TLANTA - Bill Bradley's call for improving race relations in America, a signature issue in his presidential campaign, should have a home in a thriving black middle-class city like this, flush with memories of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his struggle for racial justice.
But every time black voters here look around, Al Gore's in town.
''Gore has been here many times,'' said Randy Willis, a 43-year-old chiropractor, as he waited for friends to finish touring a museum that chronicles King's life. ''Bradley? I really don't know much about him except that he was a ballplayer at one time.''
While Gore has courted black voters intensively, Bradley has yet to take his message South, to the heartland of the black electorate. Polls consistently show him getting clobbered among black voters nationally, and, in a recent Zogby International poll, Gore held a 71- to 10-percent advantage over Bradley among blacks.
Political analysts say Bradley can't expect to compete with Gore without going where more than 55 percent of the African-American population lives and votes - an increasingly active constituency that may determine who wins the South and goes on to claim the Democratic nomination.
''If Bradley is a serious alternative to Gore, you have to ask then, what is your Southern strategy?'' said David Bositis, a senior policy analyst at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a black think tank in Washington.
The answer from the Bradley campaign: Give us time.
Anita Dunn, a spokeswoman for the campaign, acknowledged the obvious fact that Bradley had not focused on the South so much as Iowa and New Hampshire, the first-caucus and first-primary states. But she said that is the result of the bunched primary schedule which places the early emphasis on California, Iowa and the Northeast. Bradley, she said, would begin campaigning in the South ''as we move forward in the primary calendar. It's going to be very fast.''
The first real test of Bradley's and Gore's strength among blacks will take place here in Georgia, which is scheduled to be the first Southern state to hold a primary, along with Maryland, six months from now, in a precursor to the real Southern showdown a week later on Super Tuesday, March 14. In Georgia, African-American voters make up at least 40 percent of the Democratic primary vote, but the vote has risen as high as 50 percent in various elections.
After black voters showed surprising strength last year, helping the Democrats cut into the GOP's majority in the House of Representatives in the November midterm elections, even some Republican candidates - most notably millionaire publisher Steve Forbes, who has given African-Americans high-profile roles in his campaign - have sought to expand their outreach to this constituency.
And there is, in fact, a sliver of an opening for Republicans, as polls find blacks have grown slightly less fervent in their identification with the Democratic party over the course of the decade. Some Democrats hope that Bradley and Gore jostling for the black vote will energize this key constituency as President Clinton, an immensely popular figure among blacks, exits the stage.
Curtis B. Gans, director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, which tracks voter turnout, said that Bradley and Gore stand apart from previous presidential candidates in the intensity of their racial outreach.
''There has been an avoidance of any effort to mobilize the poor and minority communities, and to the extent that may be changing in this election, it's healthy,'' Gans said.
But, across Atlanta, and especially here along Auburn Avenue, where the King family church, the civil rights leader's childhood home, and a King museum are located, Gore wins among black voters, because the questions of who Bradley is, where he has been, and what he stands for have largely gone unanswered.
Typical of those voters is Camille Jackson, a 27-year-old recent law school graduate from Atlanta, who considers herself an independent, like some 23 percent of blacks surveyed in a recent Joint Center poll. That independent spirit is largely a phenomenon among younger blacks, age 35 and under, the poll found.
''If I had to vote today, I probably would vote for Gore, just because of the time he has taken and the effort he has made to include African-Americans in different things,'' said Jackson as she left the King museum.
The Rev. G.H. Williams has heard Gore speak at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where he works as a volunteer guide, but the 74-year-old said he has yet to pick his candidate. ''He's a good speaker,'' Williams said of Gore. ''But like I say, I've heard so many good speakers. They are just like preachers, they don't impress me too quick because I hear them preach one good sermon.''
Like Williams, many black elected officials are keeping their options open. Eighteen of the 38 members of the Congresssional Black Caucus have withheld formal endorsements of either Democrat. Most notable among those members still technically neutral are civil rights stalwarts like Representatives John Lewis of Georgia, Maxine Waters of California and John Conyers of Michigan, though a Gore aide said last week an endorsement from Lewis might come soon. The Rev. Jesse L. Jackson also has not officially taken sides, and neither has his son, Jesse Jackson Jr., a congressman from Illinois.
The younger Jackson said he and other lawmakers were withholding endorsements because it is too early in the selection process and because they want to hear more from both Gore and Bradley about their plans for bringing blacks and other minorities and poor people into the economic mainstream.
''I'm still waiting for a real Democrat to emerge - an FDR, Truman, HHH, Kennedy, Johnson Democrat,'' the congressman said. ''Are either of them willing to put a progressive African-American on their ticket as VP? That would be one thing that would energize the country and inspire many of those who are not currently participating,'' he said.
But Representative James E. Clyburn, a South Carolina Democrat who is the black caucus chairman and has endorsed Gore, said: ''I have talked to people in the caucus who are not yet ready to make it formal. But I have not talked to anybody who tells me they do not plan to be for Gore.''
A poll released last month by the Joint Center found that 69 percent of black adults held a favorable opinion of Gore, a perception that has remained unchanged for several years. (Clinton's numbers are about 20 points higher.) Only 17 percent held an unfavorable opinion of Gore, and 8 percent said they had not formed an opinion on him.
By contrast, Bradley scored a 41 percent favorable rating, but an almost equal number - 42 percent of the respondents - said they didn't know Bradley, while 11 percent were unfavorable toward him. Similarly, Republican front-runner, Texas Governor George W. Bush, who has courted Hispanic voters more than blacks, had a 43 percent favorable rating among blacks; 34 percent unfavorable; and 14 percent said they didn't know him.
The Rev. Bobby Howard, who teaches English at Dekalb College in Atlanta, explained those numbers this way: ''They don't know Gore as a leader, and they don't know Bradley as a person.''
Howard, an independent, has voted for Bush's father, Clinton, President Ronald Reagan, and supported billionaire Ross Perot in 1992 ''until I realized we had a fool on our hands.'' He said this time he would vote for the Texas governor. Bush, he is convinced, ''is probably going to wind up being the most liberal president that the Republican Party has had since Lincoln.''
Typically, however, Republican presidential candidates only garner about 10 percent of the black vote nationally, said Bositis of the Joint Center. The other 90 percent generally goes to the Democrat, and that vote is nowhere as strong as in the South.
Blacks are often a majority of the Democratic vote in Mississippi, Louisiana and South Carolina, about 20 percent in North Carolina and Virginia; and between 10 and 20 percent in Florida and Texas, Bositis said, though nationally, blacks make up only 10 percent of the electorate.
In an effort to reach African-American voters, both Bradley and Gore, whose civil rights records most regarded as equal and who have assembled racially diverse staffs, have embraced affirmative action and called for an end to racial profiling - in which police stop motorists based on their race.
Last month, Gore told applauding delegates to the NAACP convention, ''If I am elected president, ending racial profiling will be the first civil rights act of the next century.''
Bradley, in a later speech to the Rainbow/PUSH annual convention in Chicago, fired back: ''Why wait? Why doesn't he walk down the hall, put the executive order in front of the president and ask him to sign it?''
The upshot, said Ronald Walters, a political scientist at the University of Maryland at College Park, and an expert on black politics, is that ''there is a big disconnect between the rhetoric and public policy'' that both Bradley and Gore may need to overcome.
