To protest their founder's execution, a group of Crips in Tacoma, Washington destroyed a valuable chunk of their community. The building that once housed The Northwest Dispatch, Tacoma's longstanding black newspaper until only recently, was badly vandalized with it's windows smashed, insides torn up, and outside walls sprayed with Crip insignias that indicated the group had not yet given up their two-decade long war with Tacoma's Black community.

In it's heyday, the Dispatch was run with an iron but loving fist by Virginia Taylor. Even though the paper went south after she died, she remained a vital community figure. Her face is painted on a rainbow mural across the street from People's Park, the epicenter of so much of the violence that has haunted black Tacoma for so long, and the symbol of when that small area of the city made the entire town one of the most dangerous places to live in the country.

On the night I saw them last December, they all stood there within a block and a half radius on the same street: the picture of Taylor, one on a bright beautiful painting highlighting community points of light, the park, and the wrecked Dispatch building, a symbol of the Crips showing just how little one of those points of light meant to them.

A year after Williams' execution, I contrast what I saw that night with the pageantry outside of the facility in which Williams was executed. The Crip father might have meant one thing to all those too aware of gang activity, but inside that gilded circle of celebrities, politicians, and activists, he was Sacco, Vanzetti, and Alfred Dreyfus rolled into one. The dynamics regarding their complaint were tired enough to make even the most sympathetic of liberals groan: university academics and activists romanticizing a black outlaw while enacting in an orgy of emotionalist radical street theater.

Nearing the minutes leading to his death, drum circles were being played, spoken word poems were being read in protest, and scores of people were actually crying as if an injustice actually happened. Even Tookie's law team and academic supporters got in the act by screaming at the family members of the victim that they had killed an innocent man.

Personally, the night Williams was executed, I got blind drunk and cried my eyeballs out. I didn't do it because Williams was going to die, nor did I do it in protest of the radical politics of Williams' supporters. I did it because those supporters and those civil rights organizations that used so much emotion and exerted so much energy to defend Williams lifted nary a finger in protest of the hundreds of thousands of black lives either ended or destroyed by Williams and the millions of black lives that his gang ended up tormenting.