By Tait Manning
On September 28, days after the controversial execution of Marcellus Khalifa Williams, students and community members gathered on the Yard for a vigil to honor his life. The event was organized by Howard Ubiquiti, led by its president, Alexandria Zapiro. The vigil aimed to bring attention to the circumstances of Williams’s death while celebrating his life.
“We’re all multifaceted people, you know,” Zapiro said. “We have all these aspects of him. He was writing poetry, had his whole poetry book. He was a devout Muslim. Right. And he wasn’t just a guy in jail.”
Williams, a Black man, was convicted of the 1998 murder of Felicia Gayle. Despite the lack of reliable evidence confirming his guilt, he spent 23 years on death row. Efforts to stop the execution were rejected by Missouri Governor Mike Parson and the Missouri Supreme Court, who maintained Williams’s guilt. Calls for clemency came from anti-death penalty advocates as well as the victim’s family, but they were ultimately ignored.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, cases like Williams’s are not uncommon. Black people are seven times more likely to be wrongfully convicted and are often punished more harshly than innocent white defendants.
At the vigil, attendees circled around the Ubiquity Tree, where organizers read poems by Williams and shared stories of other individuals wrongfully executed on death row. David Greene, a student attendee, linked Williams’s case to broader patterns of structural violence against Black people.
“I think state-sanctioned murder is one of the most radicalizing events that someone can experience,” Greene said. “I think most people had that experience in 2020, with George Floyd, witnessing how that went down. And I think that whenever we lay bare the brutality of the state and how inhuman it can really be, I think for many people that’s irreconcilable.”
Other attendees voiced their frustration as well. Fudgy Frank, a D.C. resident, was among over a million citizens who petitioned Governor Parson to commute Williams’s death sentence.
“I’m just tired of seeing my siblings in Islam and humanity being treated with such cruelty,” Frank said. “And then, you know, we’re supposed to go to class, we’re supposed to go to work, we’re supposed to go on. I really hope that his legacy is kept alive and that this is not just passing, okay, until the next one.”
Organizers announced that they have ordered a plaque to honor Williams, which will be placed under the Ubiquity Tree in the coming weeks.
