I have avoided Santa Maria as I would the plague for the past three months, refusing to have any part in the Michael Jackson circus that repackaged human suffering into entertainment. Instead I was putting the dustbins outside my house in Washington at about 5.30pm on Monday when - unusually - a group of eight or so black schoolchildren went past me, whooping and shouting like Arsenal supporters parading through Highbury after a victory.
A few minutes later a member of my household reported that spirits were high among adults in a black area of Washington where he had been working. They must have heard of the Jackson acquittal minutes earlier. The two experiences revealed to me how differently the trial was perceived by whites and blacks, and how the United States is still split by racial divisions to a degree that few comprehend.
Even an international entertainer who has deliberately turned himself into someone of indeterminate race remains, as a result, a divisive figure in white and black America. To blacks he remains symbolic of an underclass that has been oppressed by police, courts and juries throughout American history - something that continues today. If you think I am exaggerating, let me draw your attention to three vastly less-publicised cases in American courts and a vote in the Senate that happened on the same day that the Jackson verdict was announced.
First, the Supreme Court in Washington ruled by a 6-3 majority that "the very integrity of the courts is jeopardised" by the process of illegally excluding blacks from juries. This happened in the trial of Thomas Miller-El, a black man sentenced to death in Texas for the murder of a white Holiday Inn clerk; the majority opinion said it "blinks reality" that prosecutors in his trial struck out ten of 11 potential black jurors for any reason other than race. Because these prosecutors deliberately excluded blacks, there was only one black juror in the trial. Miller-El escaped death. Still, since 2002 Texas - with 7.6 per cent of the nation's population - has carried out 42 per cent of its executions, a disproportionate number of them black. Across the US, the population of death row is 41.8 per cent black and 45.6 white, even though blacks make up roughly 12 per cent of the population. That same day, the Supreme Court made a related ruling about another improperly conducted murder trial of a black defendant, this time in California. A black man named Jay Johnson was convicted by an all-white jury of murdering his white girlfriend's daughter; three blacks had been excluded from the jury by prosecutors, and the Supreme Court ruled that state law made it too difficult for defendants to show that this type of practice was because of racial discrimination.
A thousand miles south of Washington, a court was gathering for jury selection in a third trial - this one in Mississippi, of an 80-year-old white man named Edgar Ray Killen, charged with the Ku Klux Klan murders of three civil rights activists, one black and two white, in 1964. Killen was among 18 charged in 1967 with violating the civil rights of the slain men; an all-white jury acquitted him despite being told that Killen had masterminded the killings. The three were originally arrested for speeding by a policeman who was a KKK member. He kept them imprisoned until a mob could gather.
Back here in Washington, on this same busy day, two hundred people met for a lunch at the US Senate to remember friends and relatives who had been lynched. They included a 91-year-old black man called James Cameron, whose life was miraculously spared as a 16-year-old in 1930, after an all-white mob that had already hanged two of his friends from a tree - supposedly because the youths had murdered a white man and raped a white woman. Cameron had a rope put round his neck too, and why he escaped death has never been clear.
You do not have to be middle-aged to remember such outrages. On Monday the Senate apologised for 4,742 lynchings, though we can assume that vastly more were not recorded. The two senators from the state whose mobs committed most - stand up again, Mississippi - did not attend, one of them being Trent Lott, leader of the Republicans in the Senate until the end of 2002. So if all these events one hot afternoon in 2005 sound like belated recognitions of racial injustices long past, I have to report that the reality is more complicated. Indeed, a Gallup poll after the Jackson acquittal found "a major racial divide" over the verdict - after a trial in which the prosecutors had still been able to see to it that Jackson was tried in an overwhelmingly white, middle-class area and that not one single black person sat on the jury.
That is what made the Jackson verdict all the more startling, and why those black kids outside my house were so keen to express their jubilation in a white and very privileged enclave of the nation's capital.
