Tookie Williams Loses Last Appeal
The story of Tookie Williams could be my own.
Tookie Williams and I both came of age during the era where Power to the People was the rallying cry, where women needed men like fish needed bicycles, and where Black Power thrillingly began to free African-Americans from the shackles of slavery and Jim Crow. As a white girl from the New Jersey suburbs I had never met a black person except the women who might clean our house, but when I got to college I found I related to the black girls in my dorm much better than the whites. Angry with my parents, my family, and the world in general, I found myself in comfortable surroundings with the student revolutionary movements.
A shared revolutionary fervor established a kinship between the radical student groups and the Black Panthers, and the repression of black people helped to stir the boiling pot of resentment on college campuses. Bombings of student buildings were discussed, and several of my friends went underground when plots were discovered and were never heard from again. Fortunately, I discovered meditation shortly thereafter which I found to be a superior method of handling my distress and safely retreated from the world of revolutionaries.
While I was discussing bombing buildings, Tookie Williams was organizing the Crips gang out of smaller gangs that were loosely associated with the Black Panthers. In those days there was a strong Robin Hood mentality, that it was ok to steal from the powerful to give to the poor and weak. ( There is some evidence that the CIA sold assault weapons and cocaine to the Crips and Bloods in order to fund the Sandanista movement in Nicaragua. […]