Goucher College is presenting a free, public presentation by Shujaa Graham, an anti-death penalty activist and exonerated death row inmate, on Thursday, November 8, at 7 p.m. in Kelley Lecture Hall.
Graham was born in Lake Providence, LA, where he grew up in a sharecropper family on a plantation in the segregated South of the 1950s. In 1961 he moved to join his family who had moved to South Central Los Angeles to try to build a more stable life.
As a teenager, Graham lived through the Watts riot and experienced the police occupation of his community. In and out of trouble, he spent much of his adolescent life in juvenile institutions, until he was sent to Soledad Prison at age 18.
In prison Graham taught himself to read and write and studied history and world affairs, and he became a leader of the growing Black Panther Party movement within the California prison system.
In 1973, he was framed in the murder of a prison guard at the Deul Vocational Institute in California. Graham and his co-defendant, Eugene Allen, were sent to San Quentin’s death row in 1976. The DA systematically excluded all African American jurors, and the community became involved in his defense and supported him through a series of trials.
In 1979, the California Supreme Court overturned his death conviction. After spending three years on death row, Graham and Eugene Allen continued to fight until they were found innocent.
Graham was released in March 1981 and continued to organize in the Bay area, building community support for the prison movement and opposition to police brutality.
As Graham often says, he won his freedom and affirmed his innocence despite of the system. He now tells his story and experiences and works with others to end the death penalty.
This event is being funded by the Gertrude C. Bussey Lectureship and is sponsored by the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Department of Philosophy, Department of Religion, Peace Studies Program, Office of the Chaplain, Goucher Prison Education Partnership (GPEP), and Sociology and Anthropology Club.