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In the long summer of 1994, I was moving around Los Angeles, seeking a place to live that was near to where I wanted to be and was priced at a rate I could afford. I couldn’t afford much and so was nowhere near Brentwood, where Nicole Brown Simpson met her end that June. I was at a friend’s house in Venice cooking dinner when OJ was laying down on the backseat of his friend’s white Bronco and headed back to his palace in an even pricier section of Brentwood. I watched it on TV as I stirred my bouillabaisse.

Between the brutal double murder at his ex-wife’s house and the Bronco chase, I was aware of OJ in the news, but I can’t remember much of that brief period. I knew who OJ was, but by that time, he was a figure from my childhood long past. I knew OJ as a professional football player for the Buffalo Bills, and then as a TV pitchman for rental cars. He would pop up in a movie now and again, or as a guest on a TV talk show, but OJ had no specific entertainment or cultural reference any longer. Boy, was that about to change.

Like most people, I assumed that his behavior in the days that led up to the slow police chase in the Bronco was the de facto admission that he was guilty, and a plea would be coming. He acted guilty because he was. He had been in the process of fleeing a pending indictment for murder when he was picked up by a friend and driven back to his house.

But days later he was finally brought before a judge where he plead, amazingly, “Absolutely not guilty.” That OJ was guilty as hell as already well known. The basic facts of the case had been revealed, and it was clear enough that OJ had, in a violent frenzy, cut himself with the same knife used to murder his wife and Ron Goldman, a perfect stranger to OJ who just happened to drop by at the wrong moment. From that cut, he left a blood trail from the murder scene to his house.

What followed for the next year was the ‘trial of the century’ which is a moniker hung on many sensational cases, but in the case of OJ, it was far more appropriate. OJ was a beloved celebrity who had married a white woman, and that had not diminished his celebrity in the eyes of the white population of Americans. If black America resented OJ’s success and what it brought him, a white wife to replace his black one, they didn’t say so. OJ was rich, and like Bill Cosby or Michael Jackson, a beloved figure in American entertainment that all Americans could equally like.

But now, OJ had entered a whole new world, and his fate represented something entirely different. OJ was now in a justice system that was a warzone of culture differences of opinion. He had murdered two white people, brutally and up close, and there was a mountain of evidence against him.

And more proximately, he was being tried for these crimes in Los Angeles which, only two years previously, had been rocked by the Rodney King riots. A solid majority of the Los Angeles population, and nearly all of its black residents, thought that the LAPD officers who beat Rodney King after a high speed car chase had done so outside the bounds of the law, and when those policemen were found not guilty of the most aggressive charges they faced, days of rioting followed An orgy of theft and arson consumed parts the city, and the police could not, or possibly would not, stop it. President George Bush called out the National Guard to restore order, and it was restored but not before 50 people had been killed. The black population of Los Angeles was not over Rodney King when jury selection for the OJ trial began.

In the fall of 1994, I found a place to live with a friend in Van Nuys, part of the broader Valley. I was no closer to Brentwood, but at least I had a house to live in that I could afford. My roommate was a DP, or cinematographer, as most know the job, and he wasn’t working for most of those long months. I worked at night, and he was up all day, watching the OJ trial. Being a bachelor, he had a huge TV, and he turned the volume up loud enough for him to hear as he swam in the pool, all while I was trying to sleep. I heard the mufflered OJ trial in my sleep and would catch up on what had happened that day when I woke in the middle of the afternoon.

The trial was a sad lesson for many Americans in legal maneuvering and misdirection. OJ’s Dream Team of lawyers was Johnnie Cochran. F. Lee Bailey, Alan Dershowitz, Robert Kardashian, Shawn Holley, Carl E. Douglas, Gerald Uelmen. Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld and they did everything possible to guide the jury away from the obvious facts and towards an inclusive finding. The state had no such legal firepower, and the judge was clearly making decisions with the cameras in mind. These men, all educated in the best colleges and law schools in America, set as their task, to free a guilty man. It was a monumental challenge and they poured all their resources into it.

Throughout the summer and into the fall of 1995, I was planning a trip to Europe. My girlfriend was there performing with a traveling show, and so I planned to meet her and travel around with her and then wander a bit on my own. In September of 1995, with more twists and turns in the trial of the century pending, I left the country.

In Germany, I would occasionally see OJ’s face on TV screens, but I didn’t see much TV for weeks, and I was no longer following the trial. In Amsterdam, I did a tour with several Brits, and they had been following the trial closely and wanted my assurance that OJ would, in fact, be found guilty. I said I thought so, because I had full faith in the American justice system, and I had no idea who the jury was.

I was in Holland and listening on the radio when the verdict was announced In spite of the clear, overwhelming and incontrovertible evidence that OJ was guilty, that he had murdered two people, and nearly cut off his ex-wife’s head, and in spite of the fact that he had done this while his kids were in the house at the time, the jury returned a ‘not guilty’ verdict.

For my part, I knew that race had been the deciding factor immediately. I lived in LA, I knew what the black population thought about the LAPD and the larger city, and as I would later find out, the entire United States, and so it was the black OJ, and not the rich OJ or celebrity OJ, that they had set free.

For the rest of the time I was in Europe, I avoided the news. It was depressing. There was plenty to do, and right before I left, I dropped by the Anne Frank House. It was late in the day, and I was the last person allowed in. I did the tour of the tiny apartment where Anne and two other families hid, hoping to avoid being murdered, and for a couple of moving minutes, I was in Anne’s room alone. She had Hollywood celebrities and a couple of members of the Royal Family from the 1940s, pictures she had cut from magazines, taped to her wall. She wrote her diary under the gaze of movie stars, and then, one day, she was marched to a camp and died. No one was held responsible for her death either.

It was when I returned to the states a few weeks later that I saw, for the first time, reactions of black people to the verdict. It was then that I saw the cheers and whoops, and realized, they didn’t care about Nicole Brown’s life; they cared about power, and OJ being let go was a sign that their power had just increased. Millions of black Americans realized they had the power to use race to thwart the justice system even in the face of overwhelming guilt. They did not care about justice, or equality. They surely didn’t care about me.

Even at my age, I have no memory of a segregated world. The schools in Pensacola were integrated by the time I entered them, but I remember a lingering tension in the air when I was in elementary and middle school. By the time I reached high school, the tension was gone. I was in the high school band, and traveled with the band to shows all over the south. The whole band stayed in hotels, and one of my regular roommates, Mark, was black, and no one said anything or cared. I liked Mark a lot, as well as his younger brother Glen. The remnant resentments of the Civil Rights era may have been there with the older folks, but no one my age gave much thought to Martin Luther King, voting rights, Freedom Riders, court cases, Rosa Parks, or anything else from the Civil Rights era because we were young, and busy living our young lives. Had the Civil Rights era ended and been declared a resounding success in the first generation to follow, we’d all be much better off.

The successes I saw in those days were the result of the lawsuits launched by the early Civil Rights leaders, all of which culminated in the Vorting Rights Acts of 1965, but it was also the product of the determination of white families to raise their white children free from blind prejudice. Using the world ‘niggar’ became less and less socially acceptable. Using that term was not the hallmark of anything but prejudice and redneck stupidity by the time I turned 18. Had it still been common, I would have heard it, but it disappeared from our vocabulary. In the white community, we were positioned to leave the world of prejudice and segregation behind as successfully as slavery had been left behind 100 years before.

But that, sadly, is not what happened next. It was in this period that black political ‘leaders’ like Jesse Jackson started in with “Well, we’ve come a long way, but we still have a long way to go!” The Civil Rights era had been too intoxicating to let go. It was a good career path.

And so, the Civil Rights era entered its next phase, the one that gave us Jese Jackson, Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan, and Barry Dunham, aka Barack Obama. Each of these men, and hundreds like them, rode the long ago crested Civil Rights wave into office on the premise that the job wasn’t done, and we still had a long way to go.

Quite a few of these men, including DC mayor Marion Barry, and Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, were sent to jail for serious crimes, and they oversaw a civic government that was not able to keep their cities from being the scene of thousands of murders of young black men at the hands of other young black men. This generation of leaders planted and watered the poison vine of malice towards the police. The Civil Rights era had demanded and received ‘equal rights’ in policing and the police had, in fact, enforced the law in black neighborhoods, but as the black crime rate rose and the black family fell, the new generation of leaders blamed the police for the problems, and not the actions of its own people, mostly the young. A dead black man at the hands of another black man meant nothing, but a dead black man killed in the process of committing a crime, and then killed in a fight with the police, was millions of dollars in cash, political fame, and a ticket back into office.

This second wave of leaders squandered the moral authority of the Civil Rights movement, and that corruption was spread to the wider black population. It was the descendants of this second corrupt wave that cheered OJ’s release. They cared not a whit about white lives, about OJ’s kids, the Brown family, or Ron Goldman’s dad, who was the one man who set in motion OJ’s demise and got him to do a at least a few years of jail time.

We are now in the next wave of racial unrest, and the leadership that has emerged from this wave is worse than the first two. The new leadership, Ibram X Kendi, Stacy Abrams, Ta-nehisi Coates, are even more hostile and dishonest. Gone are the days of praising equality or seeking a color-blind society. Those terms are well in the past. Now, it’s all race, all day every day, and the declaration that everything done over the past few decades has been for naught. We’re still infected with ‘systemic racism,’ and only more power in the hands of the government can ever extirpate this demon if it can be done at all. There is to be no equal opportunity, a goal directed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a division of the government once led by Clarence Thomas, but there are to be equal or even non-equal outcomes, as directed by the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion committees of every government office and public company in the land. No facts, no matter how clear or widely observed, can derail this narrative.

I strongly suspect that there is now plenty of racism to go around and is being taught to black children at an early age. What my generation of youth were told to put down, young black Americans have picked up. Hate must be taught, as they say, and it is being taught, in the black family and in black media. ‘White’ is a pejorative term, used as such, and ‘white privilege’ is a term meant to delegitimate everything about white people, mostly their wealth. Then, that money can be harvested.

The Civil Rights era is dead, and it’s moral authority, once well earned, is squandered.

And now, OJ is dead, at age 76. He died not in prison, where he should have or put to death by the state of California. Even had he been found guilty he wouldn’t have been executed as California doesn’t have that penalty anymore. They still have ol ‘Tex’ Watson lingering around, more than 50 years after the up-close gun and knife murders of several people. Tex was the murderous muscle behind Charles Manson. Watson has fathered four kids from prison. Imagine you’re the family of Sharon Tate, who was murdered with a viable baby, Paul Polanski, in her womb, and you get to hear about Tex fathering kids. Compassion? Is this the decision of a healthy society?

OJ would have lived on in jail, possibly even longer than he did free. Instead, he died surrounded by his family. May his peace, if he had any, have ended with his death, and he live in torment for what he did, forever. We all know what it was he did and didn’t need his ghoulish confession If I Did It, to tell us.

In 1995, black moral authority was waning. Now, it’s as dead as OJ. Rot in hell OJ, for what you did, were, represented, and revealed.