Minutes after Missouri executed Marcellus “Khaliifah” Williams on Tuesday, his son, Marcellus Williams Jr., addressed a crowd of supporters that had gathered to grieve in front of the state prison in Bonne Terre.
Among them was Maha Odah, a Palestinian American activist with Al-Hadaf Kansas City, a Palestinian liberation organization, who had driven more than two hours to be there. When Williams Jr. began to grieve for his son’s stolen opportunity to know his grandfather, Odah thought of her own experience with loss.
In November, an Israeli airstrike killed Odah’s grandfather in Gaza. She had just seen him months before in August during a family trip, the first visit in a decade due to Israel’s policies that restrict movement in and out of the blockaded Palestinian territory. Months later, her aunt was killed during the Israeli siege of Nasser Hospital, while her aunt’s son, a surgeon at the hospital, remains imprisoned with his whereabouts unknown to her family.
“I saw a mirror,” Odah said, recalling moments spent with Williams’s family. “A reflection of these two systems that are both upheld by the U.S. that condemn Black and Palestinian men, our fathers, our grandfathers, and the rest of our families, at the mercy of those who continue to find ways to dehumanize us.”
Missouri killed Williams, who was 55 years old, for a murder he said he did not commit and even though prosecutors fought to throw his conviction out due to the paucity of the evidence. Gov. Mike Parsons declined to grant Williams clemency, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to step in. His execution coincided with nationwide protests on Tuesday against Israel’s ongoing bombing campaign in Lebanon that has killed at least 615 people, including more than 50 children. News of the execution reverberated among protesters, who drew connections between Israel’s relentless U.S.-backed war on Gaza and state-sanctioned killing in the United States. In some places, demonstrators recited a poem Williams had written about Palestinian children.
For young people who have spent the better part of the last year protesting the war on Gaza, Williams’s case further reinforces their lack of agency in the face of state violence, said maya finoh, the political education and research manager at the Center for Constitutional Rights.
For young people who have spent the better part of the last year protesting the war on Gaza, Williams’s case further reinforces their lack of agency in the face of state violence.
The execution “lays bare the ways in which the criminal legal system is designed to still engage in Islamophobic anti-Black violence, and the ways in which the U.S. military-industrial complex’s empire is designed to further violence against Black and brown people abroad.”
“There’s not enough to prove that he did this crime. People are calling for what should be the stop of an execution, and the state still has the power to say, we don’t care,” finoh added. “Young people have been leading the vanguard of mass movement organizing over the past year. There has been this feeling of despair and hopelessness … in terms of, we should be able to have a say, this country says it’s a representative democracy, but it is not representing my interests or the interests of many, many people in this country.”
“They Don’t Care About Our Outrage”
In New York, Nerdeen Kiswani, founder of Within Our Lifetime, a Palestinian liberation group, said she learned of Williams’s killing while leading a march to the Israeli consulate in Manhattan. When it was her turn to speak, she also read Williams’s viral poem, “The Perplexing Smiles of the Children of Palestine,” sounding off each line as a call and response with the crowd: “In the face of apex arrogance/ and ethnic cleansing by any definition/ still your laughter can be heard/ and somehow you are able to smile/ O resilient Children of Palestine!” amid “daily terror” and “in the face of … ethnic cleansing.”
In closing, she referenced Williams’s last official statement before his execution: “All Praise Be To Allah In Every Situation!”
“When it comes to Black and brown people, the state has always executed its violence on our communities, and, of course, within the U.S., we see this play out the most when it comes to Black folks in particular, and then abroad, we’re seeing this in Lebanon, we’re seeing this in Palestine,” Kiswani, who is Palestinian, told The Intercept. “It feels like they don’t care about our outrage anymore. They know they can kill us in every corner of the world and get away with it, and so it’s our responsibility to fight for and stand up for each other.”
She said that throughout the marches she’s helped organize since October 7, she has seen many examples of solidarity between Palestinian and Black communities. An action at the Brooklyn Museum on Friday to push for the museum to divest from Israel, for example, drew participation from Black-led groups such as the Black Alliance for Peace and Equality for Flatbush. Kiswani noted that the solidarity goes back nearly a decade, when Palestinian American activists advised Black protesters in Ferguson on how to survive teargas sprayed by police, drawing on their experience from facing off with Israeli authorities in the West Bank.
Kiswani said such direct confrontations with law enforcement and state violence have helped activist groups see the intersections between their causes.
“A lot of folks in this generation — especially with all the protests that we’re seeing nationwide — people are directly interacting with the police state and are directly resisting it,” she said, mentioning the brutal arrest of fellow organizer Abdullah Akl, who was hospitalized after New York Police Department officers tackled him during the Tuesday march.
Williams’s killing was on the minds of organizers at other Palestinian and Lebanese solidarity marches on Tuesday.
In Los Angeles, while a coalition of Palestinian solidarity groups temporarily shut down Wilshire Boulevard, a main thoroughfare in the city, in front of the Israeli consulate, organizers spoke of Williams’s execution and read his poem on Gaza.
At a march against U.S.
Complicity in the bombing of Lebanon by Israel was highlighted during a protest in front of the White House in Washington, D.C. One of the organizers led protesters in chanting, “Say his name: Marcellus Williams.”
At a pro-Palestine rally in Houston, Eyad El-Akoum, a Lebanese and Muslim organizer, shared news of Williams’s execution and invited protesters to say a prayer for him, emphasizing Williams’s Muslim faith and role as an imam in prison.
El-Akoum spoke about the interconnectedness of the Black struggle, Palestinian struggle, and Lebanese struggle, pointing to Israel’s practice of indefinitely incarcerating Palestinians without charges. He drew parallels between Williams’s fate and that of thousands of Palestinians in Israeli prisons.
Despite Williams’s execution striking a chord with young people who could influence upcoming elections, neither major party presidential candidate has issued a statement on the matter.
Representative Delia Ramirez expressed concern over the lack of response from Democratic Party leadership and plans to inquire with the White House about the absence of an official statement. She emphasized that silence at this critical moment signifies complicity and drives away voters needed by the party.
Ramirez also highlighted the Democratic National Committee’s refusal to allow a Palestinian to speak at a recent convention and a smear campaign against Rep. Rashida Tlaib as factors contributing to voter apathy.
Representative Cori Bush criticized President Joe Biden for not fulfilling his promise to abolish the death penalty and Democrats for dropping opposition to capital punishment from their platform. She also criticized the administration’s handling of the conflict in Gaza.
Bush noted that these injustices feel personal to young people raised to believe that killing innocent people is wrong, fueling their anger and sense of responsibility to stand up against such injustices.
Passion was evident among protesters in Missouri, where a group gathered petitions to halt Williams’s execution. One protester, Odah, highlighted the dehumanizing treatment by politicians and institutions, drawing parallels to the plight of Palestinians.
Odah, who organizes with Al-Hadaf Kansas City, began her activism during Israel’s bombing of Gaza and protests against the displacement of Palestinian families from Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem. Her dedication to Palestinian liberation and her strong history of solidarity with movements for Black liberation motivated her to participate in the protest at the Capitol. Odah expressed that the deep understanding of state violence within their communities, the systemic oppression they face, and the shared experiences of displacement have driven them to take a stand against the forces of white supremacy. The use of death row, police brutality, and weapons created within their own communities highlights the urgency for change and the need to challenge these oppressive systems. The familiarity of these injustices further solidifies the importance of standing together in solidarity against systemic racism and violence.
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