O.J. like, “I’m not Black; I’m O.J.”
Okay.
—The Story of O.J., Jay-Z, 4:44
We were not getting into Up and Down.
This was early one morning, during the early portion of the Barcelona Olympics in Spain in 1992. Working an Olympic Games requires 16- to 18-hour days, much of which is spent on buses ferrying you from one event to the next, often around the entirety of a nation whose contours and rituals you do not know. Spain seemed, though, accessible, its people warm and helpful. And everyone, it seemed, was standing outside Up and Down — Arriba y Abajo — as my watch detailed the local time: close to 3 a.m. The club had just opened. This was SOP: Barcelona slept from 1 to 3 in the afternoon, ate dinner at 10 p.m. and didn’t start partying until deep into the night.
We would not be joining them, it seemed, “we” being four sportswriters. We were willing, but not able, according to the doorman, who was nice enough about it but made clear that we would have to wait, not possessing nearly enough clout to get past the ropes.
At that moment, a town car pulled up close to the entrance. A man emerged from the back seat. He knew one of our group, who was covering the NFL at the time. Seconds later, we were all walking into the club, along with several other members of the man’s coterie.
O.J. Simpson could be charming, in any language.
But he also could be, and was, violent. And he was almost certainly a killer.
GO DEEPER
O.J. Simpson dies at 76, family announces
Simpson’s death Wednesday, at 76, of cancer, likely hit people under 40 quite differently than people over 50. As with seminal events like the Kennedy assassination or the moon landing, you had to be there to understand the impact of Simpson’s 11-month double-murder trial in 1994 and 1995.
No one as famous as Simpson, the 1968 Heisman Trophy winner at USC, the first NFL player to rush for 2,000 yards in a season, and the first African American athlete to reach the status of iconic pitchman (for Hertz), had ever been charged with murder. And no famous person ever had been accused of a crime as grisly as the one of which Simpson had been accused — the brutal stabbing deaths of his ex-wife Nicole Simpson Brown, outside her Brentwood, Calif., home, and Ron Goldman, a waiter at a nearby restaurant, who’d gone to Brown’s home to return a pair of glasses Brown’s mother had left there while the family ate dinner.
The multiday saga that played out after the killings, culminating in Simpson riding in the back seat of a white Ford Bronco driven by his longtime friend, Al Cowlings, while Simpson held a gun to his own head, as a phalanx of police chased the Bronco for more than two hours along L.A.’s highways, transfixed a nation whose sports fans were set to watch a pivotal fifth game of the 1994 NBA Finals between the Knicks and Rockets. During the chase, they got both, with the chase and game on a split screen.
That was just the start of things.
Los Angeles motorists waved on the 405 Freeway as police cars pursued the Ford Bronco carrying murder suspect O.J. Simpson on a 90-minute slow-speed car chase June 17, 1994. (Jean-Marc Giboux / Liaison / Getty Images)
The Simpson trial was the ultimate, and perfect, manifestation of the modern American Zeitgeist, touching most of its foundational pillars: celebrity, sports, race, wealth — and television. Remove any one of those elements, and the trial would have been important, even memorable, to many. But it would not have packed the emotional and long-lasting wallop that it did. Without celebrity, it would have been long forgotten by most, like the murder trial of Dr. Sam Sheppard in 1954. Without race, its impact would have been roughly equivalent to Jeff Skillings’ and “Kenny Boy” Lay’s Enron trial in 2006.
Without television, it would be the Manson trials — a nightmare if you chose to find the gory details, but nothing that was force-fed to you on a daily basis by the American media colossus. And Simpson’s past as a famous athlete surely led to the bizarre behavior of onlookers as his chase continued through the streets of L.A.
With Simpson, those things all fed off one another, like a chemical reaction, and the country couldn’t help but watch.
The physical evidence tying him to the crimes was overwhelming. But Simpson’s wealth afforded him the opportunity to buy reasonable doubt — a defense team led by the late Johnnie Cochran that relentlessly attacked the seemingly airtight case of the L.A. District Attorney’s office, finding fertile ground in the department’s imperfect evidence collection methods — and, more effectively, and cynically, leaning into the racist past of one of the detectives on the case, Mark Fuhrman. In that, Simpson was unique: a Black man who was rich and famous enough to buy his way out of trouble, an option most people who looked like him didn’t have in the American criminal justice system.
And when Simpson improbably was acquitted by a mostly Black jury after just four hours of deliberation, the nation cleaved along racial lines.
The day of the verdict, I was covering the then-Washington Redskins, and I was at the team’s practice facility in Virginia, by myself, in the media room. As the verdict was about to be announced, in walked Heath Shuler, whom Washington had selected with great fanfare with the third pick in the 1994 draft. The franchise hoped Heath, an amiable young man from Bryson City, N.C., was going to be its franchise quarterback of the future.
I can’t remember if it was before the verdict was announced or after. But I do remember Heath saying, as ingenuously as one could, “I don’t think he did it.”
To which I replied, “Heath — even Black people think he did it.”
GO DEEPER
Graham: The complications, controversy and delicate balance of covering O.J. Simpson’s legacy
And yet, a mostly Black jury, none of whom had any connection whatsoever to the life of Orenthal James Simpson — who, we should be honest, likely would have had nothing to do with Black people like them — acquitted him in a matter of hours. Not because they thought him innocent. But because they believed the LAPD to be guilty — of lying, of racism, of despicable acts done to people in the Black community in Los Angeles, for decades. This is why Ezra Edelman’s incredible documentary, O.J. in America, is must-see TV. You cannot understand why those Black people reached that verdict if you don’t understand the history of many Black people in Los Angeles with the LAPD in the second half of the 20th century.
Here, television — always, television! — amplified and distorted. We saw HBCU students and Black people in hair salons erupt in celebration when Simpson was acquitted, while White people in bars sat in stunned silence and White women broke down in tears on the street. Back then, everyone watched CNN or the network news, and most of us saw the same pictures. And so, it became Black People Happy, White People Enraged, and it stayed there, as race always stays there, just under the surface — even though most Black people weren’t necessarily happy for O.J. They didn’t know O.J. For at least some, what they were happy about was, for once, a seemingly guilty Black man got away with it, the same way so many seemingly guilty White men had gotten away with it over the years because of wealth or privilege.
Of course, this was not acceptable for Nicole Brown Simpson’s family, or Ron Goldman’s family, and it won’t ever be, nor should it. Those children lost their mother; those parents lost their son; other people lost good friends. And they have to live with that awful reality every day of their lives. But that is the power of race and racism. Racism explodes in all directions and never brings about any result but pain and confusion.
There were awful race riots throughout the United States after Jack Johnson, the first Black man to win the heavyweight championship of the world, knocked out James J. Jeffries, in 1910. (That fight provided the genesis of the phrase “Great White Hope,” so fervent was the desire, from the famed author Jack London on down, for a White man to take the title back from Johnson.) The New York Times editorialized, “If the black man wins, thousands and thousands of his ignorant brothers will misinterpret his victory as justifying claims to much more than mere physical equality with their white neighbours.”
But there was no television, or radio, to chronicle the murders of Black people during White-directed riots that erupted in more than 50 U.S. cities after Johnson won the fight.
Some White people who are reading this may still not understand the dichotomy. So, again.
O.J. Simpson essentially removed himself from all contact with the Black community, other than with his immediate family. He had little contact with Black people in Los Angeles, where he lived when he was arrested, or with Black people where he grew up, in a poor section of San Francisco. He never spoke out on any racial issue, ever; he never lent his celebrity to any cause about which Black people had a concern. He was afforded a deference by the LAPD after he became the chief suspect in a gruesome double murder of two White people that almost no person of color ever received.
When he was finally arrested at his home, after the Bronco chase, he infamously said, as the L.A. detectives’ car took him away, “What are all these (n-words) doing in Brentwood?”
He did not say it ironically.
But when that jury went to deliberate, they seemingly cared about none of that. They probably didn’t like that O.J. had turned his back on Black people. Or that he’d beaten Nicole Brown, repeatedly, over the years. But perhaps he provided a vessel through which they could say what they thought needed to be said. And they spoke.
So many people became famous because of the Simpson trial. They are still famous today. Few — not all — have lamented that their celebrity came about because two innocent people were murdered in cold blood and because race still has this nation in a chokehold and we don’t seem to have the collective will to break it. And that after O.J. Simpson was set free, he lived most of his remaining time without much discomfort. After we all were caught in the maelstrom of an American event that perfectly captured and captivated so many, we recessed to our neutral corners, believing what we still believe, and nothing much has changed at all.
No justice. No peace.
(Top photo of O.J. Simpson, center, smiling next to Johnnie Cochran as Brian “Kato” Kaelin testifies in March 1995: Vince Bucci / AFP via Getty Images)
