glowing yellow street lamps seem to cast more shadow than light.

Outside a gas station, a group of men huddle but not for long. When a car slows down across the street, they rush to surround it, moth to flame. After a few seconds, the car heads down a side street into the inky darkness. One of the men follows on foot.

Coad need only pull back the sheer, white curtains on her front windows to view it all.

"We're getting there," she says. "But change takes time. Any change that's come to MLK is because of what (black residents) have done. We can't count on the city. We've got to do it ourselves and hope they join us."

Coad believes that day will come. Until then the sirens sound. A man carrying bags wanders across a sleepy MLK, toward a boarded-up house, seeking refuge from the cold until morning when the sun rises — and MLK reawakens.

Contact Robert Bell at 373-7055 or robert.bell@news-record.com