For many people old enough to remember the OJ Simpson murder trial, his 1995 acquittal was a defining moment in their understanding of race, policing and justice. Nearly three decades later, it still reflects the different realities of white and black Americans.
Some people remember seeing their Black colleagues and classmates erupt in cheers over perceived retaliation for institutional racism. Others remember their white counterparts being shocked by what many saw as overwhelming evidence of guilt. Both responses reflected different experiences with a criminal justice system that continues to disproportionately punish Black Americans.
Simpson, who died Wednesday, remains a symbol of racial division in American society as a reminder of how deeply inequality is felt, even as newer figures have come to symbolize the struggles over racism, policing and justice.
“It wasn’t really about the man OJ Simpson. It was about the rest of society and how we responded to him,” said Justin Hansford, a law professor at Howard University.
Simpson died in Las Vegas of prostate cancer, his family announced Thursday. He was 76.
His death comes just a few months before the 30th anniversary of the 1994 murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ron Goldman. As with the trial, public reaction to the verdict was largely determined by race .
Today, criminal justice reforms that address racial inequality are less divisive. But that has been replaced by opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion programs, a ban on books that address systemic racism and restrictions around Black history classes in public schools.
“The hardest part is that we have to keep cycling through this until we learn from our past,” said Camille Charles, a sociologist and professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. “But there are people who don’t want us to learn from our past.”
At the trial, African Americans were four times as likely to assume Simpson was innocent or framed by police, said UCLA Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Darnell Hunt, then a young sociologist who wrote a book about the different ways where black people and white Americans saw the trial.
“The case was about two different views of reality or two different views of the reality of race in America at that point in history,” he said.
The Simpson trial followed the 1992 acquittal of police officers in the beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles, which was captured on video and exposed the deep American trauma over police brutality. For many African Americans in 1995, Simpson’s acquittal was a rebuke of institutional racism in the justice system. But many white Americans believed that Simpson and his defense team played the race card to get away with the murders.
The difference was also seen in the way black media covered the trial compared to mainstream publications, Hunt said. This media tended to raise questions about whether the justice system was truly fair in terms of “what might be called the black experience,” he said.
Polls over the past decade show that most people still believe Simpson committed the murders, including most African Americans, but the racial and historical dynamics at play in the trial made it about more than just the deaths.
Hansford, the law professor at Howard University who is black and was 12 years old at the time of the Simpson verdict, said he remembers the differences in white and black reactions, even in liberal environments like Silver Spring, Maryland, the suburb of Washington where he grew up. .
“When he was acquitted, all the black students celebrated and ran into the hallways, jumping up and down,” he said. “And the white teachers were crying.”
One of Hansford’s white teachers said something about Simpson that he disagreed with, and when he responded, the teacher reprimanded him.
“It was one of the worst ways a teacher has ever spoken to me,” Hansford said. “The OJ Simpson trial created a situation where people were dug in their sides.”
The racial unrest embedded in the trial was the focus of the 2016 Oscar-winning documentary “OJ: Made in America.” Instead of focusing on the murders and the evidence presented at the trial, director Ezra Edelman placed the crimes within the context of the civil rights struggle, from which Simpson was largely insulated by the warm embrace of the white mainstream.
“All OJ had to do to be recognized is run a football club,” Edelman told the AP in 2016. “And almost simultaneously with that you have a community of people whose only way to be recognized is to burn their community down during the… 1965 Watts) riots. Those were the two tracks I tried to follow, knowing that they will intersect thirty years later.”
Simpson had married a white woman in a country that had historically punished black men who dared to explore mixed-race relationships. But Simpson was also a former football star, a wealthy Hollywood actor and brand spokesman whose money and privilege set him apart from impoverished black men punished by the criminal justice system.
“I’m not black, I’m OJ,” he liked to tell his friends.
He was admired as a unique celebrity whose transgressions, including a pattern of spousal abuse, were overlooked as incompatible with his All-American persona.
“He actually seemed to make quite an effort to distance himself from black people,” but black support for him wasn’t about that, said Charles, the University of Pennsylvania sociologist. “I think it was about seeing the system work the way we were told it should.”
Even as systemic racism in criminal justice systems remains a problem, Charles believes Black Americans are increasingly less likely to believe in the innocence of a famous defendant as a show of racial solidarity.
“The only thing that has changed is that you no longer saw the same kind of disadvantage (R&B singer) R. Kelly or Bill Cosby,” Charles said.
“There was a lot more open conflict about them, and a lot more black people were willing to say publicly, ‘No, he did that.’ I think it could also represent a better understanding of celebrity and wealth,” she said.
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Graham Lee Brewer reported from Oklahoma City and Aaron Morrison from New York. They are members of AP’s Race and Ethnicity team.