Date: July 6th, 2007 9:42 PM
Author: swashbuckling sickened associate
Subject: facebook comment -- excerpted
The small crowd of clergy, community activists and death penalty opponents that gathered in front of the Los Angeles courthouse recently was no different than other groups that for weeks have kept up the drum beat for California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to grant Stanley "Tookie" Williams clemency.
There was one very loud exception. A young African-American man shouted that Williams was a thug and a murderer and should die. He was not an agitator or a 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 when I heard this young man's words, for there are many blacks like him who want Williams dead. The instant I went to bat in my columns for clemency for Williams and against the death penalty in general, the e-mails and comments I got flew hot and heavy. Black critics bitterly reviled me for advocating clemency. They were adamant that Williams must pay for his crimes, and for the murder and mayhem the Crips gang, which he helped found, has unleashed on impoverished black communities.
Their hardened attitude toward Williams flew in the face of conventional wisdom that says that blacks are passionate opponents of the death penalty. They aren't.
During the past decade, even as more whites have said they are deeply ambivalent about the death penalty or oppose it, many blacks continue to say 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 close to 50 percent.
Blacks are scared stiff and fed up with that continuing surge in murder violence that tears at 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 confounded some black leaders who, like many others, assumed that blacks are inveterate cop haters. They aren't. They are against 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 marches, held vigils and have lobbied city and state officials for tougher gun laws. They have also taken a step that once would have been considered racial treason: They have repeatedly demanded that blacks break their code of silence toward the police and help them identify the young shooters.
The death penalty is still used and handed down in a racist fashion. However, crime fears and rampaging murder rates in many black communities have partially trumped that, and made more blacks than ever regard capital punishment 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 tireless worked to redeem his life, and those of countless other angry, violence-prone youths. But many blacks have lost friends and loved ones to those gun-toting youths. They are unforgiving and unsparing in their rage at them, and they blame Williams for helping to spawn them.
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=318447&forum_id=2#8346666)