"Blue Rage, Black Redemption: A Memoir" by Stanley Tookie Williams, published in 2004 in the United States, in paperback, 373pp, ISBN 0975358405
Condition Notes: Very good condition, well looked-after copy
Synopsis: The title of this book represents two extreme phases of the author's life. "Blue Rage" is a chronical of the author's passage down a spiralling path of Crip rage in South Central Los Angeles. "Black Redemption" depicts the stages of his redemptive awakening during his more than 23 years of imprisonment on California's death row. These memoirs of his evolution will, the author hopes, connect the reader to a deeper awareness of a social epidemic that is the unending nightmare of racial minorities in America and abroad as well. Throughout the author's life, he was hoodwink by South Central's terminal conditions, its broad and deadly template for failure. From the beginning, the author says that he was spoon-fed negative stereotypes that covertly positioned Black people as genetic criminals - inferior, illiterate, shiftless, promiscuous and ultimately "three-fifths" of a human being, as stated in the Constitution of the United States. Having bought into this myth, the author was shackled to the lowests socioeconomic rung where underprivileged citizens complete ruthlessly for morsels of the American pie - a pie theoretically served proportionately to all, based on their ambition, intelligence and perseverance. Like many others, the author became a slave to a delusional dream of capitalism's false hope: a slave to dys-education (see chapter 5); a slave to nihilism; a slave to Black-on-Black violence; and a slave to self-hate. Paralyzed within a social vacuum, the author gravitated toward thughood, not out of aspiration, but out of desperation to survive the monstrous inequities that show no mercy to young or old. Aggression, the author was to learn, served as a poor man's merit for manhood. To die as a street martyr was seen as a noble thing.
In 1971, the author met Raymond Lee Washington (may he rest in peace); and the two ultimately decided to unit their homeboys from the west and east sides of South Central; and the name of the alliance was "Cribs" (not Crips). Most of the gang members were 17 years old. Raymond attended Fremont High School on the east side where he lived; the author attended Washington High and lived on the west side. Raymond died in 1979; whilst the author ended up in San Quentin Prison for crimes that he states he did not commit. The author spent 1988 until 1994 in solitary confinement and it was there, he says, that he began his path to redemption moving beyond the selfish "I" principle and discovering the means to control his ego and reunite with God. Along with this came inner peace, the reclamation of his humanity and the ability to find his reason to be.
After this, the author penned nine anti-gang and anti-violence books for children and created the Internet Project for Street Peace, which is an international peer mentoring program that links high-risk youth in other countries to their counterparts in the United States. He has also written a Local Street Peace Protocol providing guidance on how to initiate a gang truce, available to anyone to download. The stories told in this book are true, though the names have been changed
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