Tookie's birth. . .
On December 29, 1953, in New Orleans Charity Hospital, I entered the world kicking and screaming in a caesarean ritual of blood and scalpels. Because this was 1950s, pre-Civil-Rights Louisiana, my 17-year-old mother, a "colored woman," was deprived of anesthetics as her torso was slit from sternum to pubic bone. Over and over again, she sang the Christmas carol Silent Night to distract her from the pain.

I was christened Stanley Tookie Williams III, but mostly referred to as Tookie.

Thus begins an extraordinary, unconventional American success story. Stanley "Tookie" Williams - a former youth gang leader and Crips co-founder, current San Quentin Death Row prisoner, and now a children's book author and Nobel Peace Prize nominee for the past four years - has written his memoir, Blue Rage, Black Redemption, an tumultuous, revealing work. The book is printed in a quality trade paperback format so that prisoners may receive the book via the U.S. mail.

For more details, send an email to orders@damamli.com, or call Damamli Publishing Company at 925-705-1612. To order a copy of Blue Rage, Black Redemption, click here.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

All of Tookie's proceeds from the sale of this book will be invested in programs to assist at-risk children. He will receive none of his book's revenues.


Inside South Central Los Angeles. . .
These hustlers would bet on just about anything - even who could spit, urinate, or throw a rock the farthest. I have witnessed cockfights, cricket fights, even fish fights, and pay-per-view street fights between individuals from 6 to 50 years of age.

The Gang As Family. . .
Barring the relationship with my mother, the closest reality to family for me was the Crips. In the ultimate display of fatherhood irresponsibility I had forsaken my sons to barnstorm throughout South Central Los Angeles in the name of "Crippen." I had only faint memories of my first-born son Travon when he was a baby. I only saw him when I periodically showed up to have sex with his mother Bonnie. In reality I was no more than a sperm donor who took the position that once the job was done, more fathering wasn't necessary.

At Last, Redemption. . .
I was beginning to understand that my experiences with the dysfunctional status quo of the prison culture - as well as drug addiction, poverty, gangsterism, racism, and other roadblocks - had become the excuses that defined my life. But no longer would my life, my being, be dictated by blind ignorance. Nor would I ever again allow the excuse of circumstance to dictate who I should be. It was daily studying and questioning that prompted my soul searching. I began to develop a sense of critical reasoning from which sprang the first stirrings of conscience. This was the moment when redemption infused itself into my life.



WHAT YALL THINK THEY KILLED HIM FOR SOME BULLSHIT

__________________
Im Back So Smoke Something