This Noble Land

by James A. Michener

  The 1994–95 debates concerning The Bell Curve have sounded a warning against accepting or promulgating any easy conclusion that whites are genetically superior to blacks. Such false doctrine is dangerous to the health of our republic and should be protested vigorously. The fact that as late as the 1990s some people could still misinterpret statistics to support their beliefs in the genetic inferiority of any race proves how far we have to go.

  It was in the same period that we saw a historic example of how deeply affected by racial tensions and hatred our nation’s supposedly color-blind judicial system is. The gruesome murder in a swanky Los Angeles neighborhood of a beautiful white woman in her early thirties and her casual friend, a handsome young man in his twenties, was to deeply upset our nation and our judicial system. When it became known that the dead woman was the ex-wife of the idolized black football star O. J. Simpson and that he was the prime suspect, I muttered to myself: Oh hell! This will put race relations back fifty years.

  I had first met Simpson, that superlative athlete, when I opened a long television show with him with a horrible gaffe by asking about his football career at UCLA. He was a little taken aback by my error but he said genially: ‘It was USC. But don’t be embarrassed. A fellow last week thought it was Stanford. At least you have the right city.’ We had a lively interview, and his graciousness made me a fan.

  I worked with him again in Florida when I was appointed the impartial czar of an unusual international competition, for big prize money, between the athletic stars of a dozen nations. Each contestant was eligible for ten events, but the swimming champion could not compete in the swimming races nor the tennis player in singles or doubles. The competition was furious; my friend O.J. tore the place apart in baseball, tennis and weight lifting. In the latter event foreign competitors besieged me, demanding that I rule against O.J. in a contested lift, and in retrospect I think they were right. But he had mesmerized me, and I handed down a decision in his favor that sealed the overall victory for him and helped him win a bundle.

  The last time I saw him was on a blizzardy day in Shea Stadium in 1973 during a game against the New York Jets. I was a guest of the home team and, wrapped in blankets, had a superb view of the snowy field. Excitement was high, because if Buffalo’s star running back, O. J. Simpson, had a good day, he would set an unbelievable record for rushing two thousand yards in a single season. Even though I sat with the Jets, I cheered for Simpson, and late in the day he made the final six yards, which put him over the two thousand mark. But on the next play a New York tackle banged through the line and threw Simpson for a loss, which put him back below the record. But he remained in the game and on a later play ripped off the necessary yardage, whereupon his coach pulled him out of the game to safeguard his record: 2,003 yards.

  So I was more intensely interested in the murder case than the ordinary citizen. O.J. was my man, a true hero and a very pleasant man to work with. I hoped that he was not guilty, but as the gruesome details unfolded I was shaken by their implications. Bit by bit the cruel evidence accumulated until even I had to admit that he had probably committed the crime. But then I took refuge in a question that many people think will never be answered: How could one man kill two people and not get blood everywhere on his body? It must have been two assailants, not O.J.

  The judicial system began to unravel when the sensible, soft-spoken John Macky, leader of the Los Angeles African American community, led a committee of fellow blacks into the offices of the district attorney, Gil Garcetti, and told Garcetti that he should not demand the death penalty for someone as distinguished and well loved as O.J. I was shocked when Garcetti kowtowed to their moral blackmail.

  When the jury was impaneled, I wrote this note to myself: ‘If the jury, consisting mostly of African Americans, votes him innocent, it will suggest that no black defendant, regardless of what he has done, can be found guilty in racially divided Los Angeles; and, if he is by some miracle found guilty, the city will once more explode in riots and burnings. If, as I feel sure will be the case, the jurors are unable to reach a unanimous verdict, so that a hung jury results, a fearful chasm will open between whites and blacks. We face a lose-lose-lose proposition.’

  In the early days of the trial I felt that the lawyers on each side disciplined themselves to keep the animosities of race out of the courtroom. But slowly, seeping out like an evil miasma, race took its inescapable place in the courtroom. In poll after poll the results tended to be the same. Whites—75 percent thought the testimony condemned O.J.; blacks—75 percent believed the L.A. police had framed him. Few paid any attention to the two young people who had been murdered.

  As the trial dragged to a conclusion the brilliant legal group defending Simpson achieved a miracle. They converted the trial of O. J. Simpson for a double murder into a wide-swinging attack on the L.A. Police Department, and suddenly Officer Mark Fuhrman, not Simpson, was on trial.

  In the heated final moments, Johnnie Cochran, the legal eagle of the Simpson team, boldly brought race into the middle of the courtroom. In the words of his disgusted fellow lawyer Robert Shapiro: ‘Not only did we play [the race card], we dealt it from the bottom of the deck.’ Brazenly, Cochran begged the jurors to find Simpson not guilty as a way of sending a message to the L.A. Police Department that they must stop abusing black citizens.

  When the jury retired to decide one of the most sensational legal cases in American history, they ignored the thousands of pages of testimony and the wealth of exhibits; nor did they review the arguments of the prosecution’s lawyers. With breathtaking speed they took one straw vote—10—2 in favor of a ‘not guilty’ verdict—then the ten proceeded to persuade the two recalcitrants to vote unanimously in favor of acquittal.

  On the Tuesday when the vote was announced, I, like most of America, listened with nail-biting attention as the clerk announced the—to me—appalling verdict. I may not have been 100 percent correct in my guesses on what the verdict would be, but I stand by my evaluations of the effects of the verdict, whatever it was to be. Race relations were at the crux of the case.

  I was badly shaken by the vote and told my friends who had watched the proceedings on TV with me that we should keep our mouths shut because we don’t want to say anything that we’ll regret later. I then went to a faculty meeting, at which I made the same suggestion, and we all abided by it.

  Later, watching television’s incessant treatment of the verdict with learned men and women commenting on its implications, I chanced to see the disturbing shot of the students’ union at Morehouse College, a black institution in Atlanta, where the students broke into paroxysms of joy when the verdict was announced. I was shattered to hear the Morehouse student union echo with boos and hisses when the cameras in the Los Angeles courthouse panned to the distraught white families of the two murdered victims.

  In that awful moment I caught a glimpse of the years ahead. Blacks will make O. J. Simpson and Johnnie Cochran their national symbols of revenge. Blacks who serve on juries will be expected to bring in not-guilty verdicts whenever a brother is on trial, and worst of all, those decent middle-class whites who have slowly made themselves able to see and understand the just complaints of blacks will harden their feelings.

  Although initially I thought it would put race relations back by half a century, on reflection I think the Simpson trial has probably sped the denouement of our racial tribulations forward by fifty years. With the Simpson verdict, all that I had been writing about in this essay as a problem needing attention was transformed into a crisis of great urgency. May we have the courage and wisdom to deal intelligently with this crisis so that the climax is not a violent one.

  In the aftermath of the trial the Reverend Louis Farrakhan astounded me by summoning the black men of America to a huge demonstration on the Mall in Washington, and about a million African American men of all ages convened peacefully to dedicate themselves to a more responsible public and family life. They behaved impeccably; there was not a single
arrest; and, they tacitly made it clear that henceforth they were a political force that white America would have to respect. There was, however, also the implication that if adjustments were not made to correct racial inequalities, there would be serious disturbances.

  One interesting aspect of the Simpson case involves the eventual possibility of General Colin Powell for the presidency; until Johnnie Cochran and O.J. exploded in their faces, an encouraging number of Americans, white Americans, indicated they were prepared to accept an African American president or vice president. Now how will they react? Even though Powell has indicated he is not yet ready for a national campaign, will voters in the future intensify their support for him on the grounds he might prove a healing agent, or will they have serious second thoughts about raising any black into a national symbol and shy away from Powell?

  That Colin Powell appears to have retired from the 1996 campaign is the nation’s loss. (As of June 1996, Dole reportedly was still courting Powell for the Republican ticket.) A team of Bob Dole and Colin Powell might prove unbeatable, and Powell could run as president in 2000. If sometime in the future Powell does become president, he might go far in healing the breach between the white and the black races.

  America’s looming racial crisis, intensified by the Simpson trial and verdict, leads us to the crucial, inescapable question regarding race in the United States: ‘Have relationships deteriorated so badly that interracial conflict has become inevitable?’ I believe the answer is Yes. All signs point to an oncoming clash, and I estimate that it will occur in the early years of the next century. I assess the inevitability this way: First, I can see no likelihood that white society will modify its economic practices so as to provide employment for black males in the inner cities. They will remain an unintegrated mass and a source of deep troubles and dislocations. Second, our national leaders not only appear unable to devise a system that is not anathema to the taxpaying citizenry for giving spending power to our lower-level citizens, but they are also indicating that our government is actually going to back-track on our already insufficient previous efforts. Third, current proposals intended to diminish the number of illegitimate births, particularly among black teenagers, are laudable insofar as taxpayers are concerned, but will be ineffective among the blacks and whites on welfare. The proposals I’ve seen penalize the children, and fail to educate their bewildered parents. Fourth, improbable as this may sound, there may be an inherited hatred between blacks and whites, simmering far back into the days of slavery, and if this is true, it militates against any efforts to eradicate it now.

  I am convinced that the ugly gap between white and black cannot be easily bridged. I expect the animosities to intensify into social, political and particularly economic rebellion as blacks experience the hopelessness in the inner cities, areas that will grow in size and in their ghetto quality. I think there will one day be irredentist movements in which black communities will want to govern themselves, and I suspect that vigorous protest of some kind will erupt, as it has in so many societies in the past when attempts were made to keep an underprivileged class perpetually downtrodden.

  And now, when the political trend of our national life is already skewed against our African American citizens, various government agencies are beginning to reverse gains the blacks have painfully achieved in recent years. The Supreme Court, which no longer contains an African American justice philosophically disposed to defend their rights, hands down one verdict after another clearly signaling that the days of progress toward equal justice are past. Governor Pete Wilson in California focused his run for the presidency with a powerful assault on affirmative action, and the vaunted contracts of the Republican victors in the 1994 elections brought only bad news to blacks. Every cheap politician is able to gain points by shouting that talented white men in all fields are being deprived of jobs by African Americans through quota systems. It seems as if our entire society is kicking the black man and growling: ‘Get back in line. Remember your place.’ And all this is taking place without any serious effort to create new jobs or help the inner cities.

  Recommendations

  In a period of major political change when national priorities are being redefined, we must not use the need for adjustments as an opportunity to knock the blacks even further down the socioeconomic ladder.

  1. We must all assume responsibility for solving the most difficult problem in race relations: how to provide employment opportunities for young black men in the seventeen-thirty age bracket, particularly in the inner cities. We must not humiliate African American youth by punitive measures that attack women and children and diminish even further the chances young black men have for finding employment. For the safety of the nation our young African American men should be kept in jobs, not in jails. Employment for young men is a major factor in strengthening black family life. I sometimes fear, however, that the evils of the abandoned center city cannot be solved without a major modification of the entire economic system, which is unlikely, but I also know that some rectification is absolutely necessary. To ignore the present injustices is to invite later retaliation as world history demonstrates.

  2. Wise leaders among us—economists, political leaders, social planners and dreamers of a better day—must be challenged to find solutions, and any committee directed to assume the responsibility must include ample representation of blacks and other minorities.

  3. I see the need for some new type of affirmative action that avoids those parts of a quota system that have enraged many white workers who feel disadvantaged because blacks received preferential treatment. How this can be achieved with fairness I do not know, but I do know that start-up black businesses deserve help in their competition with whites’. I am also convinced that such public services as the police and fire departments must have a representative proportion of black members, and I hope this could be ensured by the pressure of public opinion rather than by numerical quotas. Common sense could be the guide. But in an impasse, or when gross abuse can be proved as in the case of the electrical union that had never admitted a single black, I would want the courts to impose a temporary quota system, which would last only until the gross imbalance was corrected. I believe the public would support such an imposition.

  4. Many thousands of women on public assistance are producing illegitimate children, the new crop of babies who will likely spend a good part of their lives on relief. Somehow this constant replenishment of relief cases must be halted. Certainly when more than 50 percent of black babies in an area are born out of wedlock, something very wrong is taking place. I cannot favor the draconian proposals for stemming this tide that are being circulated at present—they penalize the children and their mothers without solving anything—but effective programs must be developed to reestablish the black family.

  I have studied the problem of illegitimate children in many different societies, and it is quite clear that they can thrive, despite moralistic attacks and the pressures of local prejudice. But I am also certain that it is better for a child to be born into and raised by an orderly family. I do not praise illegitimacy, but I salute the numerous young people who survive it remarkably well. I can speak with some authority on the subject, because I have never known what my parentage was; I was raised in a family that had no man on the premises. The three sisters who cared for me—one a nurse, one a school principal, one a loving, caring woman who bound us together—were better and stronger than many fathers in the area. Nevertheless, I am strongly in favor of the traditional American family. Statistically it is the preferable solution, and our black population would be better served if it could move in the direction of the stable family. But for this to happen, there must be jobs for the fathers.

  5. We should mount a national program to encourage black families to adopt black babies. And we should halt the ridiculous propaganda from black social workers who claim that only black families can adopt black babies. Along with Oscar Hammerstein, I served on the board of Pearl Buck’s Welcom
e House, an orphanage specializing in the placement of half-caste babies, especially black Asian, usually in the homes of white families, and we had conspicuous success. In fact, we almost never had a failure, and we had the same good luck with the all-black orphans we placed in all-white homes. I understand the cultural basis for the rule that black babies must go only into black homes, and I can see why adult black social workers would try to enforce that rule, but I fear they do so for their own personal reasons and to the detriment of the black orphans.

  6. I repeat, contentious race relations may be the most serious threat to the stability of American life. Anything we can do to achieve reconciliation must be done.

  The problem explored in this chapter was illustrated in newspaper articles about three significant interrelated events in America’s economic life. The first was headlined: JOB CUTS AT AT&T WILL TOTAL 40,000. The second announced that Wall Street was so excited about AT&T’s move that the Dow Jones industrial average rose sixty points. The third development appeared in the day’s quotations, which showed that AT&T’s common stock had also jumped upward 2⅝ and that the company was responsible for 7.6 index points in the Dow.

  The meaning of this news was easily deciphered. First, the company had discovered that it could wind up the year with a better bottom line on profits if it got rid of its marginally surplus workers. Second, the stock market’s exultation in the prospect of AT&T’s growing profits took precedence over all else, including the fate of company workers and their local economies. Third, the rise in AT&T’s stock meant that American business approved of the drastic cuts in personnel, because investors who held the stock would probably enjoy an even greater increase in the value of their holdings. It was, all things considered, a banner day for American business.