OJ
He was a black man who lived easily in the white man's world, never emphasizing race, comfortable in the perception of him merely as a person of remarkable athletic skills, easy smile, most pleasant to look at and listen to. Pushing his celebrity, not his color.
And then, in one terrible instant, he became something, someone entirely different. A conversation piece for the prejudices that marked and marred this nation. Accused of a most horrific crime by police who, he alleged through counsel, were motivated solely by their bias and hatreds. He morphed into a symbol for the struggles of, and wrongs exacted upon, a people, his people.
On the day the trial ended, it seemed this was a verdict on the state of this nation as much as of one man. Cheered wildly by those who believed it was a finding of guilt of the damage done not in raising accusations against an innocent person, but in the malicious actions taken over centuries by a country declaring it a crime to be black.
OJ Simpson did not long take to the role fate assigned him the day Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were brutally slayed. He did not live out the rest of his days as an advocate for racial justice and equality. It was certainly not who he was. There was, it seemed to many, a much darker truth that he would carry with him until his last breath. But, for a moment in time, it was exactly what he became.