I just saw a flyer on campus about raising awareness of the death penalty and it had information about Tookie's life.
Apparenlty, after he was put in jail he became very anti-gang and even
wrote childrens books to discourage youths from joining gangs. He
has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize more than once.
Here is a nytimes.com article about him from 2000, if anyone cares to see a different perspective:
December 6, 2000
Antigang 'Role Model' Is Up for a Nobel and Execution
By EVELYN NIEVES
ORTH
RICHMOND, Calif., Nov. 30 ? The old, dingy house that serves as an
after-school center for this impoverished East Bay town was alive with
happy noise. Children crammed both floors, their presence masking the
shabbiness of the furniture and filling the empty spaces on the
yellowed walls. They pecked away on computer keyboards, sat at school
desks finishing compositions and stuffed themselves into a corner room
to hear Martika Pittman, 10, read aloud from a book by an ex- gang
leader now on death row:
"Many gang members think they respect
themselves," Martika read. She let each word hover in the air before
reading the next. "They think they have good self-esteem because they
feel good about themselves. But they are wrong. So were we."
The younger children sat cross- legged on the floor around her, frozen
in attention. They barely flinched when adult visitors walked in. Not
until they heard that the very author they had been reading, Stanley
(Tookie) Williams, was on the telephone from San Quentin did their
attention to his book "Gangs and Self-Esteem" waver. As word spread,
the children, about 60 in all, came running from every which room to
see if they too might talk to Tookie. "Tookie! Tookie!" they shrieked,
the way other children might react to Michael Jordan. "Let me say hi!"
"No, let me!"
When Mr. Williams, a co-founder of the South
Central Los Angeles Crips who was convicted of killing four people in
1981, was nominated for a 2001 Nobel Peace Prize recently, people were
stunned. But not the children here at North Richmond's Neighborhood
House. They read his books, most of which are subtitled "Tookie Speaks
Out Against Gang Violence." They write essays on his themes, draw
pictures to illustrate the morals of his stories.
They are also
part of his brainchild, the Internet Project for Street Peace, which
allows them to talk to Somali immigrant children in Switzerland,
through e-mail and chat rooms, about how to avoid gangs and trouble. At
Neighborhood House, the Tookie antigang message is reinforced on a
daily basis.
To others, Mr. Williams' nomination for the most
prestigious humanitarian award in the world has a larger meaning. It
has drawn praise around the world from those opposed to capital
punishment, and scorn from those who support it. And still others
wonder whether a convicted murderer is an appropriate role model.
("What a swell message for kids," wrote a columnist for The San
Francisco Chronicle. "You can gun down four people and still turn your
life around.") And on death row at San Quentin, about a 30-minute drive
from North Richmond and Neighborhood House, the nomination has inspired
some inmates to want to do something besides wait around to die, Mr.
Williams said.
"It's beautiful," he said in a phone interview
conducted from Neighborhood House in which his voice, soft and low, was
barely audible above the din of the children.
A 19-year
veteran of death row ? he denies committing the shootings, which
occurred during two robberies in Los Angeles, and is requesting his
third evidentiary hearing ? Mr. Williams spends most of his time in his
9-by-4-foot cell writing, using his metal bed frame as a desk. "One's
existence," he said, "is really determined by one's mental train of
thought."
He has had eight children's books published, most for the early grades, and has finished four more, including his memoirs.
Barbara Becnel is the executive director of Neighborhood House, a
nonprofit community organization that runs a drug rehabilitation
center, distributes free food and offers other humanitarian services to
this very poor, mostly black community. She also acts as Mr. Williams's
editor, co-author and conduit to the world. She met him in 1993 while
researching an article on black youth gangs for Essence magazine. The
research led her to start writing a book on the history of the Crips
and their archrivals, the Bloods. "Everyone told me I had to go talk to
Big Took," she said.
He co-founded the Crips at age 17 (his
co-founder, Raymond Washington, was killed on the streets in 1979) and
landed on death row 10 years later. "He was quite remorseful of his
Crips legacy," Ms. Becnel said of their first meeting. "He wanted to
reverse his legacy. He told me he wanted to write children's books that
preached an antigang message."
Ms. Becnel said they first
worked together on a video message that was played at a summit meeting
between the Crips and the Bloods. The five-and-a-half-minute message
was the hit of the occasion. "All 400 people in the audience were at
the edge of their seats," Ms. Becnel said. "There was total silence.
When the screen went dark, 400 people leaped out of their chairs and
started clapping. I thought, if he could command that level of
attention, maybe we were on to something."
In 1996, Ms. Becnel
was able to sell the idea of a children's book by a death row inmate to
the Rosen Publishing Group, which specializes in books for
disadvantaged children that are distributed to schools and libraries.
Proceeds from the books are funneled into the Internet Project for
Street Peace and other antigang projects. Mr. Williams writes his books
in his cell and dictates the writing to Ms. Becnel. The latest is a
book for middle-school students that offers a harsh view from death
row, "Life in Prison." His four unpublished books await her editing.
The Internet Project, which led to Mr. Williams's nomination for the
Nobel Peace Prize, began when Ms. Becnel told him that the Crips gang
was spreading to South Africa and elsewhere. Although Mr. Williams has
no access to the Internet, based on what he gleaned from television
shows, he told her he wanted to use the Internet to reach children
around the world. Ms. Becnel saw the idea through the financing and
realization. She also monitors his Web site, www.tookie.com for him.
Mario Fehr and five other members of the Swiss Parliament put forth Mr.
Williams's Nobel nomination after learning of his Internet project.
"With his work, he has saved the lives of a lot of children around the
world," Mr. Fehr said. "Secondly, I think that no matter what mistakes
a high-risk youth has made, he can change the direction of his life for
the better and give a good example to young people. And last but not
least, I strongly oppose the death penalty and I hope that the
discussion about the nomination will help to push the death-penalty
debate to a higher level."
Mr. Williams' shot at winning the
prize is long at best. But at Neighborhood House, where many of the
students come from troubled families that know of gangs and violence
firsthand, the consensus is that Mr. Williams deserves the award. The
other day, the children were writing him congratulatory cards, as
though he had already won the prize.
"Dear Tookie," wrote Dante
Lee, 13, "I think you learned your lesson and you care about us, and
that's why you write the books. Thank you."
"I believe it,"
Dante said, nodding. "Me too!" said Ronald Weathersby, 14. "Me too!" a
half-dozen, then a dozen, other children chimed in. "Me too!"
