`RAGTIME' ACTOR MISSES SHOW BECAUSE OF WRONGFUL ARREST

A day after Alton Fitzgerald White was arrested, strip-searched and then
released when the police acknowledged they had erred, the actor, who plays a
leading role in the Broadway musical "Ragtime," said it seemed as if life
had imitated art.

In the award-winning Broadway musical, Mr. White plays Coalhouse Walker Jr.,
a black man who is accosted by racist firemen as he drives his car through
turn-of-the-century New Rochelle, N.Y.

The police said late Friday that Mr. White, who is black, had been
wrongfully arrested outside the lobby of his Harlem apartment building and
held for five hours, causing him to miss that night's performance, after
they received a report of drug dealing in his building.

Mr. White said he was leaving the building on his way to the gym and then
the theater when a female police officer stopped him outside his building.
The officer, he said, told him and three other black men who were with him
that they were looking for four black men with guns.

The police said Saturday that officers were in fact responding to a call
about two Hispanic men believed to be dealing drugs in the building. Mr.
White said he was handcuffed as he was walking out of his building on St.
Nicholas Avenue, and then later jailed, strip-searched and held for two
hours before he was allowed to make a telephone call.

In an interview Saturday, Mr. White said he was talking to attorneys about
bringing a Federal civil rights lawsuit against the police.

Mr. White said he suspected that he and the three men who were walking with
him were picked out because of their race.

Marilyn Mode, the chief spokeswoman for the Police Department, apologized to
Mr. White and to the three others on Friday night, but said they had fit a
description given by a resident. Ms. Mode also said that the police had
found a kilo of cocaine in the lobby and that two of six men arrested there
had been charged with criminal drug possession.

She said strip-searching was routine procedure in all felony drug cases.

But Mr. White said that he and his three companions were walking in the
outer lobby of the building and that the two Hispanic men who were arrested
were standing in the lobby, as the police rushed in.

Mr. White said the wrongful arrest and detention had shaken his faith in the
justice system.

"When I was sitting in that jail cell, I realized that my perception about
good and justice would never be the same, just like Coalhouse, not to the
point of violence, but the naivete, it will never be the same," he said
Saturday.

Mr. White canceled his appearance in "Ragtime" Saturday, noting that he had
not slept or eaten since the incident.

"I can hardly remember my name," he said. "They took us out of the cells and
made us strip and squat. They made us take all the shoe strings out of our
shoes, and then they put us back in the cells to take us out one at a time."
All he could think, Mr. White said, was: "You don't care. You don't care if
I am homeless or if I am starring on Broadway. The second time they pulled
me out for questioning, a 35-year-old man, all I could do is sit there and
cry out of frustration."

Norman Siegel, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union
of New York, called Mr. White's wrongful arrest an example of "racial
profiling in the City of New York at its worst" and said his group would
consider filing a lawsuit on his behalf.

"What happened here is getting some visibility because it was Mr. White,"
Mr. Siegel added. "But unfortunately, instances like this happen too often
to African-American males in the City of New York."