It is easy to forget how beloved a celebrity O. J. Simpson was in his time — Heisman Trophy winner, N.F.L. superstar, Hollywood actor and pitchman supreme. Until he was arrested in the brutal slayings of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald L. Goldman, after a televised police chase that transfixed the nation, he seemed to have transcended his roots in San Francisco housing projects.

Yet if Mr. Simpson’s guilt seemed clear to much of America, African-Americans were disinclined to see it that way. Over months of lurid televised court testimony — now being dramatized in a series that started this week on FX — Mr. Simpson became a symbol, to many blacks, of endemic racism in the justice system. And when a jury with nine black members declared him not guilty on Oct. 3, 1995, black people across the country cheered.

I wasn’t one of them.

I must admit I was as disappointed as many whites that black college students gleefully applauded the verdict as if Mr. Simpson were one of the Scottsboro Boys. While the police and prosecutors had been far from brilliant, and reasonable doubt was, well, reasonable, Mr. Simpson’s innocence seemed decidedly unlikely.

At the time, what I saw was people ignoring the facts in favor of a kind of tribalism. A black journalism professor asked me, as a linguist, to lecture on language and the trial. I’d be glad to, I told him, but I thought Mr. Simpson was guilty. I never heard from him again.