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"Tookie Must Die" By Earl Ofari Hutchinson, BlackNews.com Columnist December 2, 2005 The small crowd of clergy, community activists, and death penalty opponents that gathered in front of the courthouse recently in Los Angeles to demand clemency for Stanley "Tookie" Williams was no different than other groups that for weeks have kept up the drum beat for California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to grant Williams' clemency. There was one very loud exception. A young African-American shouted that Williams was a thug and a murderer and should die. He was not an agitator or crank. He represented a body of pro-death penalty sentiment among blacks that has seldom been publicly heard during the great Tookie debate. I was not surprised that there are many blacks such as him that want Williams dead. The instant I publicly unabashedly went to bat in my columns for clemency for Williams, and against the death penalty in general, the emails and comments I got flew hot and heavy. The black critics bitterly reviled me for advocating clemency for him. They were adamant that Williams must pay for his crimes and for the murder and mayhem the Crips gang, that he helped found, has unleashed on poor, black communities. Their hardened attitude toward Williams flew in the face of conventional wisdom that blacks are passionate opponents of the death penalty. They aren't. During the past decade, even as more whites say they are deeply ambivalent about the death penalty, or oppose it, more blacks have said that murderers, even black ones, must pay with their lives. A Harris Interactive poll in August 2001 found that nearly half of black respondents supported capital punishment. Three years later, a Gallup Poll found that black support for the death penalty still hovered at near fifty percent. The death penalty debate can no longer be neatly pigeonholed into a black versus white racial divide issue, and with good reason. Whites generally are not at risk from black criminals. Other blacks are. They are more likely to be victims of violent crime or to have friends or relatives who have been crime victims than whites. The Justice Department's annual crime victim surveys have consistently found that blacks are nearly twice as likely to be victims of murder than whites. The leading cause of death among young black males under age 24 is homicide. In nearly all cases other blacks will kill them. Blacks are scared stiff and fed up with that continuing surge in murder violence that tears black communities. A hint of that came in June 1999. A Justice Department survey that year found that blacks in a dozen cities generally applauded the police. This shocked and confounded some black leaders who assumed like everyone else that blacks are inveterate cop haters. They aren't. They are anti-racist and abusive police officers, and expect and demand efficient, fair policing in their communities. In Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and other cities, community activists have staged anti-murder walks, march, held vigils, and lobby city and state officials for tougher gun laws, and have also taken a step that once would have been racial treason. They have repeatedly demanded that blacks break their code of silence toward the police and help them identify the young shooters. Then there's the myth of the "soft" black juror. It goes like this, black jurors are so hateful of white authority that they would gleefully nullify the law and let a black lawbreaker waltz out of court a free man or woman even if that person is a killer. This is nonsense. In most big cities, blacks make up a majority, or a significant percent, of those that sit on juries, and they routinely convict other blacks of crimes every day. It's true, though, that in past years, blacks were the staunchest opponents of capital punishment, and they had good cause to be. The death penalty was a vicious, blatantly racist weapon welded by prosecutors, particularly in the South, against blacks for rape and murder on the flimsiest evidence as long as their alleged victims were white. However, crime fears, and the rampaging murder violence has partially trumped that and made more blacks than ever regard the death penalty not as a weapon to hammer blacks, but to hammer violent criminals. Tookie certainly no longer fits the label of the violent predator. He has done everything humanly possible to redeem his life, and those of countless other angry, violence prone youth. But many blacks have lost friends, and loved ones to those gun toting youth. They are unforgiving and unsparing in their rage at them, and they blame Williams for helping to spawn them. That's unfair to blame one man for the sins of some in the youth generation but when the body count rises, people must blame someone for that and Williams is that someone. It's then only a short step from that for them to loudly say that Tookie must die. Earl Ofari Hutchinson is a columnist for BlackNews.com, an author and political analyst. For media interviews, contact: Mr. Hutchinson at 323-296-6331 or hutchinsonreport@aol.com   News Topics | Home | Research | History | Blood Gangs | Crip Gangs | People| Life in a Gang | Gallery | Iraqi Cards |