by Randy Alcorn
“Do you think the prosecution did its job?”
“Well, yes and no. They proved their case. They made a lot of mistakes, sure. The biggest one was jury selection.”
Clarence bristled. “Letting too many blacks on the jury?”
“Not blacks per se, just certain blacks. One former Black Panther was one too many. After the verdict, the guy salutes Simpson with a Black Power fist. I think maybe the prosecutors got the message then, don’t you? They believed the best about America, that race wasn’t a big enough issue to overshadow justice. Well, they were wrong.”
“So did the verdict make you draw any conclusions about blacks?”
“Maybe. I don’t know”
“Be honest with me.”
“Okay. You want honest? Here’s three names—Mike Tyson. Marion Barry. O. J. Simpson.”
“What about them?”
“I have to draw a picture:?”
“Yeah.” Clarence knew where this was going, but he wanted to watch Ollie take each step.
“Okay. Tyson’s a convicted rapist, and you had prominent black leaders who couldn’t wait for him to get out so they could cheer him back to heavyweight champion. Barry was a convicted crack user, so he gets reelected as D.C. mayor. Simpson was a cokehead and a wife beater, at very least, even if you ignore the overwhelming evidence that he’s also a vicious murderer. And what happens? Blacks say these guys were set up. They raise them up like they were heroes instead of criminals.”
“Not all blacks.”
“No, of course not. But lots of blacks.”
“So what did it make you conclude about blacks?” Clarence braced himself, wondering why it mattered to him so much what Ollie thought.
Ollie studied Clarence’s face to see if he really wanted to hear his answer. “Maybe that some blacks are naïve. Or don’t care about moral responsibility. Or that some blacks have a blind loyalty to other blacks. Like they’ve thought so long about being victims—and yes, they really were victims once—they can’t make moral judgments against other blacks. They feel like traitors or something. I was called in to testify at a trial of a man who was guilty, start to finish—several witnesses, unmistakable ID, the whole nine yards. But the jury let him off. I was stunned. A black juror came up to me afterwards and he apologized to me. He said, ‘I knew he was guilty, but there’s already too many young black men behind bars; I just couldn’t put away another one.’ Ironic, since the victim was black too.”
“But you’re not saying that happens often, are you?”
“Well, how about that Jewish scholar who was stabbed to death by the black mob in New York? He actually named the guy that stabbed him before he died. But the black jury didn’t convict him. And after the acquittal, members of the jury went out partying with the defendant. It’s all documented. It happened. Or what about the conviction rates for felonies? It’s something like 80 percent nationally, but 30 percent in Detroit and less than that in D.C., where most of the accused and the juries are black. Or what about the black criminal law professor at George Washington University? The one who openly advocates jury nullification because the black community needs their men, even the criminals. Now that’s blind loyalty, don’t you think?”
“So who started the concept of blind race loyalty in American courtrooms?” Clarence asked. “White judges and juries letting off white Klansmen and winking at each other. Blacks have seen this for years. Can you understand why maybe they’d have a blind loyalty to other blacks?”
“Sure. Blacks accused of messing with whites used to be automatically convicted. It was flat out wrong. So maybe they think these black defendants are innocent and being picked on—and no doubt sometimes that’s true—and when the evidence indicates that, by all means acquit them. But in lots of cases the evidence completely refutes that. I just think there are better ways to protest the system and help minorities than freeing guilty people who are just going to go out and commit more crimes, and against who? Usually the same minorities that acquit them. I understand the frustration. No, I suppose I don’t. But that still doesn’t make it right.”
“No. It doesn’t,” Clarence said. “Black people are just reacting against the idea that being black means you’re guilty.”
“And other people are reacting against the idea that being black means you’re innocent,” Ollie said.
“The truth is, being black just means you’re human. Which means sometimes innocent, sometimes guilty. But Ollie, you have to understand the relationship with cops these black jurors bring into that courtroom. I get stopped maybe four times a year just because I’m black. You were with me coming back from the ball game, you saw it. One time I was dropping off Jake’s daughter Carly to work at a Crisis Pregnancy Center. The officer pulls me over, looks at her, and asks her if she’s all right. And then he says to me, ‘Whose kid is that?’”
“What’d you tell him?”
“I told him I’d kidnapped her and was going to sell her on the black market. No, I didn’t—but I wanted to. He was nice enough, once I proved I was innocent. What bothers me is just that—being presumed guilty and having to prove my innocence.”
“I’m not going to defend that kind of thing,” Ollie said. “I can tell you that when I was a uniformed, as far as I know I never pulled anyone over just because they were black. Now I’ve pulled over my share of people of every race, and most the time I saw them from behind and didn’t even know the color of their skin. I think the same thing goes for most cops. I agree the bozo who pulled you over coming home from Seattle was out of line. I’ve seen and heard enough of the Mark Fuhrman types. If the charge was racism and Fuhrman was on trial, I’d have found him guilty. It’s just that it was murder and someone else was on trial and I think the jury lost sight of it.”
Clarence shrugged. “Maybe they did. I just don’t think it’s that cut and dried.”
“For a couple of years I had a black partner in L.A.,” Ollie said. “Sharp guy, well read, articulate. Reminded me of you, but better looking. Could have been a corporate attorney or a CEO if he wanted to, but he wanted to be a cop. He’s a lieutenant now. He’ll make captain no problem. But the longer we spent together, the more I couldn’t believe some of the things he thought. He said crack was a white supremacist plot to murder black men—he proved this by pointing out blacks can’t afford the airplanes that bring in drugs. He told me all the liquor stores were deliberately set up by whites throughout the black community to dull black people’s thinking and raise crime so more blacks could be killed and imprisoned. When I pointed out most of the liquor stores were owned by blacks, he said it didn’t matter. He claimed government scientists created the AIDS virus in a lab in order to release it in the black community. He said AZT and other AIDS treatments were specifically designed to help white people and kill black people.”
“I’ve heard all those claims,” Clarence said, “and more.”
“I wanted to stop at a Church’s Chicken one day, and my partner refused to eat there,” Ollie said. “He claimed they put a chemical in their chicken that makes black men sterile. I was drinking a Snapple and he points to the drawing of a ship in Boston Harbor on the label, you know the Boston Tea Party, and he says that’s a slave ship. He says Snapple is made by the Ku Klux Klan and he proves it by pointing out a K with a circle around it, which of course means kosher. He offered no evidence for any of this, and I’ve heard Snapple and Church’s offer proof to the contrary, but he still believed it because it was all ‘well known’ in the black community. To be honest, it struck me as completely irrational—even though my partner was one of the smartest guys I knew. Maybe even smarter than me.”
“Now that’s hard to imagine,” Clarence said. “Okay, I don’t agree with most of those beliefs, although frankly I think there may be a little truth in some of them, I’m not sure. But I can see why it’s all ridiculous to you. It’s because you trust the white men who own most businesses. You trust the system, people in authority. Your family has ne
ver been victimized or brutalized for your skin color. So to you, these things are unthinkable. But when you’re black, you know lots of your older family members who were hurt, some killed by the Klan. You remember hundreds of incidents of prejudice and discrimination and hate against you and your family. You know your ancestors were beaten and raped and given forty lashes for learning to read or write. You’ve heard about the Tuskegee experiment where black men with syphilis weren’t given penicillin, which would have cured them, so white doctors could study the advancing effects of the disease and watch these men suffer and die needlessly. You’ve heard all these stories, most of them true, so as a black you grow up being profoundly suspicious of whites. That’s no mystery—it’s completely understandable. If the tables were reversed, I guarantee whites would suspect black-owned companies and even black doctors of conspiring to hurt them.”
“Okay, since we’re being so honest,” Ollie said, “can I ask you a question? If O. J. had been found guilty, do you think L.A. and say Chicago, Detroit, and Washington would have burned?”
“If they would have, the lives lost would have been mostly black,” Clarence said.
“I know that. But it wasn’t my question.”
“I don’t know,” Clarence said.
“Neither do I. But I have friends who are sure they would have. And their attitude was, even though they think Simpson was guilty the verdict probably saved hundreds of lives. One said to me, ‘Better one guilty man goes free than hundreds of innocent people die in the backlash of his conviction.’”
“What’s your point?” Clarence asked.
“I think you know my point, don’t you? If there’d been rioting, wouldn’t the black leadership have justified it? Wouldn’t they have made it the fault of white America? I guess my question is, can white people ever be right? Can black people ever be wrong? Because if the answer is no, a lot of white people are going to give up trying. And if you think we’ve got racial problems now, look out.”
“Sounds like a threat.”
“Not a threat. Just an observation,” Ollie said, throwing up his hands. “So what did you think about the Simpson case?”
“I had a lot of mixed feelings,” Clarence said. “Did I believe Fuhrman was typical of a lot of white cops? Sure. Not all, but enough to pull off a small scale conspiracy, yeah. We lived with that all the time in Mississippi. My grandfather was stripped naked and tarred and feathered for no reason but to humiliate a black man. I had an uncle who was castrated by Klansmen, and the police never did anything about it. He never walked right again. He took his life a few years later. He’d fought for his country in World War II, was decorated for heroism in combat. And that’s how his life ended.”
“I’m sorry,” Ollie said. “I really am.”
“Know what black folk in most towns called the local sheriff? ‘Chief head-banger.’ Black men were arrested for no reason, and any time you went to jail you expected to be beaten. There were no black lawyers then, and who could afford a white lawyer? Or trust him? The cops beat the tar out of you, and the courts put you in jail. That’s what I grew up thinking, because that’s what I grew up seeing. So, yes, I think the police are capable of great injustice. But injustice to black men on the street is one thing. Injustice to a black sports icon who most whites saw as a hero, that’s something else. It’s hard to believe cops would target this black man who they put on a pedestal, a guy they paid big money to cheer for on the football field. And what about his commercials? Corporations paid him the big bucks because they knew he appealed to whites as much as blacks.”
“I agree with you there. O. J. was a hero to me,” Ollie said. “Like Hank Aaron. But remember how at first all the feminist groups hollered the police had been far too lenient on O. J., how they’d let him get away with wife-beating and they took too long to arrest him and all? Cops can never do it right. First, they’re too lenient on a guy because he’s their hero, then next thing you know they frame the same guy for murder.”
“I think the real racial polarization happened,” Clarence said, “when whites saw the Goldman and Brown families. It was like looking in the mirror, realizing it could just as easily be them. And when blacks saw the Simpson family interviewed, it was the same thing. They looked like their mamas and sisters and aunts and cousins and the people that live down the street and go to the neighborhood church. We identify most with the people we’re used to, the ones we know and love. And we don’t know and love enough people of other races to identify with them. All that came out in the O. J. case. I lost a lot of sleep over it.”
“But if things don’t change,” Ollie said, “courtroom tactics will all be centered on race, gender, economics, religion, everything that makes us different. Attorneys will appeal to the jury to decide based on things other than the evidence. A la Johnny Cochrane.”
“I thought the most interesting aftermath of the case,” Clarence said, “was all those calls for judicial reform made by whites. After the Simi Valley verdict that cleared the cops who beat up Rodney King, a lot of blacks brought up their usual accusations of injustice, but most whites I heard kept saying, ‘We need to trust the system.’ Interesting how it all got reversed when Simpson was let off. All of a sudden there were television panel discussions and letters to the editor and columns about restructuring jury selection to avoid racial prejudice. Remember?”
“Yeah, I do,” Ollie said. “I called for a few judicial reforms myself. But nobody listens to me.”
“My uncle Elijah made an interesting comparison,” Clarence said. “He told us about a soda pop machine at Southern Pacific Railroad where he worked. It was in the management area, but everyone had access to it. Some of the executives discovered if you gave the machine a good smack in just the right place it would give you a can of pop without having to pay Well, some of the rail workers watched the execs do this for weeks, and finally one of them tried it himself. Smack, free pop. Well, one of those same executives saw him do it. Then he said to his secretary, ‘Call the vendor. We’ve got to get that machine fixed.’”
“And your point is what?” Ollie asked.
“The pop machine is the justice system. For hundreds of years white juries convicted blacks who were innocent and acquitted whites who were guilty of beating and lynching blacks and burning down their houses. Not many whites called for judicial reform. Then the Simpson case comes along, and a black man whites think was guilty is found innocent by a mostly black jury So what happens? All of a sudden, white America says, ‘Hey we’ve got to get this pop machine fixed.”’
“I never thought of it like that,” Ollie said.
“Neither did the management at the railroad. When you’re in the power position you’re used to getting things your way.”
“But two wrongs don’t make a right,” Ollie said. “White juries were wrong to acquit people just because they were white. And black juries are wrong to acquit people just because they’re black.”
“I agree with you a hundred percent,” Clarence said. “I’m just saying after hundreds of years of it going one way and them doing so little about it, it’s interesting what a hard time white folk have when it goes the other way.” Clarence sighed. “The thing I hate is after the O. J. debacle and the Million Man March there was so much talk about racial issues, but out of it came more hard feelings than ever. It seems like dialogues of the deaf.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Ollie said. “We just talked about it, and you said some things that helped me. Seems like we agree on a lot when it comes down to it. I guess when I hear you say blacks are still responsible for their choices and not every problem is due to white racism, it helps me be more open to those cases when it is.”
“And hearing you say you know racism is still around helps me to be able to see the other side too,” Clarence said.
“I have a question for you, sort of personal,” Ollie said. “As much as you know about media bias, why did you automatically believe what the Trib said about me brutalizing tha
t guy?”
“Because of my experience with cops, I guess.” Clarence took a deep breath. “My earliest memories of police officers go back to Mississippi. Some of them were nice. But a lot of them weren’t. They’d mock us, call us names—spooks, shines, spades, jigs, coons, and niggers. They’d always intimidate black folk, I mean law-abiding folk. I could have probably gotten over that, but … there’s one story I didn’t tell you.”
Clarence sighed, as if he needed to draw on reserves to tell his tale. “One night my daddy heard about one of my cousins, Seth, Uncle Elijah’s oldest boy. He’d been hangin’ around a white civil rights activist that came down from New York. All the authorities hated him. Well, word got out they arrested my cousin and this white boy and were holding them in the jail. Daddy went down to the jail with my uncle. Mama begged him not to go without witnesses, but just he and Elijah went. They got there and asked to see the boys. The sheriff was a big fat white cop.”
“Like me,” Ollie asked, “but not as muscular?”
“Yeah, sort of. Anyway they ended up accusing my dad and uncle of trying to break the kids out of jail, which was ridiculous. Uncle Elijah was just like Daddy Strong as an ox, but gentle as they come. Well, these cops decided they were going to teach those colored men a lesson. So they let out the boys and locked up the men. Then they proceeded to beat up Daddy and Uncle Elijah. They beat them with their hands and sticks and a baseball bat. They urinated on them. They tortured them by jamming a fork up their nose. I’m not going to tell you the rest, because it rips me up to even think about it. Sometimes Daddy still doubles over in pain from what they did to him that night.”
Clarence tried to contain his tears, which now streamed down his face. Ollie looked stunned.
“When my cousin came to tell us Daddy was in jail, he drove Mama and me down there. We were on the outside of those thick walls, but we could hear Daddy and Uncle Elijah … they were … screaming.”
