The Governor of Oklahoma, Mr Frank Keating, may get an uncomfortable reception today when he turns up at a bell-ringing ceremony to mark Martin Luther King Day.
At least that's the hope of hunger-striking local state representative, Mr Opio Toure, who is campaigning for a moratorium on the death penalty in a state described recently by the Rev Jesse Jackson as "a killing machine".
He and other sections of the African-American community in the city wonder how Mr Keating can commemorate a man so opposed to the death penalty only days after he gave the nod to the execution of the first black woman in the United States since 1954 and the first woman to be executed in Oklahoma since 1903.
Wanda Jean Allen (41) died by lethal injection on Thursday night. She was the second Oklahoma inmate executed last week. Six more will die this month.
Strapped to a gurney, the Tulsa World reports, Allen was asked if she had last words. "Father," she prayed, "forgive them, for they know not what they do."
Then she looked up and smiled at her defence team.
A defence investigator, Mr David Presson, raised his hand to use the American Sign Language symbol for "I love you". And when the prison chaplain began reading Scripture, she said: "That's it. Thank you."
As the lethal drugs entered her system, Allen smiled at her supporters, shut her eyes and died with her face towards them.
She was pronounced dead six minutes later.
Members of her victims' families were among those who watched the execution in McAlester state prison, about 130 miles south-east of Oklahoma City. As witnesses were led to the death chamber in a low building, separate from the main prison, death row inmates could be heard banging on bars and shouting.
The execution came just two hours after the US Supreme Court and, earlier, Mr Keating rejected pleas for a 30-day stay from Allen supporters including the civil rights activist, Mr Jackson, who argued she should be spared because she was borderline mentally retarded.
Allen in 1988 shot the lesbian lover whom she had met in prison while serving a four-year term for the killing of a childhood friend.
At her trial she claimed that her lover had been attacking her with a rake and pleaded self-defence.
Campaigners against the death penalty say the case against her was particularly flawed - she was defended by a lawyer who had no experience of capital cases and had sought unsuccessfully to withdraw from the case.
He was doubly handicapped by the fact that her family were unable to contribute more than $800 to the costs of researching her defence.
And her lawyer only discovered after the trial that she had been assessed as a child as having an IQ of only 69. The appeal court was unconvinced and found she clearly knew the difference between right and wrong.
Ms Latoya Leathers, daughter of her second victim, said Allen's death will give the family closure.
She criticised Mr Jackson for twice travelling to Oklahoma City and protesting on Allen's behalf.
"We're the victims, not Wanda Jean . . . and justice has been served," she said after the execution.
Oklahoma put 11 people to death in 2000, ranking only behind Texas, which set a US record of 40 executions in a year. A recent poll by the Tulsa World found 41 per cent of Oklahomans support the call for a moratorium.