This week in 2000

“Know that I love all of you. I love the people, I love all of you for your blessing, strength, for your courage…Keep moving forward, my brothers. Slavery couldn’t stop us. The lynching couldn’t stop us in the south. This lynching will not stop us tonight. We will go forward. Our destiny in this country is freedom and liberation. We will gain our freedom and liberation by any means necessary. By any means necessary, we keep marching forward. I love you, Mr. Jackson. Bianca, make sure that the state does not get my body. Make sure that we get my name as Shaka Sankofa. My name is not Gary Graham. Make sure that it is properly presented on my grave. Shaka Sankofa…”

— Gary Graham, convicted of robbery and murder, lethal injection, Texas.
Executed June 22, 2000

“After considering all of the facts, I am convinced justice is being done,” said Texas governor George W. Bush after the final appeals for Graham were denied. Inside the execution chamber, strapped with more restraints than normally used, Graham called executions a “holocaust for black Americans.” Graham maintained his innocence despite his conviction for shooting fifty-three-year-old Bobby Grant Lambert outside a Houston supermarket.

Along with hundreds of protesters in California and Massachusetts and outside Huntsville Prison, sitting in as witnesses to Graham’s execution were Rev. Jesse Jackson, Rev. Al Sharpton, and Amnesty International representative Bianca Jagger. “There were no tears shed,” said Jackson, who talked and prayed with Graham an hour before his execution. “He had a sense of inner peace. He feels he was being used as a kind of change agent to expose the system.”