Gray-Haired Witnesses for Justice || Profile of The Founders
About the Gray-Haired Witnesses for Justice
Gray-Haired Witnesses for Justice
Gray-Haired Witnesses for Justice was founded on May 24, 2010, by Marpessa Dawn Kupendua, Rev. Dr. Ruby Nell Sales, and Bj Peak-Graham. Each brought to the initiative a lifetime of activism, organizing, advocacy, and witness grounded in the continuing Black freedom struggle.
Marpessa Dawn Kupendua, an Ancestor
Community Organizer | Human Rights Advocate | Writer | OCG Witness from the Bridge
1942–2019
Marpessa Dawn Kupendua was a Philadelphia-area community organizer, writer, poet, and human-rights advocate whose work encompassed Black liberation, women’s empowerment, political-prisoner advocacy, and opposition to the death penalty. An early Black internet activist, she used emerging digital networks to circulate information, connect organizers, and advance campaigns for justice long before social media became an organizing tool.
Kupendua advocated for political prisoners and people on death row and was active in movements supporting the MOVE 9 and Mumia Abu-Jamal. She was a founder of NISAA Unlimited Association, an organization dedicated to the empowerment of women of color, and brought decades of movement experience to the founding of Gray-Haired Witnesses for Justice. Marpessa was also a guest on OUR COMMON GROUND. She joined the ancestors in 2019.
Rev. Dr. Ruby Nell Sales
Public Theologian | Civil Rights Veteran | Human Rights Activist | Founder, The SpiritHouse Project
Rev. Dr. Ruby Nell Sales is a nationally recognized public theologian, human-rights activist, and veteran of the Southern Freedom Movement. As a young activist with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, she worked in the struggle for voting rights and racial justice and survived the 1965 murder of seminarian Jonathan Daniels, who was killed while protecting her from a shotgun blast in Hayneville, Alabama.
Her life’s work has continued at the intersection of race, class, gender, spirituality, and social justice. She is the founder of The SpiritHouse Project, which brings together education, organizing, the arts, and spiritual reflection in the pursuit of racial, economic, and human justice. Rev. Dr. Sales has been an important voice within the OUR COMMON GROUND conversation and brought her experience as a movement veteran and public theologian to the founding of Gray-Haired Witnesses for Justice.
Bj Peak-Graham
Founder & Executive Producer, OUR COMMON GROUND Media | Broadcaster | Organizer | Advocate
Bj Peak-Graham is the founder and Executive Producer of OUR COMMON GROUND Media and host of OUR COMMON GROUND with Janice Graham, an independent Black public-affairs broadcast platform built around political analysis, culture, history, movement work, and the amplification of Black voices. Her career has spanned corporate leadership, human resources and organizational development, community advocacy, public policy, and more than four decades of broadcasting.
Through OUR COMMON GROUND and its related initiatives, she has created spaces where scholars, organizers, artists, journalists, movement veterans, and community voices could speak directly to Black audiences and to one another. Her work is grounded in the conviction that preserving Black memory, interrogating power, and carrying forward the lessons of struggle are obligations as well as acts of resistance. Gray-Haired Witnesses for Justice grew from that same commitment to lived history, justice, and bearing witness.
