Word: alabama
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Death row is about the same size in Alabama, where 55 men await the chair in Holman. Mitchell Rutledge, 23 years old, I.Q. 84, is among them. "You're just sitting there waiting for somebody to come kill you," says Rutledge of his purgatory, "just like a dog out there in the dog pound." But he does not claim innocence. No: he did kill a man two days before Christmas 1980. Rutledge was doped up and drunk with two friends. One pal brought along a gun, and with it they took off on a joyride...
...most people the life of a foolish punk like Rutledge does not count for much. He is defective. His death would not be unbearably sad, but his destruction by the state of Alabama would be: not a large tragedy, not final proof that the U.S. is barbaric, but still better left undone. Executing Rutledge would be a waste, not so much of his diminished humanity, but of society's moral capital. The gunslinging heroes of corny adventure fiction had it right: there are guys not worth killing. Let Rutledge sit and stew...
King's view of history was also futuristic. He looked ahead to how things might be. "I have a dream," he said at the March on Washington. August 1963, "that one day the state of Alabama .. will be transformed into a situation where little Black boys and Black girls will be able to join with little white boys and little white girls and walk together as sister and brothers. "History would also see a reestablishment of the original idea of the American republic. "This will be the day." King continued, "when all of God's children will be able...
...ways as well as the fact of change itself. It was indeed in discussion of the relation between means and ends that King's philosophy of non-violence was so persuasive for Blacks and whites. When faced with the new militancy among Blacks around 1963, especially among Birmingham. Alabama demonstrators, King tried to argue this new mood should not lead to violence. It was precisely in Birmingham that King's method of non-violent action was judged by Malcolm X and others to have failed. In Birmingham, King mounted a frontal attack upon the segregation and oppression of Blacks...
...Dominton 62, S. Alabama...