On Sept. 24, 2024, Imam Khaliifah Marcellus Williams was executed by lethal injection at the age of 55 by the state of Missouri, his last words being “All praise be to Allah in every situation!!!” In 2001, Williams was convicted of the murder of news reporter and social worker Felicia Gayle who was found stabbed 43 times in her home in 1998. In the 23 years since the conviction, Williams’ defense has continued to argue that there was no forensic evidence of Williams having any connections to the crime scene in addition to the murder weapon being mishandled, causing more questions to surround DNA evidence. 

This wasn’t the first time Williams was faced with the anxiety that came with knowing his death was near during his lengthy prison sentence. In 2015 and 2017, then-governor Eric Greitens, alongside the Missouri Supreme Court issued reprieves for Marcellus Williams’ execution. An article from the Equal Justice Initiative explains,  “The governor appointed a board of inquiry to investigate innocence claims based on DNA testing of the weapon, but before it submitted findings, it was disbanded by current Gov. Mike Parson.”  Khaliifah Marcellus Williams was the 100th person to be executed by the state of Missouri since 1989 and one of five people executed by five different states between Sept. 20 and 26.

Khaliifah Williams was a poet and devout Muslim during his 23-year-long prison sentence. He often wrote about the injustices seen in the world since he reverted to Islam, one of his last poems being about the resilience of the children of Palestine. He had much love for all walks of life, and possessed the type of radical love for his community that bell hooks writes about in her critically acclaimed book All About Love. All About Love asks the reader to closely examine all relationships in their lives, including the one you may have with yourself, and encourages the reader to nourish and grow physically, spiritually and emotionally with another being.

bell hooks, who passed in 2021, dedicated her life to examining the intertwined acts of oppression through a lens of race, feminism, capitalism and love. hooks viewed love as a radical idea that was often left intentionally misunderstood by a lacking definition outlined by colonization. Her book all about love pushes back on the idea that love is something that we as humans can never understand and therefore should not attempt to. Instead, she takes the idea of love and stretches it to its finest inner workings as far as parental, interpersonal, romantic and all other forms of love. Williams was an embodiment of this type of radical love, which he aimed to spread through his writing.

Love, especially the love of a Black person, is a radical act and is the foundation of an emerging organization at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the west side Chicago area: the African Freedom & Reparations Operative (AFRO).