The Letter That Freed My Grandfather

Rena Karefa-Johnson recounts how one Londoner, moved by a story in his morning newspaper, inspired millions of ordinary people to free thousands of prisoners, including her grandfather.

FREETOWN, SIERRA LEONE · 1971

The night my grandfather was taken, he told my mom not to worry. That’s what my mother remembers most: worrying about him, and then worrying that she was worrying because he’d asked her not to. She was fifteen years old when a group of soldiers stormed through her family’s front door, ransacked their house, and dragged her father into their vehicle.

My grandmother didn’t find out until the next day that he had been taken to Pademba Road Prison, at the behest of a President who did not take kindly to the tens of thousands of people supporting the new political party my grandfather co-founded in response to the regime's rising authoritarianism.

LONDON, ENGLAND · 1961

Ten years earlier, a British man named Peter Benenson opened his morning newspaper on the London Underground and read about two students in Portugal sentenced to seven years in prison by the authoritarian Estado Novo regime, simply for raising a toast to freedom.

The story moved him to act. He wrote an appeal, published in The Observer, calling on ordinary people around the world to support political prisoners by writing letters demanding their release. The piece went the 1960s equivalent of viral. Thousands of people heeded the call, forming letter-writing groups that would eventually become Amnesty International.

AMNESTY FOR THE PEOPLE, BY THE PEOPLE

Less than two years later, Amnesty campaigns freed their first prisoner: Ukrainian Archbishop Josyf Slipyi, who had been incarcerated in Siberia. A decade after that first release and six months after my Grandpa was thrown into Pademba Road Prison, Amnesty International featured him as “prisoner of the month” and launched a letter-writing campaign that led to his release, shortly before the state ordered the execution of the comrade arrested alongside him.

This story could have ended very differently. How many times have we seen something upsetting in the news and moved on with our lives, assuming powerlessness? But two things transformed a moment as ordinary as a man reading the paper on his daily commute into something that has freed tens of thousands of people from incarceration.

The first is the magic that comes simply from trying: from closing the gap between hearing about injustice and acting on it. Peter Benenson had no silver bullet to free those Portuguese students, but the fact that he felt compelled to do something made everything else possible. The second is the power of everyday people. He did not appeal to the powers that be; he invited ordinary people to take modest but meaningful actions. Actions that have generated over 50 million letters, emails, and petitions from more than ten million people worldwide. Actions that allowed my grandfather to live well and long, and die old and free. Actions that meant I got to know him.

Free Somebody

You can do this. Here's how.

Got 5 minutes?

Write a letter to free a prisoner. Amnesty International’s Write for Rights campaign makes it simple — they identify the cases, you write the letter.
Write a support letter for someone navigating the criminal legal system. Judges consider these letters when deciding whether to hold someone pretrial, how much bail to set, and how to sentence them. If someone you know has an active case, reach out and ask if they'd be comfortable with you working with their attorney to submit a letter on their behalf.

Got more time?

Host a letter-writing party. Organize a letter-writing or petition-signing gathering with your family, community, school, or place of worship. Amnesty International has toolkits to help you run one.
Become a pen pal. Organizations like Black and Pink and the California Coalition for Women Prisoners connect volunteers with incarcerated people who want correspondence. A letter can be a lifeline.