Blue Rage, Black Redemption: A Memoir

"Tookie learned the hard way that belonging to a gang is not smart. I salute him for his courage and determination to overcome his circumstances." -- Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Nobel Peace Prize laureate"Some of the most vital peacemakers arise out of the very heart of the most destructive spaces. Tookie's story is proof of this." -- Luis Rodriguez, author of Always Running Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The title of this book represents two extreme phases of my life. "Blue Rage" is a chronicle of my passage down a spiraling path of Crip rage in South Central Los Angeles. "Black Redemption" depicts the stages of my redemptive awakening during my more than twenty-three years of imprisonment on California's death row. These memoirs of my evolution will, I hope, connect the reader to a deeper awareness of a social epidemic that is the unending nightmare of racial minorities in America and abroad as well. Throughout my life I was hoodwinked by South Central's terminal conditions, its broad and deadly template for failure. From the beginning I was spoon-fed negative stereotypes that covertly positioned black people as genetic criminals -- inferior, illiterate, shiftless, promiscuous, and ultimately "three-fifths" of a human being, as stated in the Constitution of the United States. Having bought into this myth, I was shackled to the lowest socioeconomic rung where underprivileged citizens compete ruthlessly for morsels of the American pie -- a pie theoretically served proportionately to all, based on their ambition, intelligence, and perseverance. Like many others I became a slave to a delusional dream of capitalism's false hope: a slave to dys-education (see Chapter 5); a slave to nihilism; a slave to drugs; a slave to black-on-black violence; and a slave to self-hate. Paralyzed within a social vacuum, I gravitated toward thughood, not out of aspiration but out of desperation to survive the monstrous inequities that show no mercy to young or old. Aggression, I was to learn, served as a poor man's merit for manhood. To die as a street martyr was seen as a noble thing. In 1971, I met Raymond Lee Washington (may he rest in peace) and we ultimately decided to unite our homeboys from the west and east sides of South Central to combat neighboring street gangs. (An erroneous grapevine suggests that the Crips formed in 1969, or even as early as the 1950s.) Most Crips themselves are unaware that the original name for our alliance was "Cribs," a name selected from a list of many options. But the short-lived label of "Cribs" was carelessly mispronounced by many of us and morphed into the name "Crips," our permanent identity. Most of us were seventeen years of age. The Crips mythology has many romanticized, bogus accounts. I never thought it would be necessary to address such issues. But I can set the record straight -- for Raymond Washington, for me, and for others who fought and often died for this causeless cause. I assumed that everyone in South Central knew that Raymond was the leader of the East Side Crips, and that I was the leader of the West Side Crips. A few published chronicles have Raymond attending Washington High School and uniting the neighborhood west side gangs where he supposedly resided. In fact, Raymond attended Fremont High School on the east side, where he lived. A fundamental inquiry would have revealed that I lived on the west side, where I attended Washington High and rallied our homeboys and groups of local gangs. Even our former rivals have a better understanding of the Crips' origins than many social historians. Most of the public misinformation has been fostered by academics, journalists and other parasitical opportunists, stool pigeons, and wannabe Crip founders who shamelessly seek undue profit and recognition for gang genocide. There is no honor in insinuating yourself as a player in this legacy of bloodletting where your feet have never trod. Another version incorrectly documents the Crips as an offshoot of the Black Panther Party. No Panther Party member ever mentioned the Crips (or Cribs) as being a spin-off of the Panthers. It is also fiction that the Crips functioned under the acronym C.R.I.P., for Community Resource Inner-City Project or Community Revolutionary Inner City Project. (Words such as "revolutionary agenda" were alien to our thuggish, uninformed teenage consciousness.) We did not unite to protect the community; our motive was to protect ourselves and our families. There are people who say it was karmic justice that Raymond and I, who impinged on society in 1971 with a violent pact, deserved our exit from society in 1979 -- Raymond to the grave and myself to San Quentin State Prison. They cry out that I am incapable of redemption. My detractors' attitude toward my redemption is driven largely by my open apology (see the apology at www.tookie.com) to black folks and others whom I have offended by my helping to create the Crips over thirty-three years ago. My detractors argue that I could not be redeemed because I have not apologized to the family members of the victims I was convicted of killing. Please allow me to clarify. I will never apologize for capital crimes that I did not commit -- not even to save my life. And I did not commit the crimes for which I was sentenced to be executed by the State of California. Being a condemned prisoner, I am viewed among the least able to qualify as a promoter of redemption and of peace. But the most wretched among society can be redeemed, find peace, and reach out to others to lift them up. Real redemption cannot be faked or intellectualized. It must be subjective: experienced, and then shared. In the past, redemption was an alien concept to me. But from 1988 until 1994, while I lived in solitary confinement, I embarked on a transitional path toward redemption. I underwent years of education, soul-searching, edification, spiritual cultivation, and fighting to transcend my inner demons. Subsequently the redeeming process for me symbolized the end of a bad beginning -- and a new start. In time I developed a conscience that empowered me to think beyond the selfish "I" principle. Armed with new insight, I discovered the means to control my ego, which enabled me to reunite with God; to reclaim my humanity; to discover inner peace; and to find my raison d'être -- my reason to be. Since then, I have written nine antigang and antiviolence books for children, created the Internet Project for Street Peace -- an international peer mentoring program that links high-risk youth in other countries to their counterparts in the United States -- and wrote a Local Street Peace Protocol that provides guidance on how to initiate a gang truce and is available to anyone who chooses to download it from my website at www.tookie.com. Yes, redemption has resurrected me from a spiritual and mental death. And whether people are able to accept my redemption or not, they can never take it away. God chooses to redeem, not the laws of the government, the media, the sanctimonious, or the vindictive. To be redeemed, I have learned, is to be at peace with oneself. In fact, true virtue is self-victory by a path of redemption to peace. To avoid damaging others, certain names, nicknames, and quite a few well-known incidents have been excluded from Blue Rage, Black Redemption . For the same reason I have used pseudonyms for some of the people I include in this book. Otherwise, the story I tell is true. Copyright © 2004 by Stanley Tookie Williams Forward It started out as a gray Friday morning, and as I rushed into a West Oakland McDonald's to grab a breakfast sandwich, I heard the commotion coming from a table of older black gentlemen in the back of the restaurant. "If he killed those people, he ought to die," said one. "Well, whether he did it or not, if he stays locked up for the rest of his life, that ain't living," said another. "He might as well be dead." Although I tried to avoid this breakfast-table debate, as soon as I was spotted I was summoned to the table. "Tavis Smiley, what are you doing here?" One brother yelled out. "We're talking about that gang leader Tookie Williams who is supposed to be executed for killing those people in L.A. back in the day." "So, Smiley," asked another, "what do you think? Should he die?" The whole scene was surreal. I had just flown into Oakland International Airport that morning and, ironically, my radio producer and I were on our way to San Quentin to meet with Stanley Tookie Williams. He asked to meet me in person before doing an interview that would be aired on both my radio and television shows. It was November 25, 2005, the day after Thanksgiving, and I was already riding a sea of emotions long before being confronted by the breakfast club. Of all the McDonald's we could have chosen. The truth is, at that moment, I wasn't sure how to respond to the brother's question. All I knew for sure is that I am vehemently opposed to the death penalty and, as a person of faith, I believe in the scripture where God says, "Vengeance is mine." So, without going into too much more detail, that was my answer as I wished the brothers a good day. As I got back in the car, I started thinking about the morning ahead. Although unfortunately I've visited friends or family members in jail over the years, fortunately I had never been to death row. I wasn't sure what to expect. But as for Stanley, I had a little bit of insight. When Jamie Foxx came on my television show, he talked about what it was like to portray Stanley in the television movie Redemption: The Stan Tookie Williams Story . Jamie also told me that in spite of Stanley's imposing figure -- a massive chest and bulging arms and legs from bodybuilding -- Stanley was very gentle and soft-spoken. When we arrived at San Quentin a short while later, I found all of that to be true. After going through two metal detectors and security doors, we waited in a small visitors' cell that held an old table, a few chairs, and a small barred window that looked out onto the bay. A few minutes later, a guard escorted the shackled, gentle, soft-spoken bodybuilder with glasses and gray hair to the cell. After his cuffs were unlocked, he reached out, shook my hand, and said, "I'm Stan, and I've been waiting to meet you." As we sat down, Stan immediately opened the window and we began to talk. We talked briefly about the childhood he discusses at length in this book. We talked about what it was like to be in prison for nearly twenty-five years -...