LETTERS FROM HOME: ANOTHER INJUSTICE CORRODES AMERICA'S SOUL

Oct. 5, 1995

Dear Leslie,

DC and I went to see Denzel Washington's new movie a few nights ago. "Devil in a Blue Dress" basically is about a man who's lost his job and needs to pay his mortgage.

Easy's just back from fighting in WWII, has bought a house on the GI Bill and wants to do the right thing. But he's drawn into the nasty underworld of a Los Angeles political fight.

He's hired to find a white woman, the missing girlfriend of a mayoral candidate. She is known to frequent black nightclubs. Everywhere Easy goes looking, people wind up dead and he makes a good suspect.

This movie also is about racism. Easy, engaged in conversation by a white girl on the pier at Malibu, narrowly avoids getting beaten up by a group of young white men for his trouble.

When you see him battered by white police detectives, the video of Rodney King rolls in your head. It's funny how a new movie about an old event can resonate with something that occurred in between.

The black people in this movie very much have their own community, and that community is physically and psychologically separate from the dominant white society. There are panoramic scenes in the movie in which every face you see is black, happy and vibrant with life.

Aside from Spike Lee's work, the last time I saw black people as a group so lovingly depicted in a movie was "Sounder."

So much has changed since the days when a man like Easy had to sneak onto a whites-only floor of a hotel. And so much hasn't.

The black people in this movie take it for granted that they're going to get screwed by the criminal justice system. Calling the cops is the last thing Easy does in any situation.

He still agonizes over his moral choices, like what to do about a friend who has a bad habit of killing people if it's convenient.

What do you do about someone like that? he asks. The answer: Friends are all you've got.

So when I heard the O.J. Simpson verdict read, and later saw different crowds of black people cheering, I thought back to that movie. To the protectiveness a tread-upon minority had toward its own, and the Mark Fuhrman-style racism that can be used to rationalize everything.

When people have been oppressed, treated as if they are no one for generations, the backlog of anger must be huge.

Less than half a century after the Ku Klux Klan was lynching black men for looking at white women, a black man who evidence showed killed his white ex-wife and someone else who happened along is set free because one of the investigating detectives is a racist.

This is progress of the most bizarre kind.

Oct. 3 felt like a day of great tragedy for the United States. No one was vindicated. And the raw gash of racism that runs through America's history was uglily visible to all.

Johnny Cochran is criticized for playing the so-called race card, but it's the same card that won George Bush the presidency. Now it's O.J. Simpson's turn.

Until the fear of a different race or culture no longer separates us, the fear will be used to claim victory at any cost.

And until the law is equal for everyone, injustices of all kinds will continue to corrode the American soul.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.