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Monday, August 01, 2005

The Day I Cried on National TV

7:11 PM

I will never forget the day during the O.J. Simpson criminal trial when Johnny Cochran and Chris Darden hammered each other, soul and tongue, for hours on whether or not the mostly black jury could hear the "N" word--perhaps the ugliest word ever attached to an ethnic group in the history of the English language--dispassionately enough for "the state" to receive "a fair trial." The irony of that sharp switchback of modern American history was as thick as raw pinesap and as ugly tasting in my mouth.

I walked out of that insanely pressurized, tiny little courtroom and all too soon another television camera was in front of my face and another "what do you think?" question was hanging in the broadcast air.

And I started to cry. What a fool I made of myself. It's live TV, and I'm crying. Finally, clumsily, I strung together semi-audible words to the effect that basically "30 years after we thought we had changed things in America, what's happening in that courtroom is the proof that we failed. I failed!" and other such words. I was embarrassed. I thought I had committed TV broadcast journalism heresy.

I apologized profusely to people I spoke with several times a day, a lot of it on camera, five days a week for more than a year, and stepped away only to find that other national networks and L.A. TV stations wanted me to cry for them.

Why am I recalling this very bad moment now? Because of a Yankee writer who came south and brought his journalistic and literary talents with him; twice, in fact, a decade apart. His name is Richard Rubin. In 1995 he wrote a fine book about Mississippi racial criminal justice history, "Confederacy of Silence: A True Tale of the New Old South." And in this weekend's The New York Times Magazine, he writes one of the best pieces of journalism in the voluminous, ugly history of the 1955 Emmett Till murder case. A case my readers will remember from other posts; the murder has strangely haunted me for 50 of my 57 years of life.

Within the article, "The Ghosts of Emmett Till," Mr. Rubin asks a question. Below are a few graffs from inside Richard Rubin's truly fine article about one of modern America's very worst moments. The kind that lingers over centuries. And that is as it should be.

This is from his interview with one of Emmett's murderers' defense attorneys, now a very old man:

At first he offered something about Anglo-Saxons having "a reputation for being a little harder against people who get out of line than do others," but he quickly set that aside and explained: "You said 'Anglo-Saxon,' the jury would understand what you were talking about. You're talking about a white man.' He added, making a pointed reference to another trial that at that very moment was also polarizing the country, "I guess you could say I was playing the race card."

And it occurred to me, right then, just how much the defense of O.J. Simpson owed to the defense of Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, and how little, in some ways, the country had changed in the past 40 years. The issue of race was still so potent that it could overwhelm evidence and hijack a jury, even when the case at hand was a brutal, savage murder. I found it interesting that Whitten made the connection; I wondered if anyone in that courtroom in Los Angeles had.

Yes, Mr. Rubin, I did, every day of the almost 16 months spent in that courtroom starting in the Summer of 1994; unlike "normal" murder cases, the Simpson press corps was in court almost five days a week from the Prelim that summer until the verdict October 3, 1995.

In truth, Mr. Rubin, there were very few days during those years when I did not think about Emmett Till. Except, apparently, we saw 'mirror' ironies comparing the two courtrooms over half a century.

The Ghosts of Emmett Till in The New York Times

7:11 PM / Editor / permalink 2 comments

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2 Comments:

Dear Mr. Bosco

I hope you are having a good holiday. Someone wrote something about you in a public forum and I have sent you an email in your CU account in its whereabouts. Can you please look at it?

Thanks for your time

yan

By Glutterbug, at 3:21 PM

Don't worry about it. I deleted it. I think you and this man have been having this debate for a while and it spilled over. No idea. Never read your blog before.

By Glutterbug, at 6:39 PM