Toxic Masculinity on a Macro Level: How Marcellus Williams' Modern-Day Lynching Exposes Systemic Violence Against Black Communities Rooted in White Sexual Repression and the Colonial Lust for Control

The Case Against Marcellus Williams: A Pattern of White Supremacist Violence

Marcellus ‘Khaliifa’ Williams, a 55-year-old, devout Muslim and father, was executed on September 24th, 2024. An imam for other incarcerated people, Williams was also an accomplished poet. Despite protests, national attention, more than a million signatures on the petition calling to stop the execution, and endless calls and emails from those in solidarity with Williams and his family, the state went through with the execution and murdered Williams. His son and two lawyers were present.

In an interview with KSDK news prior to Williams' murder, his son, Marcellus Williams Jr. expressed, “I hope a miracle happens…all I wish is to free my father from bondage and enslavement and spare his life…I already put it in inside my body that I would be witness to it, to the execution. I'm gonna stand there firm and show my dad he's not alone if this is what it comes to…I'm gonna see him off.”

Williams has been on Missouri's death row for 23 years, devoting much of his time to studying Islam and writing poetry, after being accused of murdering Felicia Gayle, a former reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Gayle was found stabbed to death in her home on August 11, 1998. Numerous news outlets have reported on the intentional mishandling of this case. There's zero forensic evidence linking Mr. Williams to the crime, yet the police and state of Missouri still targeted him. To make matters even more egregious, just before the hearing on August 21, it came to light that prosecutors had tampered with the DNA evidence by touching the knife without gloves before the original trial in 2001. Even the prosecutor handling the case today has called into question the murder accusation against Williams.

Lawyers from the Midwest Innocence Project have been working tirelessly since 1998 to clear Williams of these claims, but unfortunately their best option at the time was to enter a “no-content plea to first degree murder in exchange for a new sentence of life in prison without parole.”

Many have made the connection between Williams’ state-sponsored execution and the equally depraved, state-sponsored annihilation of Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and the people of Palestine, Congo, and Sudan. Saul Williams (no relation), took to “X” (formerly Twitter) and wrote, “This feeling. Don’t forget this feeling. This is the feeling of every innocent person condemned to death by a system devoid of humanity. This is how people feel powerless in the face of the greatest injustice. Every lynching. ‘Every bombed village.’ This is genocide.”

Screenshot of a comment made by the killer Governor Mike Parson who vehemently supports the genocide against Palestine accompanied by a response from user, Achmat X pointing out the inextricable connection between foreign and domestic policy in the so-called U.S.

A screenshot of a poem written by Marcellus ‘Khaliifa’ Williams. Design by Dream Defenders posted. This poem is titled, “The Perplexing Smiles of the Children of Palestine,” in which Williams describes the genocidal bombardment of Palestine at the hands of the Settler Colony of Israel and how even through the terror Palestinian children still manage to smile and laugh. Williams saw clearly what was happening in Gaza and knew it was an inhumane product of white supremacist, Zionist evil.

Abolishing the death penalty would be merely a Band-Aid solution. The intentional mishandling of evidence, deliberate obfuscation of the truth, and placement of vile white supremacists like Governor Parson in positions of power reveal the root problem. This isn't just a pattern with Parson, who has a bloody record of executing 11 people since taking office—it's a nationwide and global issue.

Williams was innocent, as were Mike Brown and Breonna Taylor (and her boyfriend, whom they're wrongly blaming for her death). Javion Magee, recently found hanging from a tree in North Carolina with a rope around his neck, was also innocent. These are not isolated incidents. Williams' imprisonment since 1998, without a shred of evidence, was the initial violation of human rights. The root problem lies in our entire "justice" system and the unchecked white supremacist violence perpetrated by police, government officials, and white vigilantes. The Innocence Project reports:

“Since 1973, at least 200 people have been exonerated from death row in the U.S., according to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC). The vast majority of people exonerated from death row are Black or Latinx, and more than half of death row exonerees are Black. Studies consistently demonstrate that the race of the accused and/or race of the victim plays an arbitrary yet determinative role in the administration of the death penalty.”

We know that this isn't the first or last time an innocent Black person has been convicted of a crime they didn't commit. We can remember Emmett Till, may he rest in power. It's a horrific reality that Black people's lives are ended everyday due to these instances of white supremacist violence that stretches back into the not-so distant past.

Khaliifa Williams’ last statement reads, “All Praise Be to Allah in Every Situation.” The Innocence Project shared that Williams’ was a devoutly religious person and an a accomplished poet.

The Deranged Connection Between White Violence and Sexual Repression

As PBS reports, “although the practice of lynching had existed since before slavery, it gained momentum during Reconstruction, when viable black towns sprang up across the South and African Americans began to make political and economic inroads by registering to vote, establishing businesses and running for public office. Many whites—landowners and poor whites—felt threatened by this rise in black prominence. Foremost on their minds was a fear of sex between the races.” This era witnessed the spread of harmful stereotypes portraying Black men as inherently hypersexual and dangerous predators, supposedly seeking integration only to pursue white women. This reflects a pattern still seen in justifications for white violence today, where white men project their own repressed desires and hidden motives onto Black people.

In Broken Heart of America, Walter Johnson reveals the disturbing link between white supremacist violence and sexual repression. He recounts the lynching of John Buckner in 1894 in Valley Park, west of St. Louis, Missouri. Johnson uses the writing of Theodore Dreiser, a white newspaper journalist, to illustrate this connection:

"A Negro in an outlying county assaulted a girl," Dreiser wrote, "and I arrived in time to see him lynched. But walking in the woods afterward, away from the swinging body, I thought of her…if I had been alive before, now I was much more so, within my own blood and nerves. I fairly tingled all over with longing and aspiration…Love—all its possibilities—paraded before my eyes a gorgeous fantastic and sensual procession. Love! Love! The beauty of a woman's body."

“Something about the lynching aroused Dreiser,” Johnson wrote, “…His arousal seems to have captured something about the energy of the mob, the sexual energy that these white men felt as they murdered a Black man who projected animal appetites they openly condemned and secretly desired.” Today the white mobs with “animal appetites” are the judges, jurors, and government officials like Governor Mike Parsons who adamantly, heartlessly, and blood-lustfully, denied Marcellus Williams clemency. As Ericka Hart wrote in an Instagram post, “If there is one thing that will remain true regardless of who is President, this country subsists off of the continued genocide of Black people. Rest in power Khaliifa Williams, you should be here.”

Screenshot of a comment left on Ericka Hart’s post about Marcellus Williams’ execution.

The Prison Industrial Complex as Modern Day Slavery and The Role of Black Feminists in Anti-Lynching Advocacy

According to A Black Women's History of the United States, “Over 3,500 African Americans were lynched between 1877 and 1950 nationwide. White men used false claims that Black male lynching victims had raped white women, but a number of Black female lynching victims met their end resisting white rapists.” Black women have always been at the forefront of antilynching advocacy. One of the most prominent, outspoken, fierce social justice advocates was Ida B. Wells, a prolific journalist who started her own newspaper and dedicated innumerable pages to investigating Black murders. She reported fearlessly on the “white lies undergirding mainstream excuses for mob violence,” (108) despite a bounty on her head and death threats that made her leave her home in the South.

Marcellus ‘Khaliifa’ Williams is one of many Black people who have been victimized by the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC), a calculated, machinery of Black death. The PIC is the ultimate expression of toxic masculinity wherein white police officers, jurors, government officials, vigilantes, and the like, exert dominance, control, and even project their twisted sexual fantasies onto Black people. As many Black feminists like Angela Davis (who coined the concept of the “Prison Industrial Complex”), have pointed out and dedicated their lives to exposing and dismantling, the PIC is modern day slavery and provides a legal means for executing —or lynching— Black people.

Mainstream news outlets often report Black murders by the state, like in this case with Williams, or with the police, as we saw with Sandra Bland and countless others, in a way that downplays the extreme violence, presenting it as if it occurred passively without the state's or officer's direct involvement, choice, or agency. However, with a little media literacy we can read between the lines, question who's writing the stories, and what conditioning, motives, or politics they might hold.

Williams' case rightfully garnered public outcry and attention—he should still be alive today. It's crucial to recognize that his unlawful imprisonment, lifetime in jail, and ultimate modern day lynching, is a form of white supremacist terror and violence, not just against him and his family, but Black communities at large. This violence persists, even when other instances don't receive national spotlight.

The Ubiquity of White Supremacist Terror

Examples of this white supremacist terror and violence span across all spaces: sidewalks, highways, parks, and even citizens' front doorsteps. Police officers have long been known to intrude on Black people's space to intimidate and escalate, oftentimes leads to wrongful Black murder. In 2019, Angela Whitehead bravely stood her ground in the face of two, unwelcome, invasive, and trespassing police officers who had no business being at her door. How they invaded her home and disturbed her family's peace was inexcusable.

This incident exemplifies how cops, and those in positions of authority, can exert control and power arbitrarily. Disregarding Whitehead's human rights and repeated requests for them to leave, the officers remained in her doorway until they were good and ready to leave. While Whitehead and her family survived this intrusion, police encounters too often end in the murder of Black people, as horrifically seen with Sandra Bland and Sonya Massey—may they rest in power.

Mourning and Mobilizing for Justice

Marcellus Williams' murder is one of many executions that reveal the ongoing genocide against Black people in this country and we should all be in mourning. Let us turn our grief, anger, and rage into fuel for protesting the larger systems that led to this racist violence. As Angela Davis asserts, “The prison-industrial complex is a means to criminalize and demonize American Black people and other minorities for profit. It nourishes the racism that lives in the deep structures of our society.”

And let us not fail to make the connections that this is the result of ongoing settler colonialism founded on the concept of “terra incognita” — a construct rooted in white lust for blood, money, and control, that led to the continued forced removal, dispossession, extraction, exploitation, and killings of Black folks and Indigenous folks all along. It stems from centuries of kidnapping, enslaving, and disenfranchising Black people to amass wealth and power for white colonizers on stolen, Indigenous land.