The Crips have earned the dubious distinction as America's most publicized and successful street gang. Once a dysfunctional purse-snatching outfit based in south-central Los Angeles, the notorious group now operates in 42 states. While their founder, Stanley 'Tookie' Williams, awaits his execution, the recently formed UW-Madison organization Coalition Against Legal Lynching seeks to reverse his sentence.
This past Monday night, you may have passed several students, each holding a candle while enduring the freezing rain in front of Memorial Library. CALL, according to member Laura Nelson, is a subchapter of the nationwide campaign to end the death penalty. On the October bus ride from Madison to the Million More March in Washington, DC, Laura recalled the film chronicling 'Tookie's' life, 'Redemption', as CALL's inspiration.
'There were some people on the bus who were floored by that movie,' Nelson said.
Williams' nine children's books, written during his incarceration, have garnered Nobel Peace Prize nominations, while his proponents boast his work with troubled teens has saved roughly 150,000 lives.
Of course, if we entertain this ridiculous figure, we must hold Mr. Williams responsible for all the vicious and deviant behavior he one time glamorized'every ounce of crack ever trafficked and each bystander shot during a turf war.
I'm surprised our current president doesn't consider him a domestic terrorist.
'Everyone'politicians, doctors, lawyers'is held accountable for their past,' argued Detective George Chavez of the Madison Police Department, who examines gang related crimes. ''Tookie' Williams was imprisoned and sentenced based on his past.'
But it's the CALL's name, not their poster boy choice, which is most troubling. Lynching was arguably the most heinous crime perpetrated by our racial majority, so despicable that the term 'lynch mob' has faded from our vernacular. These acts of hatred were mourned and memorialized by Billie Holiday in her unsettling rendition of 'Strange Fruit.'
For a student organization to marginalize the significance of this term by drawing a parallel to the sentencing of a murderer is deplorable. Aren't there any elderly black or white individuals who themselves witnessed that 'strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees', who are offended by this? Is CALL really equating 'Tookie' Williams' fate to the killing of Emmett Till?
I oppose capital punishment and agree there is injustice spawned out of racial and economic disparity. But if you'll excuse my callousness, a candlelit vigil held in our Midwestern drizzle isn't equivalent to enacting the Emancipation Proclamation, nor will it motivate Arnold Schwarzenegger to grant Tookie's Golden State clemency. To think it might, and for it to be endorsed by Mayor Cieslewicz, is not only a waste of time, but the height of pomposity.
Court-defined justice, in the absence of extraordinary, contradictory evidence (which, in 'Tookie's' case, the US Supreme Court couldn't find), is paramount over a jail-cell character transformation, and I still trust the verdict of the American legal system, with all its flaws and blemishes, far more than I do the repentance of a self-stylized, former street 'general.'
And just as it doesn't take any courage to condemn a convicted felon, it doesn't require any sincerity to apologize in the face of death.
