Shujaa
Graham
Shujaa Graham was born in Lake Providence, Louisiana, where he grew up on a plantation. His family worked as sharecroppers in the segregated South of the 1950s. In 1961, he left to join his relatives in South Central Los Angeles to try to build a more stable life. As a teenager Shujaa 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 the age of 18, when he was sent to Soledad Prison.
In prison, Shujaa became part of the prison activist movement, a reflection of the struggles against racism and injustice in the outside communities. In 1973, because of his leadership in the prison movement, Shujaa was targeted and framed in the murder of a prison guard at the Deul Vocational Institute in Stockton, California. The community became involved in his defense and supported him throughout four trials. Shujaa and his co-defendant, Eugene Allen, were sent to San Quentin’s death row in 1976, after a second trial in San Francisco. The district attorney had systematically excluded all African-American jurors, and in 1979, the California Supreme Court overturned the death conviction.
After spending three years on death row, Shujaa and his co-defendant continued to fight for their innocence. A third trial ended in a hung jury and after a fourth trial, they were found innocent. As Shujaa often says, he won his freedom and affirmed his innocence in spite of the system.
Shujaa was released in March 1981, and worked in the Bay Area, building community support for the prison movement, as well as working against police brutality. “I've tried to integrate the prison issue with other movements,” Shujaa says. “My politics go far beyond prison itself, but because I’ve been in prison I felt a responsibility to try to expose the conditions of prison life, to fight against new prisons, to address how the disenfranchised will be tomorrow’s victims of the prison system.”
In the years following his release, Shujaa moved away from the Bay Area, learned landscaping and created his own business. He now lectures frequently on the death penalty, the criminal justice system, incarceration and innocence, and racism in America.
“I’m filled with ideals that would make life better for all humanity, that’s my struggle,” Shujaa says. “That’s going to be my struggle until I die. I have no regrets. Since I’ve joined the movement, it’s been my life. It gave me a sense to live for something, it made me proud of myself, and it gave me a greater sense of dignity.
“I may not be able to enjoy the fruits of this struggle but our children will, and hopefully they won’t have to experience what we experienced. We spent many hours campaigning and struggling for something that should already be here – justice.”
Shujaa and his wife, Phyllis Prentice, raised three children and became part of a progressive community in Maryland outside of Washington, D.C., where they live today. They are both members of the project board of Witness to Innocence and participate in the Journey of Hope.