Rights and justice

For much of 1995, America for once didn’t need the black press to find a major black story dominating the news.

When the not-guilty verdict came back in the O.J. Simpson murder trial after its round-the-clock coverage, however, it did need the kind of analysis provided by the Banner to make sense of the case. While three-quarters of blacks thought O.J. was innocent of murdering his ex-wife and her friend, an equal number of whites thought he did it. But legal standards of proof and serious questions about police planting evidence spelled reasonable doubt leading to the acquittal, a Banner editorial explained.

The paper also elucidated another huge African American story that fall — including dubious questions about just how huge it was. The paper questioned estimates that grossly undercounted the Million Man March, which easily reached its stated goal, if not far more than that. The Banner also assailed accounts that diminished the influence of the Boston native who convened the march, Minister Louis Farrakhan.

Closer to home, legal issues less sensational than O.J. but no less important to those involved led the news. African American Boston Police Sgt. Michael Cox sued the department, after he was beaten by fellow officers and left bleeding on the ground while working undercover. In 1996, the city paid $1 million to the widow of the Rev. Accelyne Williams to settle a wrongful death case stemming from the retired minister’s fatal heart attack after a SWAT team mistakenly stormed his house.

After years of missing out on qualified black candidates, the state’s Supreme Judicial Court finally got one in 1997 with the appointment of Roderick L. Ireland. Two years later, the Boston Housing Authority paid $1.5 million to minority women harassed almost daily in predominantly white housing developments in South Boston and Charlestown.

The city marked a major milestone with the results of the 2000 U.S. Census showing that whites were no longer Boston’s majority population. In the early years of the decade, coalitions of black, Latino and Asian activists and voters helped put greater numbers of people of color in office and apply pressure to elected officials at the city and state level.

Legal matters saw two local politicians fall from grace. State Sen. Dianne Wilkerson was cited for failure to pay income taxes while Speaker of the House Thomas Finneran, a white representative from Mattapan, stepped down in advance of an eventual guilty plea in a redistricting scandal.

The era saw a bright spot for minority businesses with the development and sale for $705 million of One Lincoln Place. The downtown office tower was backed by a consortium of black, Chinese and Latino investors.