It has been 20 years since the trial of O.J. Simpson captivated the nation. Millions of people can remember sitting glued to their television sets as they watched the Ford Bronco racing down the highway as police cars trialed slowly behind with onlookers cheering, “Go O.J., Go!” It seems that every major network covered the event. Even C-Span pre-empted its regular coverage of congress to televise the drama.
For those of you who are too young ― like the majority of my college students ― to fully remember the trial, let me provide some details. The trial was a TV spectacle with all the makings of a potential Hollywood movie. Sex and violence, interracial relationships and marriage, infidelity, alcoholism, sexual deviancy and a host of tantalizing tales that titillated and fascinated the public. Stories from the trial became daily tidbits as all venues of major media from weekly tabloids, to highbrow publications intensely covered the trial.
You also had a cast of real-life characters that would have been a fiction writer’s dream.
The strong, handsome, Black, football all-time great. The former beauty queen, blonde, blue-eyed murdered wife. Her tall, dark and handsome, murdered friend. The blond, hedonistic beach boy. The Latin housekeeper. The Asian judge. The White/Jewish female prosecutor. The Black male Prosecutor. The Black male defense attorney. The legendary WASP defense attorney. The Jewish defense attorney. The Black ex-wife and kids from his first marriage. Biracial kids from his second marriage. The White racist cop. It went on and on.
The trial, like many other issues in America, exposed the large racial divide in our nation. A CNN poll showed that 62 percent of Whites believed that Simpson was guilty and 68 percent of Blacks felt that he was innocent. Charges that the defense team lead by the late Johnnie Cochran was playing the race card to Time magazine darkening Simpson’s face on its cover elicited outrage from certain segments of the Black community and further divided the public. The racial gulf remained after the trial.
Many White Americans were shocked and, in some cases, outraged by witnessing groups of Blacks cheering the verdict. To many of them, such a reaction demonstrated callousness and indifference to the plight of two brutally murdered victims. For many Black Americans, the verdict represented vindication from a justice system that had for so long vehemently judiciously mistreated, violated, railroaded and incarcerated so many Black people (especially young Black men). In fact, Simpson was probably was an afterthought, if a thought at all.
I vividly remember the day the verdict was handed down, October 3, 1995. I was a graduate student working on my Ph.D. at a land grant institution in northern New England.
