THE O.J. SIMPSON MURDER TRIAL : History Lurks Amid Hoopla and Rhetoric

At Will Rogers Park in Watts on Saturday, an event honoring Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. illuminated how feelings among some in the African American community about the O.J. Simpson case are intertwined with longstanding grievances against the cops, the courts and the D.A.’s office.

The event was to add Cochran, Simpson’s lead attorney, to Watts’ Walk of Fame and Promenade of Prominence, the South Los Angeles version of the stars on Hollywood Boulevard. The walk is on the sidewalks surrounding the park.

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On hand were about 200 seated in the Will Rogers gym, ranging in age from older people to teen-agers. A young peoples’ choir sang. The audience prayed, saluted the flag and listened as the rich voice of Margie Evans filled the room with the African American anthem, “Lift ev’ry voice and sing, ‘til earth and heaven ring.”

Los Angeles County Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, in her tribute, talked about a subtle way the Simpson trial is linked to community impressions about the criminal justice system.

Burke, a cautious politician, mentioned the trial only briefly and almost indirectly. Unlike other speakers, she didn’t draw cheers from the audience with phrases like: “After Johnnie wins this case. . . .”

Rather, she was oblique.

Cochran, she noted, became a powerful voice inside the criminal justice system when he served as chief assistant to then-Dist. Atty. John Van de Kamp.

What Cochran is now showing, she said, is that “any African American lawyer can compete with any lawyer in the United States on the biggest case in the United States.”

“There has always been a glass ceiling for black lawyers,” she said. It even existed, she added, among African American clients. Many African Americans, she said, accepted “the idea that black lawyers can’t deal with” L.A.’s criminal justice system.

Those days, she said, are ending.

Later, I talked to one of the organizers of the event, Dr. James May, a cardiologist who has been deeply interested in the Simpson case from the beginning. In fact, he leads a group of trial followers in a discussion once a month at a South L.A. church.

In May’s view--one more extreme than Burke’s--Cochran has become a symbol of inclusion in a criminal justice system seen by many African Americans as discriminatory in both employment opportunities and the execution of the law.

Although people care about Simpson and the victims, Mays said, “that feeling has been superseded by their perception of the guilt of our social institutions.”

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Perhaps Mays’ assessment is too harsh. After all, Deputy Dist. Atty. Chris Darden, an African American, is a leading member of the Simpson prosecution team. And, hanging around the D.A.’s office, you don’t get the feeling of a guilty social institution, but one overwhelmed by L.A.’s social and racial problems.

It seems that every time there’s a hot case, prosecutors must confront a perception in minority communities that their decisions are being shaped by racial considerations. That was apparent at a news conference held by Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti last week when he was asked some tough questions about his office’s refusal to prosecute a white man who shot and killed one Latino tagger and wounded another.

The Mexican American Bar Assn. was demanding Garcetti reopen the case. “We made a legal decision he did not commit a crime,” Garcetti said of the gunman.

In back of the bar association’s suspicions were many decades of unfair arrests and prosecutions in the Latino community, landmarks in the history of Latino L.A.

If you want to be literal and legalistic, this doesn’t have anything to do with the Simpson trial. Neither do the past injustices visited on the black community.

But history is always in the background, a history of suspicion toward law enforcement, even when the prosecution says it has a solid case.

“I’m sad two murders were committed,” said tennis instructor Kelvin Brown, an African American, as we talked in the park after the ceremony. “Not knowing all the details, I’m trying not to decide on it until there is something more definite in the proof. But the prosecution will have to prove its case beyond reasonable doubt--and there is still doubt in my mind.”