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Poll results like that mystify most white Americans. Yet blacks see little news in the numbers. "I don't know how we can be surprised about a poll that shows African Americans are suspicious of our system of jurisprudence," says the Rev. Cecil Murray, the influential pastor of the First A.M.E. Church, Los Angeles' oldest black congregation. Indeed, such poll results probably indicate less about how blacks view the evidence against Simpson than about how they regard the way blacks are treated generally by the criminal justice system. "For many blacks, every black man is on trial," says District of Columbia delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton. "O.J. Simpson has become the proxy not because the black man is a criminal but because the black man is increasingly seen as a criminal by virtue of his sex and color."
The perception among blacks that the criminal-justice system discriminates against them is pervasive and deep. Why, many African Americans ask, does justice tend to be swifter when the murder victim is white? (While Simpson's trial is expected to start within 60 days, the suspected killers of Michael Jordan's father, who was slain a year ago, have yet to be arraigned.) Why are blacks so disproportionately represented on death row, and why, since 1977, have 63 blacks been executed for murdering whites while only one white has been executed for murdering a black? Not surprisingly, in the TIME/CNN poll, 59% of black respondents favored overturning death sentences in capital cases where statistical evidence points to a pattern of unfair treatment of minorities. Only 28% of whites felt the same way.
"Most black people feel they are considered guilty until they are proved innocent," says psychologist Richard Majors of the National Council of ( African American Men in Washington. Asserts Laura Washington, editor of the monthly Chicago Reporter, which focuses on race issues: "There is a long-held assumption, dating back to the days of lynching, that blacks on trial won't get a fair shake." Such attitudes make it easy for blacks to believe charges like those of racist behavior against police investigator Fuhrman.
Still, when news of the murders first broke, blacks, like whites, seemed disinclined to cast the case in racial terms. Most African Americans felt hard-pressed to identify completely with a man who was so rich, so celebrated -- and so unconnected to the black community. "Simpson did not function within our race," says Conrad Worrill, chairman of the grass-roots National Black United Front in Chicago. "His wife, lawyers and housekeepers were white." Many blacks faulted Simpson for not using his celebrity status to promote African-American causes. Says the Rev. Fletcher Bryant of the United Methodist Church in Englewood, New Jersey: "O.J. is a rich dude who runs with whites."