theguardian: by Geoffry Robertson —

In 1976, I was a junior lawyer on Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter’s retrial defence team. His story has a significance that should outlive his death.

It all began with the riots in Watts and Harlem in the early 1960s, which left 13 black children killed by police bullets. Rubin Carter, who until then had been marching non-violently with Martin Luther King, became a black Muslim and started to talk to the press about fighting back. That made him a public enemy in his home town of Paterson, where he had been arrested at the age of eleven for stabbing a man he said had indecently assaulted him. He was put away in a reformatory for seven years and was not forgiven – even as he began winning boxing titles.

In the summer of 1976, I walked the mean streets of Paterson, New Jersey, with Rubin “Hurricane” Carter – and encountered the raw, bloodshot hate-gaze from the white folks who passed us by. Carter was instantly recognisable: he was as bald and black and muscley as the Michelin man.

“What chance do you give me?” he asked this then-young British lawyer, shrugging his boxer’s shoulders. “You can see my verdict in their eyes. In America, nothing has really changed.”

On the political surface, it seemed to have changed. In 1966, when Carter – then a top professional boxer – was first convicted by an all-white jury for slaying three of their kind in a local bar, the governor of Georgia was fighting desegregation with a pick-axe. Now his successor, Jimmy Carter, was on the way to the US presidency, preaching racial harmony and quoting Bob Dylan in his campaign ads. Rubin’s original 1966 conviction for an apparently motiveless triple murder was based on palpably inadequate evidence and came at a time when he was a contender for the world middleweight title.

More: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/21/rubin-hurricane-carters-life-story-is-a-warning-to-us-about-racism-and-revenge