Reverend Fred Shaw Jr., Director of Public Affairs for Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR)

Reverend Frederick Shaw is the Director of Public Affairs and Spokesperson for the Citizens Commission on Human Rights International (CCHR), a more than 50-year mental health industry watchdog. He’s also the President of the NAACP Inglewood-South Bay Branch in California, with a long history of working with NAACP.  

He is the President of NAACP Inglewood/South Bay, as well as past President of the Compton Branch of the NAACP,  where he was the first President from Compton to be appointed to a California State Chair overseeing “The Children’s Taskforce.” Working in both the Compton and Inglewood-South Bay chapters, he met with many members of the U.S. Congress alongside CCHR International to get the Child Medication Safety Act passed, a federal law which prohibits schools from forcing students to take psychotropic drugs as a requisite for their education. This reinforces parents’ rights to refuse psychiatric drugs for their children and to determine their children’s healthcare needs.

In 2020, Rev. Shaw started a Task Force against Institutional Racism in the Psychiatric Industry, comprising African American attorneys, civil rights advocates, members of the clergy, medical doctors, psychologists and educators. The Task Force reminds African Americans of the mental health industry’s history of stigmatizing minorities—from labeling runaway slaves and civil rights protestors as mentally ill and the use of eugenics (population control that targeted African Americans, sterilizing them) to segregating children in schools and the foster-child-welfare system today and drugging them.  

Rev. Shaw is a native of Compton, CA and has worked in Compton for most of his life as a fierce advocate for children and adults in Civic and Human Rights. He has advocated and stressed the importance of education, and the reduction of poverty and drug addiction. His late mother, Marcine Shaw, was a sergeant in the Women’s Army Corp in 1950. For 18 years she was Senior Deputy to Los Angeles County Supervisors Kenneth Hahn and Yvonne Brathwaite-Burke and a Compton City Council member for six years and was described as a “foot soldier for human rights.”

• After attending Pepperdine University, he was ordained in Religious Science in 1975.
• Between 1980-1993, Rev. Shaw was a Los Angeles County Sheriff Deputy from, which included organizing and implementing the Sheriff’s Youth Athletic League.
• In 1992, he was the co-founder and President of the World Literacy Crusade, an international organization with the purpose of eradicating poverty and hopelessness in the inner cities through education.

• In 2005, The State of the African American Male and the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation honored Rev. Shaw as one of their recipients of the MEN WHO CARE AWARD, along with actor Jaime Fox.  He received this award for his demonstrated NAACP leadership skills and dedicated persistence to eliminate the drugging of children.

• Rev Shaw co-founded the Basic Life Institute, an organization contracted with the State of California and County of Los Angeles serving at-risk youth from ages 12 – 18 years old.  The LA County Board of Supervisors awarded him for his work with foster care children and youth on probation.

• For nearly three decades, Rev. Shaw has worked closely with CCHR International and is now its international spokesman while he also continues to work with NAACP.  From these positions, he has:

1. Helped obtain three national Resolutions, two from the NAACP and one from the National Caucus of Black State Legislators that supported children’s rights not to be subjected coercive psychotropic drugs, to stop the psychotropic of foster care children and to prohibit electroshock.
2. He traveled to South Africa in 1997 to attend the Truth & Reconciliation Commission (TRC) investigating apartheid crimes where he helped CCHR present evidence to the TRC about the role of psychiatric and psychological racism in introducing and maintaining apartheid, and how Africans were allowed to die from easily treatable medical conditions when locked up in slave labor psychiatric camps during apartheid.
3. In November 2016, he led a march in South Africa against African children being subjected to dangerous psychotropic drugs and protested the World Psychiatric Association congress being held in the country.
4. He has delivered seminars and speeches across the U.S. and is a regular guest on community radio shows and is quoted in press newswires, reaching millions.
5. Rev Shaw also lends his powerful voice in defense of children around the world and continues to lead CCHR marches against the electroshocking of children.

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