This week in 1990

“Let my death serve as an instigator that will awaken a nation to fight and adopt the philosophy of the late, great Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who said, ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’”

— Wallace Thomas, convicted of murder, electric chair, Alabama.
Executed July 13, 1990

Fourteen years after the abduction and fatal shooting of Quenette Shehane, age twenty-one, and several appeals later, Thomas Wallace was executed. Both of Wallace’s accomplices had implicated him in the shooting. Wallace, a black man, vehemently protested the death penalty, calling it racist. He even wore a purple ribbon and a sticker that said “Execute justice, not people,” to his own execution.