DIFFERING RACIAL PERCEPTIONS- AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY

During the 1980s and 1990s a number of publications and public debates documented the divergent ways blacks and whites viewed race. They showed that blacks and whites saw the existence of racial bias and the consequences of racial discrimination quite differently: many whites believed that racial discrimination had declined, while many blacks believed that more needed to be done to combat racial discrimination.

The extent of conflicting racial views was revealed by the differing reactions to the murder trial of black sports commentator and former football star O.J. Simpson in 1995. Simpson was accused of murdering his estranged wife and her companion, and his lawyers presented a defense that charged the Los Angeles police with racial bias. The televised trial became a public spectacle dramatizing opposing perceptions of the legal system. The jury’s not guilty verdict outraged most whites who saw it as a miscarriage of justice and satisfied many African Americans who considered it a justifiable indictment of police racism. Television recorded these contrasting reactions to the verdict: a white crowd stunned, a black group elated.

The racial divide in America remained a critical issue in the late 1990s. In 1995 Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, perceived by many whites and some blacks to be a purveyor of anti-Semitism, organized the Million Man March in Washington, D.C. Although many condemned Farrakhan as a black racist, the Million Man March brought hundreds of thousands of black men to Washington to show black pride and solidarity. Participants pledged themselves to work for positive change in their communities. Two years later, a call for a Million Woman March brought tens of thousands of black women to Philadelphia in a similar show of concern.

Race remained one of America's most contentious issues. In 1997 President Bill Clinton asked Americans to come together in frank discussions of race and led some of the conversations personally. Suggestions that the president apologize for slavery received little public support. Congress refused to support proposals for an African American Museum on the Mall, in Washington, D.C. Arson claimed hundreds of black churches in 1996 and 1997, but white churches and businesses provided aid for their reconstruction. Such conflicting signs provided evidence that race was still America's unresolved dilemma.

Some attempts to atone for America’s racist past were made as the 21st century began. In 2001 and 2002 two men were convicted on state charges for the bombing of a black church in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four young girls attending Sunday school. Previously, no state charges had been filed in the case. In 2005 the United States Senate formally apologized to lynching victims and their descendants, most of whom were African American, acknowledging the Senate’s failure to pass federal anti-lynching legislation. The same year a jury in Philadelphia, Mississippi, convicted Edgar Ray Killen, a former Ku Klux Klan member, of manslaughter in the 1964 murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner. Previously, the men responsible for the murders had only faced charges of violating federal civil rights laws. Killen’s trial represented the first time anyone involved in the abduction and murders of the three civil rights activists had faced state murder and manslaughter charges.