O.J. Simpson is dead. He died of prostate cancer in Las Vegas on April 10, 2024.
When I was a kid and teenager, he was simply “The Juice,” a physical genius who played for the Bills and then the 49ers. In 1973, he carried the ball for 2,003 yards. He appeared on the large and small screen in productions as different as Roots and The Naked Gun series. He had the face and physique of a god, the urbane personality of a natural pitchman, good comic timing, and the courtroom luck of Lizzie Borden. He is probably the man who killed his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ron Goldman on June 12, 1994. And yet so many people still misunderstand the overarching subtext of the “Trial of the Century.”
When Simpson was acquitted, some white Americans, who had apparently never heard of Klaus von Bulow, were incensed at seeing an obvious murderer walk. The fact that the accused was a black man, and the victim a white woman, certainly had a lot to do with it. Some African Americans were gleeful at the acquittal, as if Simpson somehow represented the multitudes of innocent black men who were lynched during the Jim Crow era for alleged crimes against whites. Ironically, both perspectives miss the point that the outcome of the case had more to do with wealth than race.
If O.J. Simpson had been a poor white man or a poor black man relying on appointed counsel (or if he had served out the full sentence for his 2007 conviction for armed robbery and kidnapping), he would have likely died in prison rather than in Las Vegas.