“Blue Rage, Black Redemption: A Memoir” by Stanley Tookie Williams is a first-hand account of Williams’ per­son­al jour­ney from co-found­ing the noto­ri­ous Crips gang to becom­ing a reformed pris­on­er and activist for youth from behind bars on California’s death row. The book, which has an epi­logue by Barbara Becnel and a fore­ward by Tavis Smiley, details how Williams became a pow­er­ful anti-gang activist dur­ing the two decades he spent on death row pri­or to his December 2005 exe­cu­tion. Williams’ book open­ly dis­cuss­es the life of drugs and vio­lence that led to the for­ma­tion of the Crips, and then offers an inside look into his per­son­al trans­for­ma­tion: ​“Black Redemption depicts the stages of my redemp­tive awak­en­ing dur­ing my more than twen­ty-three years of impris­on­ment.… I hope it will con­nect the read­er to a deep­er aware­ness of a social epi­dem­ic,” Williams wrote after fin­ish­ing the book.
(Touchstone Books, 2007). See Books.

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