Listening to O.J.'s Fans

...suburb] who might run down an elderly black gentleman...

...Trial attorney Leonard Birdsong said, "Black people don't usually get the benefit of the doubt...

...When I sit down at the table you cannot extract the melanin from me through some superscientific process...

...Malveaux continued to beat up the prosecutors for all their ancillary arguments concerning Simpson's spousal abuse ("the statistics don't bear them out, that all batterers are murderers") and refocused the case on the primary issue- African-Americans getting the shaft...

...Angela Jordan Davis of the National Rainbow Coalition: "Even O.J...

...was the one who beat her like that...

...You got a problem not only with Mark Fuhrman, but all of his buddies who are deciding to go down with him...

...It may not be in the form of the Aryan Nation...

...We'll shoot you and cut you, maybe once or twice, but not like that...

...The only thing he has a relationship with is his dog...

...Here's Malveaux bemoaning Simpson lawyer Robert Shapiro's decision to take issue with Holocaust comparisons from his dream teammate Johnnie Cochran: "I don't want to have a pity party and say my suffering was worse than yours, but if 'Holocaust' is a metaphor for suffering, it certainly applies to African-American people...

...Maybe they won't do anything afterwards, but who knows...

...And excuse me, Mr...

...To flesh out these themes, Malveaux assembled some of the sharpest legal minds in the country...

...But Birdsong's faith was rekindled: "That's why we have the jury system...

...I was at the Nubian Eye clothing shop, right next to the Nation of Islam's D.C...

...But it might be some young white suburbanite . . . that might say, Any black person walks down this street, we'll get him.'" The nationally syndicated Julianne Malveaux of Pacifica Radio also had a few things on her mind...

...Yeah, that could be it," Birdsong concurred...

...It doesn't mean he was going to kill her just because he was jealous...

...When people don't like the way the conversation is going, they're accused of playing the race card," said Malveaux...

...If they had been voting on emotion, they would have convicted him just on the fact that nobody is more hostile to interracial relationships than black women...

...Vichy Indians...

...You mean the white things for the wrong reasons...

...Right after the panel, she interviewed Russell Means, famed Native-American activist and co-star of The Last of the Mohicans, who chastised those "Vichy Indian leaders talking about treaty rights...

...But when the verdict was actually rendered, the youngest, most guarded, and avid defender of Simpson dropped to his knees and shrieked in a falsetto that would have done Eddie Kendricks proud: "He got away with it...

...But give her some diversity points...

...After enduring an unrelated press conference address by Malik Zulu Shabazz about the impending judgment by the righteous, or some apocalyptic equivalent, no one was more relieved than I to hear "not guilty"-at least until I got to my car...

...She might have been spending all his money...

...Now am I the Queen of Spades, or the 2? That perhaps is the question...

...Disallowing that naggish pittance, burden of proof, she stated, "Prosecution gets the last word...

...Black people don't do stuff like that from what I've read and heard...

...Might as well get used to it...

...After pleading with "dear mother-father God" to "help us live past this point of emotional turmoil," Hughes made her case for the jury's evidence-based decision...

...Anybody could've kicked her around...

...Not as sad as Washington media mogul Cathy Hughes's performance on WOL radio, or the "We Offer Love" network, as she calls it...

...Her audience agreed...

...asked Malveaux...

...What...

...Might as well face it...

...It may not be a riot...

...That's real sad," Malveaux agreed...

...But back to the merits of the Simpson case: "Jews were not the only Europeans who participated in the slave trade, but they were some of them...

...Said one caller: "You name me one case when African-Americans sliced up their victims to that extent...

...One of my newfound friends even confessed, "The information that I got from the TV, I'm gonna be honest, I think the police killed her...

...Not that Malveaux actually had any debate, but she wondered aloud what it might be like by asking one panelist, "We ended up with three African-Americans in this conversation...

...Shapiro, but Mark Fuhrman, meet James Crow II, also known as Jim, also known quite frankly as Adolf...

...Lessons were learned, career advice distributed...

...There's hurt behind the issue of a rich, good-looking brother leaving a good hardworking sister who stuck with him through his hard years for a white teenage blonde...

...he wondered...

...If you look close enough, you've got a problem in probably every hamlet in this country...

...You got a problem...

...The beauty of black talk radio, its performers often say, is that information is not tightly controlled as it is in white media...

...That was what should follow the O.J...

...Note to panel: The jurors live nowhere near O.J.'s Brentwood manse...

...They soon found common ground, however, as Means promoted his new CD, "The Radical," with cuts like "Waco: The White Man's Wounded Knee" and "Nixon's Dead Ass," along with his new book, Where White Men Fear to Tread...

...The deck is stacked always in favor of the prosecution...

...Why aren't we concerned about some yahoo in Gaithersburg [a D.C...

...The white man "is afraid of matriarchal society- he wants total control," Means said with anthropological verve...

...headquarters, when the verdict was announced...

...Though Cochran now seems eager to mute any race schisms, his supporters in the air wars see no reason to shrink...

...No sense in denying it, America," said Joe Madison of WRC radio in Washington...

...Simpson with all his wealth and all his celebrity-he may have succeeded here-but even he was not immune from racism in this case...

...Countless hours of trial-watching have given birth to Malveaux's latest judicial epiphany...

...Malveaux with her MIT Ph.D: "This is a tribe I'm not hip to...

...That's why you get a jury of your peers...

...This stumped even Dr...

...Simpson verdict, according to the practitioners of African-American talk radio in the District of Columbia...

...Let me tell you how sisters feel...

...Malveaux suggested Simpson could make restitution for unseemly non-homicidal behavior by "taking a leadership position in talking about domestic violence" (an idea expressed, as well, by Jesse Jackson in the Washington Post...

...A listener named Dee said of the black-and-blue Nicole: "Just because they have those pictures, that's not to say that O.J...

...We jawed back and forth about who was full of what, about motive and hair fibers, and about how Ronald Goldman, dead at 25, was only at Nicole's house because he "was trying to make a booty call...

...According to Madison, blacks shouldn't rest easy, especially with no precautions having been taken to deal with the festering white mob enraged by the verdict...

...We don't need to focus on them, we need to focus on the slave trade...

...Juries very often do the right things for the wrong reasons...

...But as I made the acquaintance of five kindly gents who let me crowd around their six-inch screen, we had a post-verdict symposium about time-lines and DNA and other things we knew absolutely nothing about...

...How would it have differed if we brought in a white person who truly believed Simpson was guilty and was angry about the verdict...

...There's decades of hurt bedded down in those sisters, and they were able to rise above it...

...I am, the race card...

...Truth is not diluted, debate can be fostered...

...People from the community were supposed to come together, use their collective good sense, put that together with the law, and make a decision about the people who lived among them...