������Ƶ

Media coverage of the recent death of National Football League Hall of Famer O.J. Simpson highlighted how his 1995 murder trial and its controversial verdict exposed the very different opinions between Black and white people regarding his guilt or innocence. He was acquitted of the brutal knife killings of his former wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman.

Those accounts led me to recall another highly publicized case involving race, sex and violence — the Massie-Kahahawai case in 1931-32 — that racially divided Hawaii. Thalia Massie, the 20-year-old white wife of a Navy lieutenant, accused five local young men, including popular barefoot-football player Joseph Kahahawai, of raping her.

Kahahawai was kidnapped and killed by Massie’s husband and three accomplices, who were all convicted of manslaughter. But their lengthy prison sentences were commuted to one hour in custody; thus they literally got away with murder, much like Simpson is said to have done.

Despite their similarities, the Simpson and Massie-Kahahawai cases had very different racial consequences for the continental U.S. and Hawaii, respectively. Simpson’s not guilty verdict contributed to the ongoing white backlash against Black people and racial minorities in general and further racially divided America.

In contrast, the freeing of Kahahawai’s killers following their guilty verdicts led to social, labor and political movements toward racial equality and overcoming racial cleavages, although they weren’t fully successful.

Racial Divide Increased After Simpson Case

Comparing the two cases, I’ll start with the Simpson case and how it illuminated the wide racial schism between Black and white communities. According to a Washington Post-ABC News poll at that time, 63% of white people believed Simpson was guilty of murder, while only 22% of African Americans held the same opinion.

Those divergent views were dramatically evident in the immediate public responses when Simpson’s not guilty verdict was announced with Black people cheering jubilantly, while white people appeared dumbfounded.

Some news media accounts at that time maintained that the not guilty decision was payback by the predominantly African American jury for the 1992 acquittal of the four Los Angeles Police Department officers tried for the videotaped beating of Rodney King.

Following the Simpson case, America became further separated by race and continued its rightward shift toward greater racial inequality and animosity. A year after the Simpson verdict, California — led by white voters — passed Proposition 209, prohibiting race-based affirmative action in public employment, contracting and education, including college admissions.

Other states followed California’s lead, until the U.S. Supreme Court ended race-conscious affirmative action programs in college admissions last year. Racial enmity has clearly increased in the three decades since the Simpson case to the extent that the probable Republican presidential nominee regularly engages in public racist rants, which predated his election in 2016.

In a recent campaign speech, former President Donald Trump demeaned undocumented immigrants as “animals” and “not human,” thus denying them a shared humanity, which is a principal marker of racism.

A Different Outcome In Hawaii

Turning to the Massie-Kahahawai case, David Stannard, professor emeritus at the University of Hawaii Manoa, has written a wonderful book about it, “Honor Killing: How the Infamous ‘Massie Affair’ Transformed Hawaii.”

He describes the racial division in Hawaii following the rape accusations against Kahahawai and his four friends — two local Japanese men, a Chinese Hawaiian and a Native Hawaiian.

Stannard summarizes the racialized views concerning their guilt or innocence: “The split in opinion that was now emerging cut right down the middle — haoles on one side, almost everyone else on the other.”

This split reflected the much deeper racial cleavage between haoles and non-haoles, much like how the opposed beliefs regarding Simpson being guilty or innocent mirrored the racial gulf between Black and white people.

The racial rift in Hawaii increased further after the jury in the rape trial of the five young men couldn’t reach a unanimous verdict, and so a mistrial was declared. Rather than wait for the retrial, Massie’s husband, her mother and two Navy sailors took the law into their own hands and kidnapped Kahahawai, and one of the sailors shot him to death.

Despite clear evidence of premeditation and deliberation, Kahahawai’s killers were charged and found guilty of manslaughter instead of murder and were sentenced to 10 years at hard labor at Oahu Prison. They then left the courthouse and crossed King Street to Iolani Palace, the seat of the territorial government, where Gov. Lawrence Judd commuted their sentences to just one hour.

Outrage among non-haoles at this blatant racial injustice eventually gave rise to a wholesale transformation of Hawaii, as is evident in the subtitle of Stannard’s book. Rather than widening racial divisions, the Massie-Kahahawai case reconstructed island society in ways that promoted racial equality.

Hawaii was thus transformed culturally, economically and politically. The notion of local identity emerged in the news media during the Massie rape trial to describe the five defendants and was later adopted by non-haole, working-class people to refer to themselves.

In the economy, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union organized dockworkers in Honolulu and Hilo by the late 1930s and sugar and pineapple workers starting in 1945 following the end of the war.

Politically, supported by the ILWU, the Democratic Party won control of both houses of the Territorial Legislature from the haole-dominated Republicans for the first time in 1954. As I wrote in my last column, the party, which was not strictly non-haole given haole supporters and leaders, such as John Burns and Tom Gill, implemented policies that advanced equality among racial and ethnic groups.  

Those policies, such as greater funding of public education and support for workers, fostered collective socioeconomic mobility, at least for several decades until the 1980s. Thus, a more valid comparison with the racial aftermath of the Simpson case would be to consider what similarly has transpired in Hawaii regarding race and ethnicity during the past 30 years.

Very briefly, some notable opportunities have been provided in electoral politics for ethnic and indigenous minorities, such as the election of Ben Cayetano as the first Filipino governor in the U.S. in 1994 and the election of Kai Kahele as the second Native Hawaiian to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2020.

While we aren’t racially divided between white and non-white people to the same extent as in the continental U.S., the haole-local cleavage still persists as a significant and reoccurring problem. Issues surrounding Hawaiian sovereignty, particularly land rights and claims, have yet to be resolved.

Lastly, as I have repeated ad nauseam, Hawaii still remains stratified socioeconomically and unequally by ethnicity.