Back Story 4: Bush and the Death Penalty

My fifth year at Calvin, Bork and Buma became the perspectives editors at Chimes, and were very generous with giving me space when an idea occurred to me for an article.

Sometime in late October, Buma said something to me like, “We haven’t had a good controversy at Chimes for a while. Why don’t you write something to really get people upset?”

We tossed around a few ideas, and I came up with the idea of attacking Bush on the death penalty.

It was something I felt strongly about anyway, so it was no problem getting into the issue. Since blacks are more likely to be executed than whites for the same crimes, the death penalty is always a racially charged issue. But this is particularly true of Texas, where white juries love to send black men to their death. And under George W. Bush there were a few cases, most notably that of Gary Graham, where a black man was convicted and executed on the thinnest of evidence. Not only did Bush ignore appeals to issue a stay of execution, he cancelled a press conference to avoid talking about the issue.

The day of Graham’s execution was filled with both protests and counter protests on both sides, again much of it racially charged, including the Ku Klux Klan, which demonstrated by holding up signs thanking Bush for executing Graham. I wanted to use one of these pictures as a graphic with my article, and I was sure this would be something that would cause discussion on campus.

There were a couple issues, one was timing. The week I proposed the article in question I already had another anti-Bush article running in Chimes, and both Buma and I agreed one article an issue was plenty. The following week there was no space, and then the week after was right before the election. It could run the third week, but there was no point in running an article like that after the election.

The problem is that the issue right before the election everyone wants to get their two cents in, and there is not a lot of space. Bork and Buma agreed to run the article, but couldn’t promise me enough space for a large graphic as well.

And then of course there was the issue of whether it was appropriate to have a picture of the Ku Klux Klan in the Chimes. I argued that it was. I wasn’t promoting the Klan; in fact quite the opposite I was using their opinions as a counter-example to the value of the death penalty. Of course a lot of people, prefer not to think about these things, but any discussion of the death penalty would be incomplete without mention of racial factors, and the Ku Klux Klan applauding the execution of a black man should not be brushed under the rug. A black man executed by a white governor while the Ku Klux Klan applauds…In fact the only thing missing is that Bush had Graham killed by lethal injection instead of hanging him from a tree.

And yet, there was still the issue that whoever opened up the Chimes to that page would be confronted by a picture of the Klan. They might not even read the article, but their eyes would see the Ku Klux Klan plastered across the pages of Chimes. In the end, to my great regret, the decision was made to cut the graphic out. Although this decision was made probably as much for reasons of space as anything else. In fact even my article itself had to be severely edited down from what I originally handed in. I regretted this as well, just because I tend to be biased towards my own work, but it did make room for some other great articles, such as Bierma’s piece “hypocritical pro-lifers”, which covered some of the same themes about the way we think about the value of life in politics.

Although my article still contained written parts about the Ku Klux Klan celebrating the execution, I was worried that it would be neutered without the graphic, and wouldn’t cause people to think about the issues in quite the same way. But Buma assured me that, the day the issue came out, he overheard several people complaining about me during the day.
The original un-edited version of that article is available on Google Drive: Here