ACQUITTAL: Simpson and his lawyers during the not-guilty
verdict
Oct. 3, 1995
Color Us Divided on O.J.
By James Poniewozik
What
Americans had in common that day was that we stopped using the phone for
a few minutes: according to AT&T, phone traffic dropped 60% from 10 a.m.
to 10:05 a.m. P.T. In appliance stores and offices and diners, we
dropped everything and watched as nine blacks, two whites and one
Hispanic rendered their verdict: Orenthal James Simpson was not guilty
of the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald
Goldman. On the streets of African-American neighborhoods and the
campuses of black colleges, we high-fived total strangers in jubilation.
In white communities, we sat in quiet shock or vocal disgust. On radio
shows, we hailed the acquittal of the black former football hero as
payback for years of police racism, and we condemned the decision as a
simple case of money buying freedom. At New York City's Rikers Island
prison, we broke into applause, guards and inmates alike. In the Harriet
Tubman battered women's shelter in Minneapolis, Minn., we cried. Later,
on the TV news, we watched each other watching, and soon that watching
became the bigger news, for it taught us what else we had in common. We,
each of us, could not believe the other side could feel the way it did.
We realized that we were not, in fact, "we."
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