Free This Noble Land by James A. Michener

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 announcedthe—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