On Friday night’s Real Time with Bill Maher, in light of O.J. Simpson’s recent cancer death, Maher and fellow luminary Piers Morgan discussed the moment in 1995 when the former football player was acquitted of murdering his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman. The conversation was about as enlightening as one might expect.
Morgan expressed his fascination with how many people “were prepared to accept that [Simpson] probably got away with it but thought it was one in the eye back in the justice system.” He called the acquittal a “travesty of justice.”
But as Maher informed Morgan in his Deep Thinking Voice, “That’s not what it was. …I don’t think people ever really interpreted that the right way. I think Black folks knew very well that he did it, and I don’t blame them one bit for cheering him on.”
Maher went on to make a point that many, many writers have laid out before: For generations before the Simpson trial, Black Americans had faced rampant, racist injustices both within and outside the U.S. criminal justice system. Within that context, Simpson’s acquittal became something far bigger than an individual outcome.
As Charles J. Ogletree Jr.—professor at Harvard Law School and Director of Harvard’s Houston Institute for Race & Justice—told PBS’s Frontline in 2005, “the African American community has accepted [Simpson] not as an athlete or a hero, but as someone in the criminal justice system who, like them, would have been railroaded, they would say, if he had not had a Johnnie Cochran there to rescue him.”
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