Hands Off Assata Campaign Marks Anniversary of Liberation

Assata Shakur in Cuba Where She Was Granted Political Asylum From US Imperialism
Originally uploaded by Pan-African News Wire Photo File.

Hands Off Assata Campaign
http://assatashakur.org/1106.htm

Time Frame: 1 Month

Plan of Action:
Distribute Hands Off Assata (HOA) material and hold public activities that highlight the political work of Assata Shakur and the harassement and aggression that activists like her endure.

Purpose of Action:
Raise public awareness and encourage community action to address the continued struggle against racism, economic oppression, police brutality and political manipulation in the united states.

What is HOA?

The Hands Off Assata Campaign is a coming together of organizations and individuals who are outraged by the heightened attempts by the federal government, congress of the united states and the state of new jersey to illegally force thru kidnapping a return of Assata Shakur from Cuba to the plantation United States.

We know that Assata Shakur is a bona fide political exile living in the island nation of Cuba. She was persecuted for her political beliefs and tortured while in prison. We support the international human rights and Geneva conventions, which enabled her to seek and secure political asylum in Cuba, and we support the right of the Cuban people to grant it to her. We are shocked by the actions of new jersey and the department of justice, who has issued a $1 million dollar bounty on head of Assata Shakur.

Doing such a thing is tantamount to a call to "soldiers of fortune" to kidnap and kill Ms. Shakur and for them to engage in international espionage against the sovereign nation of Cuba.

We are shocked by the activities of the United States House of Representatives, which in September 1998 passed House Resolution 254, calling on the Cuban Government to extradite Assata Shakur. Given that there is no binding extradition treaty between Cuba and the United States, such a request is outside the context of international law. In addition, we call on the Congress of the United States to hold public hearings on the past and current impact of FBI's Counter Intelligence Program known as COINTELPRO.

Given that Assata Shakur was not the only one politically persecuted for her political beliefs, we demand that a full airing take place on that program. And finally are calling on the United States end its hostility towards the tiny nation of Cuba by normalizing relations with the Island and ending the US economic blockade.

Assata Shakur: Sister, Woman, Exile, Mother, Grand mother

ASSATA SHAKUR is an African woman. She is a social justice activist, a poet, a mother and a grandmother. She has lived in Cuba since the early 1980s. During the heady days of the 1960s and 1970s, she found herself a victim of both racial profiling and political targeting. After being spotted on the New Jersey turnpike on May 2, 1973, (DWB) driving while Black, it was discovered that she and her two companions were known members of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army. Like Martin Luther King, Jr. Malcolm X, Leonard Peltier and many members of the Civil Rights and American Indian Movements, Assata and her companions had been watched, their phones tapped, their families monitored, their organizations infiltrated, and widespread disinformation campaigns waged against them. They were like many activists of the day targets of the FBI's Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO). In fact, Assata was wanted, not for anything she had actually done, but for a variety of crimes that government and state officials were trying to pin on her. This was common in the 1970s: discredit the voice of activists by painting them as criminals, trumping up indictments, tying them up in courts and if possible jailing them. In the mid 1970s, The Church Committee of the Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operations and the Domestic Intelligence Subcommittee, headed by Senator Walter Mondale, provided incontrovertible documentation of a government sponsored conspiracy against the civil and human rights of all sorts of political activists.

THUS ON THAT DAY IN MAY, Assata was a marked woman. And after police stopped them, a shoot out occurred. When the smoke cleared one police officer, and one of Assata's companions, Zayd Shakur lay dead. Assata, shot in the back and dragged from the car, lay wounded. Only belatedly taken to the hospital, Assata was then chained to her bed, tortured and questioned while injured. In fact, she never received adequate medical attention even though she had a broken clavicle and a paralyzed arm. Nonetheless, she was quickly jailed, prosecuted and incarcerated over the next few years for the series of trumped up cases. Interestingly, in five separate trials, and with majority white juries, charges were dismissed because of lack of evidence or she was acquitted of all charges ranging from bank robbery to murder. As the manager of one bank said at trial - she is just not the one who robbed my bank. Only in the final trial in 1977, where she was charged with the Turnpike killings, was she found guilty. This even though forensic evidence taken that day showed that she had not fired a weapon. She was sentenced to life + 33 years in prison. In 1979, and after nearly six years behind bars, she escaped from Clinton Correctional Facility for Women in New Jersey and some time later emerged in Cuba where she applied for and received political asylum. Since being in Cuba, she has continued her college education, published an autobiography, and writes on global issues facing women, youth, and people of color.

DURING THE 1990s, rightist politicians and police bodies - this time in conjunction with conservative members of the Cuban-American community - reinvigorated their attempts to pursue Assata Shakur. They did this even though Assata has not tried to re-enter the United States and is, according to international law, a political exile who should be left alone. Linking "fear of crime" rhetoric with anti-Cuban sentiment, New Jersey governor Christine Todd-Whitman issued a bounty which was $100,000, on the head of Assata Shakur. She even went as far as to announce her bounty on Radio Marti, the US government radio station which beams anti-Castro propaganda into the Caribbean. To do such a thing put Assata in danger because it is tantamount to encouraging any opportunists to kidnap and/or kill her for pay. In addition, in 1998, Congressmen Franks and Menendez from New Jersey and Ros-Lehtinen and Diaz-Balart of Florida introduced and got passed - House Resolution 254 - which calls for the Cuban government to extradite Assata Shakur as a condition to normalizing US-Cuba relations. Interestingly, while Assata and Cuba are portrayed as "criminal", a terrorist bombing campaign - thought to be sponsored by ultra-rightist forces in the United States - has been launched against Cuba, killing and injuring Cuban citizens and foreign tourists alike.

What can you do?
Write and/or Call NJ State Police Superintendent, NJ State Attorney General, and your local congressperson to:
End the one million dollar bounty placed on her
Remove Assata Shakur’s name off the terrorist watch list
Repeal House Resolution #254
Support congressional hearings on COINTELPRO

Contact Information:
Rick Fuentes – NJ State Police Superintendent
P.O. Box 7068
West Trenton, NJ 08628
609-882-2000

Stuart Rabner - State Attorney General
P.O. Box 080
Trenton, NJ 08625-0080
609-984-6500

You can use a Congressional email service to look up your rep's email: http://www.congress.org/

Organize around The Hands Off Assata Shakur Campaign in your respective cities:
Download, print, and pass “Hands Off Assata Shakur” Flyers (flyers below)
The Real Facts: http://www.assatashakur.org/docs/flyer_assata2.pdf
Hands Off Assata: http://www.assatashakur.org/docs/the_facts_2005.pdf

Plan a showing of the film Eyes of the Rainbow (1996). This film portrays the life and current struggles of Assata Shakur. Contact HOA for this: hoacampaign@yahoo.com

Organize a Hands Off Assata Shakur Campaign Rally and/or Teach-In

Host a smaller event or fundraising party in tandem with the main city events. Contact HOA to host: (866) 244-4708 or hoacampaign@yahoo.com

Learn more about Assata Shakur by visiting the largest Assata Shakur website on the Internet: http://www.AssataShakur.org

Donate to the Hands Off Assata Efforts:
Donate to The Talking Drum Collective
Make online donations at: http://www.ftpmovement.com/donate.html or
Send contributions:
The Talking Drum Collective
P.O. Box 1921
Stone Mountain, Ga. 30086

Donate to the Happy Birthday Campaign
Your continuous support is vital to our Campaign organizing. Tax-deductible contributions can be made to the Hands Off Assata Campaign; please make checks payable to our fiscal agent: Illinois Justice Foundation

And mail to:
HOA Campaign
1573 N. Milwaukee Ave., PMB #404
Chicago, IL 60622

Further expose the HOA Campaign by linking our HOA banners
http://www.assatashakur.org/banners.htm

Add your organization's name to our list of endorsers/Take petitions:
http://www.petitiononline.com/assata/petition.html

Contact us so that we can add your organization's name to our list of endorsers. hoacampaign@yahoo.com


Demand an end to the blockade against Cuba.
Acknowledge and release all US political prisoners.

This Campaign is a on going process, be patient with us as we Agitate, Educate, Organize And Mobilize.. more information coming...

Take the Poll
http://assatashakur.org/1106.htm#news
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IF YOU ARE IN NEW YORK, JOIN US FOR - Assata Shakur's 60th Birthday Launch!
http://assatashakur.org/nyc_1106.htm

Join the Hands Off Assata Campaign, co-hosts Susan Taylor and Mos Def, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, and many other supporters in an international mobilization to call on the state of New Jersey and the US Department of Justice to rescind the illegitimate $1 million bounty to capture Assata Shakur, remove her name from the domestic terrorist list, and ultimately issue Ms. Shakur a rightful, long overdue pardon.

Join us:
Thursday, November 2nd, 2006
6 pm
SEIU 1199 Hall
310 West 43rd Street (between 8th and 9th Aves.)
New York, NY
Free...donations accepted

Featuring:
• Co-Hosts Susan Taylor and Mos Def
• Gloria Rolando's "Eyes of the Rainbow" about Assata's life in Cuba
• Assata Skakur's Birthday Card
Sign the card, receive a hand made Hands Off Assata bracelet, and contribute to a larger liberation movement for Assata Shakur...for Cuba...for us all.

For more information:
http://www.happybirthdayassata.org
hoacampaign@yahoo.com
(866) 244-4708

* * * * * *
Supporters (in formation):
Angela Davis
Susan Taylor
Charles Mingus, III
Khephra Burns
Malcolm X Grassroots Movement
Talib Kweli
dead prez
Kimberly Elise
Greg Tate
Goapele
National Boricua Human Rights Network
Global Exchange
The Millions More Movement Harlem Local Organizing Committee
ProLibertad Freedom Campaign
Popular Education Project to Free the Cuban 5
Michaela Angela Davis
Kevin Powell
Sistas on the Rise
Jericho Movement
The Yoruba Society of Brooklyn, Corp.
Ile Ase, Inc.
Omo Obatala Egbe, Inc.
Safiyah Nuh Foundation
Reverend Herbert Daughtry
Medgar Evers College Center for Law and Social Justice
City Councilman Charles Barron
National Center for Human Rights Education
Affinity Community Services
National Conference of Black Lawyers
Campaign to End the Death Penalty
Rose Brewer
Black Radical Congress
Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism
Chicago Abortion Fund
Prisoner's Justice Action Committee, (Toronto, Canada)
CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities
Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees
Harry Allen
Leslie Cagan, United for Peace and Justice
Evelyn C. White
Alice Walker
National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression
The Talking Drum Collective
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"Now is the time for us to come together with one another, to organize, to speak out and speak up on behalf of each other. There is no time to waste, while we debate, define, and discuss; the enemy continues his genocidal plan. We need to bear in mind the Ashanti proverb: 'Two men in a burning house must not stop to argue.' " - Dr. Mutulu Shakur

UHURU!

Assata Shakur Forum - http://www.assatashakur.org/forum
FTP Movement - http://www.FTPmovement.com

Notes on Assata Shakur and Cuba: Will Obama Sell Her Out?

Assata Shakur in Cuba Where She Was Granted Political Asylum From US Imperialism
Originally uploaded by Pan-African News Wire Photo File

Notes on Assata Shakur and Cuba

The points in this commentary are quite well-taken, and every effort to tell the truth about sister Assata Shakur and how she came to live in exile in Cuba should be encouraged.

There's no good reason to assume that President Obama, who campaigned on the idea that Washington's blockade of Cuba should be maintained, can be trusted with the fate of Assata, but Obama's not the decisive player in this situation. Not by a long shot.

Pressure against normalizing relations are taking many forms, including the pressure on Obama to use Assata's presence as an exile in Cuba as an obstacle.

However, there's no reason to assume that the Cuban government, which wants and needs normalized relations with the United States, would sell Assata out in order to gain normal relations.

Walter Lippmann
Los Angeles, California

=================================

SF BAY VIEW
May 9, 2009

Will Obama sell Assata out?

http://www.sfbayview.com/2009/will-obama-sell-assata-out/

by Paul Scott
Drawing of Political Exile Assata Shakur. Free Assata! Hands off Cuba!

Most Americans are not familiar with Assata Shakur. After all, she’s not exactly the type of Black superhero that they parade around during Black History Month. This is the type ignorance that some legislators in New Jersey hope will allow them to extradite Shakur back to the U.S. under the cover of our darkness.

Assata Shakur (JoAnne Chesimard) was involved in a 1973 shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike that resulted in the deaths of fellow Black Liberation Army member Zayd Shakur and New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster. Shakur was sentenced to life in prison in 1977 but was broken out of prison by her comrades in 1979. She has been living under political asylum in Cuba since 1984.

She still remains on the FBI’s Most Wanted List with a million dollar reward for any snitch willing to give her up to the FEDS. (See the FBI’s Wanted poster for Assata at http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/fugitives/dt/chesimard_jd.htm.)

However, with President Barack Obama seeking to open political channels with Cuba and ease U.S. restrictions, politicians in New Jersey have been turning up the heat on the Prez to make the Cuban government give up Shakur if they want to be in Uncle Sam’s good graces.

While the current headlines of “NJ to Press for Return of Cop Killer” would lead you to believe that Shakur is some heartless street thugstress that went around shootin’ up police stations just for kicks, the truth about the government repression by which groups like the Black Panther Party and its underground military arm, the Black Liberation Army, suffered has never really been told.

We cannot allow the media to even begin discussing Assata Shakur without putting her struggle in the context of COINTELPRO. The Counter Intelligence Program was an effort by J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation and its associated agencies to destroy groups that dared stand against U.S. oppression.

It was under COINTELPRO that Black leadership suffered under “dirty tricks” that ranged from political assassinations (Chairman Fred Hampton) to smear campaigns which are too many to even begin to name here. Even the good Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was not immune to Hoover’s “dirty tricks.”

Could you really expect Assata Shakur to get a fair trail under such repressive policies?

According to the late civil rights attorney William Kuntsler in his book, “My Life as a Radical Lawyer,” a law enforcement agent told him that during Shakur’s trial ” a member of the New Jersey State Assembly had gone to the hotel where the jury was sequestered and talked to them about the necessity to convict.” In the book Kuntsler hints that even he underestimated the lengths that New Jersey law enforcement would go to get a conviction of Shakur.

Today, those same types of people are at it again. On April 17, New Jersey Sen. Sean King sent a letter to President Obama asking him to “delay normalizing relations with Cuba unless they agree to extradite convicted cop killer JoAnne Chesimard.”

(Read the letter at http://blog.nj.com/ledgerupdates_impact/2009/04/LettertoPresObamaSenatorKean.pdf.)

Also, New Jersey Attorney General Anne Milgram has been quoted as saying, “Obama’s move to ease sanctions against Cuba is an opportunity to bring back Joanne Chesimard.”

Now, do I think that Obama would sacrifice Assata Shakur on the alter of “Democracy” for political expediency? You’re darn right!

To appease middle class white America, President Obama will throw Shakur under the same Greyhound that he threw Rev. Jeremiah Wright. That is, if we don’t raise our voices.

There are organizations that have been fighting to keep the plight of Assata Shakur in our faces for years. See especially http://www.assatashakur.org/.

Black bloggers must start an immediate, emergency mass education campaign to tell the true story of Assata Shakur and COINTELPRO to combat the efforts of the miseducation of the mainstream media.

We must make sure that our local and national “urban” radio stations inform their listeners about this issue.

We must arm ourselves with information about Assata Shakur and COINTELPRO through websites, DVDs and books such as “Show Down” by the late Del Jones and “Racial Matters” and “Black America: The FBI Files” by Kenneth O’Reilly.

Finally, we must appeal to the Hip Hop artists who have the ears of the people to raise the issue if only for the reason of reppin’ for “Tupac’s kin folk.” (If that will motivate them to take action.)

If we do not raise this issue, loudly, Assata Shakur will be back in a U.S. prison or worse before she knows what hit her.

We owe this much to a sister who, as the rapper Common said in “A Song for Assata,” “went through all this … so we can be free.”

Paul Scott

Paul Scott writes for No Warning Shots Fired. He can be reached at info@nowarningshotsfired.com or (919) 451-8283. Watch “A Song for Assata” at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrWxrFr7TL4.

Assata Shakur: Tracking a Black Revolutionary's Every Move in Cuba

Assata Shakur After Her Capture on May 2, 1973 in New Jersey
Originally uploaded by Pan-African News Wire Photo File

Kelly: Tracking a Black Revolutonary's Every Move in Cuba

Monday, March 3, 2008
With the Assistance of the Pan-African News Wire

Mike Kelly
http://www.northjersey.com/news/crimeandcourts/Tracking_a_cop-killers_every_move_in_Cuba.html

Convicted Black Panther Party veteran Assata Shakur may enjoy political sanctuary in Cuba, but for years she has been secretly monitored by a web of New Jersey State Police contacts that includes Cuban citizens.

The disclosure by state police investigators of their clandestine tracking of Assata comes as Fidel Castro recently turned over control of the Communist government to his brother, Raul.

In the wake of the Cuban power shift, state and federal authorities hope to extradite Assata Shakur and about 70 U.S. fugitives granted asylum in Cuba.

For New Jersey security elite, the big prize is Assata, a member of the militant Black Liberation Army. She was caught after a 1973 turnpike shootout that killed one state trooper and wounded another -- and left her wounded, too.

Chesimard, who changed her name to Assata Shakur, was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Trooper Werner Foerster. With the help of fellow militants, she broke out of a New Jersey women's prison in 1979 and turned up four years later in Cuba -- celebrated as a revolutionary heroine by Fidel Castro.

In 2005, New Jersey authorities increased the bounty for her capture to $1 million.

"We are not going away," said state police Lt. Kevin Tormey, the chief detective on the Chesimard case since 1989.

State police officials have made no secret of their three-decade desire to catch Assata, now 60 and allegedly
living in the Havana area. But this is the first time officials have publicly agreed to describe how they have spied on New Jersey's most notorious, yet elusive, fugitive.

Tormey and others stress that their monitoring of Assata Shakur does not include covert U.S. agents or undercover state troopers on the ground in Cuba. But their system of contacts nevertheless offers a window into the murky world of tracking international fugitives and underscores the tenacity by the state police to bring Assata to New Jersey for incarceration and persecution.

State police say that for a brief time in the mid-1990s, they considered going beyond just monitoring Assata and arranging to kidnap her in Cuba or lure her to another country where she could be arrested and returned to New Jersey.

"We explored that but we never moved forward," Tormey said.

For Tormey, 45, and his 37-year-old assistant, state police Detective Michael Rinaldi, a graduate of Bergen Catholic High School, the Chesimard case has become a high-tech collection of information – including monitoring YouTube, where videos about her have been posted. At the same time, it's an old-fashioned police case that involves legwork and personal conversations with sources.

In his 19 years on the case, Tormey has traveled to almost a dozen nations to interview people who met Assata in Cuba or knew about her. He and Rinaldi also work on the Chesimard case with agents from the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force in Newark.

In an interview at his office in the intelligence division of state police headquarters in West Trenton, Tormey said some of the most reliable information on Assata Shakur comes from Cubans who are potentially risking their lives by cooperating with American law enforcement.

The system of passing the information back to New Jersey is complicated, though.

Even though the U.S. government restricts travel to Cuba, phone conversations and e-mails are not as limited. Nonetheless, Tormey said, most Cuban informants fear calling him directly to talk about Assata.

"A lot of them don't want to talk over open lines," Tormey said.

One method, he said, is to pass morsels of information to relatives in America, who then relay it to the state police. Another is to pass information to foreign diplomats who then give it to U.S. contacts -- and then to state police.

Back in West Trenton, Tormey and Rinaldi then try to connect the dot-like snippets on Assata -- her comings and goings and observations on her health. Some is rumor; some is fact.

What results is a pointillist-like portrait -- with notable holes.

Detectives know, for example, that Cuban authorities are keeping a close eye on Assata now, especially since the reward for her capture was increased to $1 million. But detectives don't know whether she is under some sort of house arrest or has to ask authorities before she can go anywhere.

"She doesn't seem to have the same freedom on the island she once had," Tormey said.

Before 2005, Assata Shakur was seen strolling through Havana or driving a Volkswagen. Her phone number was even listed in a Havana telephone directory -- under the name Assata Shakur.

Chesimard also reportedly worked as a translator for a radio station. In some cases, she courted attention from the media–notably an interview on a New York television station.

But Tormey said she has not been seen in public as much in recent years. After the $1 million bounty was announced, Fidel Castro renewed his support for Assata and publicly accused the United States of portraying her "as a terrorist, something that was an injustice, a brutality, an infamous lie."

One of the more tantalizing contacts, Tormey said, involved a secret operative in Cuba who was working with U.S. authorities to spy on Robert Vesco, a Boonton Township embezzler who fled America in 1970s after contributing to President Richard Nixon's reelection in the hope of shutting down a federal investigation of his finances.

After living in Costa Rica and the Bahamas, Vesco was granted "humanitarian refuge" in Cuba in 1982 and reportedly placed under the personal protection of Fidel Castro -- a status Assata received, too.

By the mid-1990s, Vesco fell out of favor with Cuban authorities and was eventually jailed in a fraudulent scheme to make an alleged miracle drug for such ailments as cancer and arthritis.

With Vesco in prison, the undercover Cuban operative working with U.S. federal agents contacted the state police about Assata.

"We started talking to this guy," said Tormey, who declined to say whether the operative was a Cuban citizen -- or where he is now.

But plans never went beyond the talking phase.

Tormey said he hopes Raul Castro will revoke Chesimard's protected status and send her back to New Jersey. But he has no illusions that will happen anytime soon.

"It's been a roller-coaster ride," he says. "But there is still a hole in the state police. We want to bring her in."

E-mail: kellym@northjersey.com. Read Mike Kelly's blog at northjersey.com/freshjersey.

In Solidarity With Assata Shakur and the Cuban Revolution

Assata Shakur After Her Capture on May 2, 1973 in New Jersey
Originally uploaded by Pan-African News Wire Photo File.

An Open Letter to the Black and Progressive Communities

Sisters, Brothers, Comrades:

Hands Off Assata Web Site
http://www.handsoffassata.org

The United States and New Jersey recently placed Assata Shakur on the FBI’s wanted lists of “terrorists,” and also placed a $1 million dollar bounty on her head. Both of these actions pose serious threats to Assata’s life. These actions are also equally dangerous to the Republic of Cuba, because they are an escalation of the United States’ destabilization campaign, providing a pretext for military aggression. For more than four decades, the United States has worked to overthrow the Republic of Cuba, attempting on more than two dozen occasions to assassinate its president, His Excellency Fidel Castro.

Who Is Assata Shakur?

Assata Shakur is a mother, grandmother, and activist who follow in the footsteps of Harriet Tubman, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, and all of those sisters and brothers who risked their lives so that Black people may one day be free. Assata is not a terrorist; she is a victim of the American government’s internal terror campaign, directed against the Black Liberation Movement.

Popularly known as COINTELPRO (counterintelligence program), this onslaught against Black people in America resulted in the assassination of, unlawful imprisonment of, and exile of hundreds of Black activists during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Among the casualties and victims were Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and Fred Hampton, who were both murdered with the complicity of the government; and Geromino Pratt and Dhoruba bin Wihad, who spent years in prison for crimes they did not commit.

As part of the FBI’s campaign against the Black Panther Party, Assata was labeled the “Queen of the Black Liberation Army,” and falsely accused of bank robberies and other crimes up and down in the East Coast in the early 1970s. Fleeing from these false allegations, she was captured while traveling the New Jersey Turnpike on May 2, 1973 with two other members of the Black Panther Party--Zayd Shakur and Sundiata Acoli--after their car was stopped for an alleged faulty taillight. A shoot-out erupted that resulted in deaths of Zayd and a state trooper, Werner Forster.

Following her arrest, New Jersey State Troopers delighted in torturing Assata and, after his arrest, Sundiata, as well. While shackled and chained to a bed, arms paralyzed, and bullet wounds in her chest, Assata was beaten with shotgun butts by New Jersey State Troopers shouting Nazi slogans and threats to kill her.

In the history of New Jersey, no woman pretrial detainee has ever been treated as she was, continuously confined to a men’s prison, under twenty-four surveillance of her most intimate activities, without intellectual sustenance, adequate medical attention, or exercise, and without the company of other women for all the years she was in their custody.

Following detentions and trials riddled with egregious human rights violations and constitutional errors (e.g., massive negative publicity and exclusion of African people from the jury), Assata and Sundiata were both found guilty, in separate trials, of the murder of Trooper Weiner and sentenced to life in prison. Prior to her New Jersey trial, Assata was tried six times on the various flimsy, false charges for which she was being sought. Each time she was acquitted.

In 1979, in one of the boldest and most righteous actions in the history of the 20th century Black Liberation Movement, Assata was liberated from a New Jersey jail. In 1986, she was granted asylum by the government of Cuba, where she has continued to speak out for the right of African people in the United States to freedom and self-determination.

Thirty-two years later, Sundiata, now sixty-eight years old, remains in prison and, despite a near stellar prison record, has twice been denied parole because of his continuing commitment to speaking out for the freedom of Black people, and against the vindictiveness of the law enforcement agencies in New Jersey.

United States and New Jersey Actions Violate International Law
The United States and New Jersey actions represent a historically unprecedented attack on the sovereignty of a nation and its right to grant political asylum to those it believes are deserving of it.

Several international instruments address the question of political asylum and political refugees. The two most comprehensive of these instruments are the Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, adopted in Geneva in 1951; and the Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, adopted in New York in 1967.

The Protocol is an independent international treaty detailing the minimum humanitarian standards for the treatment of refugees. The fact that the majority of UN member countries, including the United States, are parties to both the Convention and the Protocol shows how universal these two treaties are.

The Convention defines refugees as people who are outside their country of origin (or their habitual residence, in the case of stateless people) and who, due to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for race, religion, nationality, a group membership or political opinion, cannot or will not avail themselves of the protection to which they are entitled.

The Convention also details the rights and obligations of refugees, including those refugees should not be expelled or returned to territory where their life or freedom would be threatened. Furthermore, it prohibits discrimination against refugees on the basis of race, religion, or country of origin. In short, the United States and New Jersey’s actions make a mockery of international law and norms.

The hypocrisy of the United States is also clear. The United States has a long history of providing asylum to individuals considered “criminals” by other governments, most notably those considered “criminals” by the Cuban government. The United States, for example, provided asylum to the veterans of the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs (the United States-endorsed invasion of Cuba).

The first Bush administration overruled a United States deportation order on Orlando Bosch, one of the most notorious, and granted him asylum. The Justice Department had described Bosch as “a terrorist, unfettered by laws or human decency, threatening and inflicting violence without regard to the identity of his victims.”

More recently, Luis Posada Carriles, another long-time violent anti-Cuban government activist, illegally entered the United States. Posada is a prime suspect in the 1976 bombing of a Cuban commercial airliner, which crashed over the Island of Barbados that killed 73 people. He has also admitted to plotting attacks that damaged tourist spots in Havana and killed an Italian visitor there in 1997.

Additionally, Posada was convicted in Panama in a 2000 bomb plot against President Castro. The United States has arrested Posada and reportedly is considering whether or not to deport him, but not to Venezuela that is seeking his extraction for trial on charges stemming from the Cuban airline bombing. Posada lawyer has argued that Posada was granted legal residency in the United States while working with the United States and the CIA against President Castro. Unlike Assata, Bosch and Posada are true “terrorists” because they have complete lack of regard for the lives of innocent civilians.

We are forever indebted to the Cuban people for their solidarity and friendship to African people, in Africa and throughout the Diaspora and for providing sanctuary to our beloved Sister from the racist United States criminal injustice system. When Africa called, Cuba answered! Cuba’s military assistance to the people of Angola was critical to the successful overthrow of the racist apartheid regime of South Africa. We urge you to join with us in solidarity with the Cuban people and in solidarity with Assata.

What You Can Do:
- Sign our petition and circulate this letter.
URL: http://www/handsoffassata.org

- Write letters to the President, your United States Senator and Congressperson and Acting New Jersey Governor Richard Codey expressing your support for Assata and urging them respect the Cuban government’s sovereignty and stop their attacks on Assata.

- Hold a local rally or other event in solidarity with Cuba and Assata.

- Work to free Sundiata Acoli and all political prisoners and prisoners of war.

HANDS OFF CUBA! HANDS OFF ASSATA!
FREE SUNDIATA ACOLI AND ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS!

Joan P. Gibbs, Esq.
Rosemarie Mealy, J.D

Statement of Facts in the New Jersey Trial of Assata Shakur

Assata Shakur After Her Capture on May 2, 1973 in New Jersey
Originally uploaded by Pan-African News Wire Photo File

STATEMENT OF FACTS IN THE NEW JERSEY TRIAL OF ASSATA SHAKUR

Written by Evelyn A. Williams, dated June 25, 2005

As a member of Assata’s New Jersey trial legal defense team, and her appeal lawyer, I think a correct statement of the circumstances of New Jersey Trooper Werner Foerster’s death as established by exhibits, trial testimony and forensic evidence and that conclusively repudiate the revisionist lies now being advanced by the State of New Jersey as “fact”, need to be repeated.

It is be remember that the only surviving eyewitnesses to the NJ Turnpike shoot-out were (1) Sundiata Acoli, (2) Trooper Harper, (3) Assata and (4) the driver of a car traveling along the NJ Turnpike at the time of the incident. Zayd Malik Shakur, a passenger, was killed during the shootout.

1. Sundiata did not testify at trial, nor did he make any pre-trial statements.

2. Harper’s testimony and actions are contained in the following documents (admitted into evidence)

a. The three official investigative reports prepared by Harper, in which he wrote that after he stopped the Pontiac, he ordered Sundiata to the back of the car to show his driver’s license to Trooper Foerster who had arrived at the scene. That Sundiata complied without incident. That as he looked into the inside door of the Pontiac to check the registration, Foerster yelled at him and held up an ammunition clip. He stated that at the same time Assata reached into a red pocketbook, removed a gun from it and fired at him. That he immediately ran to the rear of his car and fired at Assata, who had emerged from the car, and was firing at him from a prostrate position alongside of the Pontiac. And it was at this point that he shot her. (admitted into evidence)

b. His Grand Jury testimony where he swore under oath to the truth of the statements he had made in his 3 official reports. (admitted into evidence)

c. Trial transcripts of his testimony at both Sundiata’s and Assata’s trials where he admitted, under cross-examination, that he had lied in all three of his official reports and in his Grand Jury testimony. That the truth was that Foerster had never shown him an ammunition clip; that Foerster had not yelled to him; that he had not seen a gun in Assata’s hand while she was seated in the car; that Assata did not shoot him from the car; and that he had not seen a red pocketbook.

d. Audio tapes of the official recorded NJ Turnpike radio communications between all NJ State Trooper cars traveling the Turnpike near the scene of the shoot-out, dated May 2, 1973, which revealed that two additional turnpike patrol cars, those driven by Trooper Robert Palenchar and Trooper Woerner Foerster, had been ordered to aid Harper at the stop prior to the shoot-out. (admitted into evidence)

e. The verbatim, hand-written record of what transpired inside the NJ Turnpike Administration Building when Harper entered it at or about 1AM on May 2, 1973, to report the shoot-out to Sergeant Chester Baginski who was in charge of maintaining the official record of turnpike occurrences on that (refereed to as the Station Bible). Harper reported that he had just been involved in a shoot-out after he had stopped a Pontiac containing three Black people, two men and a woman, that he had been wounded, and that the Pontiac was proceeding South on the turnpike. He gave the license plate number, but did not mention that Trooper Foerster had arrived at the scene. (admitted into evidence)

f. Audio tapes of the investigation conducted by Detective Sgt. First Class Richard H. Kelly in the Administration Building at 7:37AM that morning to determine why over an hour elapsed from the time Harper entered the Administration Building that night and the discovery of Foerster’s body. Statements by each of the troopers present when Harper came into the Administration Building revealed that Harper had not reported Foerster’s presence at the scene and that no one was aware of the fact that Foerster lay on the road beside his car in front of the Administration building for over an hour, when his body was accidentally discovered by Trooper O’Rourke who had left the Administration building to investigate the scene of the shoot-out, less than 200 yards away. (admitted into evidence)

3. Assata testified that Harper stopped the car without any known reason, shot her with her arms raised at his demand, and then shot her in the back as she was turning to avoid his bullets. Almost mortally wounded, and semi-conscious, she climbed into the backseat of the Pontiac to avoid further bullets. Sundiata drove the car five miles down the road and parked it, where she remained until State Troopers dragged her onto the road.

4. A driver traveling north along the turnpike at the time of the incident testified at trial that he had seen a State Trooper struggling with a Black man between a parked white vehicle and a State Trooper car whose overhead revolving lights lit up the area. He was unable to identify the Black man, and further stated that he saw no one else on the road or at the scene. He immediately reported what he had seen to New Jersey Police Headquarters.

It therefore remained only forensic evidence to help determine the facts of that night as much as they could be determined. The forensic evidence examined by both the New Jersey crime laboratory in Trenton, New Jersey and FBI crime laboratories in Washington, D.C. established the following:

1. The finger print analyses of every gun and every piece of ammunition found at the scene showed there were no fingerprints of Assata found on any of them. (The official analyses admitted into evidence)

2. Neutron Activation Analysis taken immediately after Assata was taken to the hospital that night showed there was no gun power residue on her hands. Effectively refuting the possibility that she had fired a gun. (The official analyses were admitted into evidence)

3. As a result of the bullet Harper shot under her armpit, while her arms were raised in, her median nerve was severed, immediately paralyzing her entire right arm, shattering her clavicle, and lodging in her chest so close to her heart that an operation to remove it was not feasible. A neurologist testified to that fact at the trial.

4. A pathologist testified that “There is no conceivable way that the bullet could have traveled over to the clavicle if her arm was down. That trajectory is impossible.”

5. A surgeon testified that “it was anatomically necessary that both arms be in the air for Ms. Chesimard to have received the wounds she did.”

The state offered no expert witnesses to refute this medical testimony.

6. Photographs depicting the gunshot entry wound under her armpit and the entry would of the bullet Harper shot into her back were admitted into evidence during the trial.

Therefore, since no evidence existed that proved Assata fired the bullet that killed Trooper Foerster, why was she found guilty of his murder? There are several explanations:

The first is that the climate of hatred, prejudice and racism that had so contaminated the Middlesex County jury pool in 1973 that a change of venue was ordered, continued to exist in 1977. The unanimous opinion of the 1973 jury pool was “If she’s Black, she’s guilty.” After three defense motions for change of venue, Judge Leon Gerofsky granted the motion, stating, “It was almost impossible to obtain a jury here comprised of people willing to accept the responsibility of impartiality so that defendants will be protected from transitory passion and prejudice.” The trial was then moved to Morris County where Assata’s trial was severed from Sundiata’s because of her pregnancy.

In 1977 Assata began trial for the second time in this same Middlesex County, and this time jury nullification was insured: The jurors chosen to determine Assata’s guilt or innocence consisted of five jurors who were either relatives or close personal friends of state troopers or of state law enforcement officers.

However, Assata was not convicted of firing the shot that killed Trooper Foerster. She was convicted as an accomplice to his murder under New Jersey’s “aiding and abetting” statute. Under New Jersey law, if a person’s presence at the scene of a crime can be construed as “aiding and abetting” the crime, that person can be convicted of the substantive crime itself. Judge Theodore Appleby charged the jury that they were permitted to speculate that Assata’s “mere presence” at a scene of violence, with weapons in the vehicle, was sufficient to sustain a conviction of the murder of Trooper Foerster. She was also convicted of possession of weapons – none of which could be identified as having been handled by her and of the attempted murder of Trooper Harper, who had sustained a flesh wound at the time of the shootout.

Now, 32 years after her conviction, a new, fabricated version of Foerster’s death has emerged:

There is absolutely no evidence to support statements made by Col. Joseph R. Fuentes, superintendent of the New Jersey State Police, who said that “It was later determined that Werner Foerster’s service weapon was ripped from his holster as he lay wounded on the pavement, and he was executed with two shots to the head from his own service weapon.”

But his motivation for making those statements is clear:

1. To justify Assata being placed on the domestic terror watch list along with Osama bin Ladin. He said, “Anyone with a mindset that would execute a police officer once they were on the ground is dangerous enough to be considered a domestic terrorism threat.” But Assata is the only person convicted of a single domestic crime who has been classified a terrorist and put on the terrorism watch list, thereby nullifying the very definition of “terrorism”

2. To justify the $1 million dollar bounty to be paid from tax payers money. He said, “The reward money should make Chesimard a much more attractive quarry for professional bounty hunters.”

New Jersey State Assembly Speaker, Albio Sires, a longtime member of CANF (Cuban American National Foundation, representing Cuban exiles), said: “If Cuba’s citizenry could be informed of the $1 million bounty and the real story of Chesimard’s crimes, there is an increased likelihood of her being brought to Justice…. We want the Cuban people to know the real story about Joanne Chesimard and not the deceptive representation advanced by the Castro regime. We want people to realize that she is not a hero and she is really a violent criminal who is wanted for killing a State Trooper and escaping justice.”

By falsely asserting that Assata shot Foerster in the head while he lay helplessly on the ground, killing him “execution style”, the US Justice Department hopes to strip Assata of any of the sympathy and political support she now receives in the United States and from the citizens of Cuba. By labeling her a cold-blooded cop killer, the hope is that the real circumstances of the NJ Turnpike as well as all the years prior to that event during which time Assata was relentlessly hunted with the stated purpose of killing her on sight for having committed crimes of which the government knew she was innocent, will be forgotten.

But even as official lies are now being manufactured to convert Assata into a terrorist, so that Cuba can be accused of “harboring a terrorist” and to justify kidnapping her, there are, in fact, two well-known and admitted, convicted terrorists who are now being given safe harbor in the United States.

The US government has refused to extradite admitted terrorist, Luis Posada Carriles, (charged with the shoot down of a Cuban airliner in 1976, killing 73 civilians and convicted of other terrorist acts including the Bay of Pigs). The US government has also refused to extradite Posada’s convicted fellow terrorist, Orlando Bosch, who escaped from Venezuela and came to Miami in 1987 with the assistance of the CANF, Jeb Bush and his father, the then US Attorney, Gonzalez, who personally approved the bounty, also approved prisoner torture at Abu Ghreb. Or that the approval came after New Jersey resident, Michael Chertoff, was named Secretary of the Department of Homeland Defense.

There are the facts. Let us not forget them.

- Evelyn A. Williams

More Corporate Media Attacks on Assata Shakur: Former Black Panther Party Member Was Granted Political Asylum in Cuba

Assata Shakur After Her Capture on May 2, 1973 in New Jersey
Originally uploaded by Pan-African News Wire Photo File

http://www.philly.com/dailynews/local/20090307_Escaped_killer_now_a__1M_target.html

Posted on Sat, Mar. 7, 2009

Escaped killer now a $1M target

Cop's slayer fled N.J. prison in '79

By JASON NARK
Philadelphia Daily News
narkj@phillynews.com 856-779-3231

SOMETIME IN 1984, convicted cop-killer Joanne Chesimard surfaced in Cuba, about 1,200 miles from the New Jersey prison from which she had escaped five years earlier.

As her exile hits the 25-year mark, a changing political landscape in both countries and the $1 million that dangles over her head have kept authorities in New Jersey hopeful that a break will come.

It's not clear how Chesimard - who now goes by the name Assata Shakur- made it to the Caribbean island, but as long as there's no collateral damage, New Jersey authorities say they don't really care how the former Black Liberation Army member is returned home.

"If she's healthy and walking and talking and there's no carnage in the wake, I don't think there would be issues," said New Jersey State Police Lt. Kevin Tormey, who has been assigned to the case since 1989.

The hefty reward, which jumped from $50,000 to $1 million in 2005, has spurred a slow but steady stream of calls, Tormey said - from bounty hunters, former Cubans and even some anonymous officials within the country itself. Tormey has traveled to at least a dozen countries to conduct interviews.

So far, nothing's panned out.

"We've done more than most people would think, and a lot of it's classified. We'll talk to anyone, anyplace, anytime," he said. "There's only one home run, and we've had triples and doubles."

Former Cuban president Fidel Castro welcomed Shakur and spoke on her behalf when the reward was raised. Tormey said there's never been any productive dialogue between Castro's government and authorities in New Jersey.

"I think he has said that she was mistreated," Tormey said of Castro. "I don't think he has the information of her guilt."

Shakur was one of three passengers in a 1965 Pontiac pulled over by State Trooper James Harper on the New Jersey Turnpike in East Brunswick, Middlesex County, for a faulty taillight on the night of May 2, 1973.

Trooper Werner Foerster, 34, arrived on the scene as backup.

During questioning, authorities said, Shakur and one of the men opened fire with automatic weapons. Both Foerster and Shakur were hit. Shakur then took Foerster's gun and fatally shot him as he lay on the ground, authorities said.

Shakur's brother-in-law, James Coston, was killed in the gun battle, and the third passenger, Clark Squire, also known as Sundiata Acoli, eventually was arrested and sent to prison.

According to a New York Times article after the shooting, the two other men in the car were transporting Shakur to a hideout in Philadelphia at the time because she was wanted on numerous offenses.

Shakur eventually was convicted by a jury in 1977 and escaped two years later from the Clinton Correctional Institution for Women, in Hunterdon County, with the help of three gunmen acting as visitors.

Over the years, New Jersey elected officials have pleaded with federal and international governments to demand Shakur's return. The state police even asked Pope John Paul II to intervene when he visited Cuba in 1998.

During the 2005 U.S. Conference of Mayors in Chicago, Trenton Mayor Douglas Palmer spoke of not normalizing relations with Cuba until Shakur was returned.

That stance riled the large international contingency of Shakur supporters active on the Internet, earning Palmer the nickname "Black Bounty Hunter" by one Shakur supporter.

"I just think that certainly we need to make sure she comes back for justice," Palmer told the Daily News in an interview this week.

Earlier this week, Cuban President Raul Castro ousted some of his ailing brother's longtime appointees, furthering the rumor of sweeping changes in the communist country. Meanwhile, the world waits to see if President Obama will open lines of communication between the U.S. and Cuba.

Now in her early 60s, Shakur has stopped giving interviews, but has said publicly that a "regime change" in Cuba would send her "up the creek without a paddle."

Tormey said the Obama administration has bigger concerns than Cuba at the moment, but he'd love to have Shakur return through diplomatic channels rather than bounty hunters.

The U.S. State Department did not return a phone call seeking comment.

A Google search for Joanne Chesimard or Assata Shakur shows many Web sites created on her behalf, and the support she has engendered from all walks of life, including law professors, celebrities and Mumia Abu-Jamal, himself on death row for the murder of Philadelphia Police Officer Daniel Faulkner.

Tormey said Shakur has used time to her advantage and has cast a distorted veil over the truth.

"The facts are that this woman was part of a violent black-separatist group that wanted to overthrow the U.S. government and viewed police as soldiers of the government," Tormey said. "She started the shooting on the turnpike. Her weapon shot both troopers and she had an all-star defense team."

Shakur's version of the story - on the Web site
http://www.assatashakur.org, in excerpts from her autobiography, and from information on other sites - is that she had been pulled over and had tried to surrender but was shot with her hands raised.

Shakur also claimed she had been beaten at the hospital and kept in bug-infested cells, even while pregnant with her daughter.

In a "Statement of Facts in the New Jersey Trial of Assata Shakur," Evelyn Williams, Shakur's aunt and former attorney, claims, among other things: that Trooper Harper lied under testimony, that Shakur's fingerprints were not found on any weapon, and that several members of the all-white jury were either friends or relatives of law-enforcement officers.

"Assata is an innocent woman. Not only should the bounty be lifted, but she should receive some type of compensation," said Mukasa Afrika, founder of Laying the Foundation, a Philadelphia-based organization devoted to African-culture education.

"It's a hunt. That's all it is, and the fact that she continues to inspire people angers police."

Even after her 25 years in Cuba, police in New Jersey certainly remain angry.

"She's been compared to Harriet Tubman and Martin Luther King on some site," Tormey said. "She had nothing to do with peace."

For more information about Assata Shakur, visit the New Jersey State Police Web site at New Jersey State Police, or visit http://www.assatashakur.org

=====================================================

STATEMENT OF FACTS IN THE NEW JERSEY TRIAL OF ASSATA SHAKUR:

Written by Evelyn A. Williams, dated June 25, 2005

As a member of Assata’s New Jersey trial legal defense team, and her appeal lawyer, I think a correct statement of the circumstances of New Jersey Trooper Werner Foerster’s death as established by exhibits, trial testimony and forensic evidence and that conclusively repudiate the revisionist lies now being advanced by the State of New Jersey as “fact”, need to be repeated.

It is be remember that the only surviving eyewitnesses to the NJ Turnpike shoot-out were (1) Sundiata Acoli, (2) Trooper Harper, (3) Assata and (4) the driver of a car traveling along the NJ Turnpike at the time of the incident. Zayd Malik Shakur, a passenger, was killed during the shootout.

1. Sundiata did not testify at trial, nor did he make any pre-trial statements.

2. Harper’s testimony and actions are contained in the following documents (admitted into evidence)

a. The three official investigative reports prepared by Harper, in which he wrote that after he stopped the Pontiac, he ordered Sundiata to the back of the car to show his driver’s license to Trooper Foerster who had arrived at the scene. That Sundiata complied without incident. That as he looked into the inside door of the Pontiac to check the registration, Foerster yelled at him and held up an ammunition clip.

He stated that at the same time Assata reached into a red pocketbook, removed a gun from it and fired at him. That he immediately ran to the rear of his car and fired at Assata, who had emerged from the car, and was firing at him from a prostrate position alongside of the Pontiac. And it was at this point that he shot her. (admitted into evidence)

b. His Grand Jury testimony where he swore under oath to the truth of the statements he had made in his 3 official reports. (admitted into evidence)

c. Trial transcripts of his testimony at both Sundiata’s and Assata’s trials where he admitted, under cross-examination, that he had lied in all three of his official reports and in his Grand Jury testimony. That the truth was that Foerster had never shown him an ammunition clip; that Foerster had not yelled to him; that he had not seen a gun in Assata’s hand while she was seated in the car; that Assata did not shoot him from the car; and that he had not seen a red pocketbook.

d. Audio tapes of the official recorded NJ Turnpike radio
communications between all NJ State Trooper cars traveling the Turnpike near the scene of the shoot-out, dated May 2, 1973, which revealed that two additional turnpike patrol cars, those driven by Trooper Robert Palenchar and Trooper Woerner Foerster, had been ordered to aid Harper at the stop prior to the shoot-out. (admitted into evidence)

e. The verbatim, hand-written record of what transpired inside the NJ Turnpike Administration Building when Harper entered it at or about 1AM on May 2, 1973, to report the shoot-out to Sergeant Chester Baginski who was in charge of maintaining the official record of turnpike occurrences on that (refereed to as the Station Bible).

Harper reported that he had just been involved in a shoot-out after he had stopped a Pontiac containing three Black people, two men and a woman, that he had been wounded, and that the Pontiac was proceeding South on the turnpike. He gave the license plate number, but did not mention that Trooper Foerster had arrived at the scene. (admitted into evidence)

f. Audio tapes of the investigation conducted by Detective Sgt. First Class Richard H. Kelly in the Administration Building at 7:37AM that morning to determine why over an hour elapsed from the time Harper entered the Administration Building that night and the discovery of Foerster’s body.

Statements by each of the troopers present when Harper came into the Administration Building revealed that Harper had not reported Foerster’s presence at the scene and that no one was aware of the fact that Foerster lay on the road beside his car in front of the Administration building for over an hour, when his body was accidentally discovered by Trooper O’Rourke who had left the Administration building to investigate the scene of the shoot-out, less than 200 yards away. (admitted into evidence)

3. Assata testified that Harper stopped the car without any known reason, shot her with her arms raised at his demand, and then shot her in the back as she was turning to avoid his bullets. Almost mortally wounded, and semi-conscious, she climbed into the backseat of the Pontiac to avoid further bullets. Sundiata drove the car five miles down the road and parked it, where she remained until State Troopers dragged her onto the road.

4. A driver traveling north along the turnpike at the time of the incident testified at trial that he had seen a State Trooper struggling with a Black man between a parked white vehicle and a State Trooper car whose overhead revolving lights lit up the area. He was unable to identify the Black man, and further stated that he saw no one else on the road or at the scene. He immediately reported what he had seen to New Jersey Police Headquarters.

It therefore remained only forensic evidence to help determine the facts of that night as much as they could be determined. The forensic evidence examined by both the New Jersey crime laboratory in Trenton, New Jersey and FBI crime laboratories in Washington, D.C. established the following:

1. The finger print analyses of every gun and every piece of ammunition found at the scene showed there were no fingerprints of Assata found on any of them. (The official analyses admitted into evidence)

2. Neutron Activation Analysis taken immediately after Assata was taken to the hospital that night showed there was no gun power residue on her hands. Effectively refuting the possibility that she had fired a gun. (The official analyses were admitted into evidence)

3. As a result of the bullet Harper shot under her armpit, while her arms were raised in, her median nerve was severed, immediately paralyzing her entire right arm, shattering her clavicle, and lodging in her chest so close to her heart that an operation to remove it was not feasible. A neurologist testified to that fact at the trial.

4. A pathologist testified that “There is no conceivable way that the bullet could have traveled over to the clavicle if her arm was down. That trajectory is impossible.”

5. A surgeon testified that “it was anatomically necessary that both arms be in the air for Ms. Chesimard to have received the wounds she did.”

The state offered no expert witnesses to refute this medical testimony.

6. Photographs depicting the gunshot entry wound under her armpit and the entry would of the bullet Harper shot into her back were admitted into evidence during the trial.

Therefore, since no evidence existed that proved Assata fired the bullet that killed Trooper Foerster, why was she found guilty of his murder? There are several explanations:

The first is that the climate of hatred, prejudice and racism that had so contaminated the Middlesex County jury pool in 1973 that a change of venue was ordered, continued to exist in 1977. The unanimous opinion of the 1973 jury pool was “If she’s Black, she’s guilty.”

After three defense motions for change of venue, Judge Leon Gerofsky granted the motion, stating, “It was almost impossible to obtain a jury here comprised of people willing to accept the responsibility of impartiality so that defendants will be protected from transitory passion and prejudice.” The trial was then moved to Morris County where Assata’s trial was severed from Sundiata’s because of her pregnancy.

In 1977 Assata began trial for the second time in this same Middlesex County, and this time jury nullification was insured: The jurors chosen to determine Assata’s guilt or innocence consisted of five jurors who were either relatives or close personal friends of state troopers or of state law enforcement officers.

However, Assata was not convicted of firing the shot that killed Trooper Foerster. She was convicted as an accomplice to his murder under New Jersey’s “aiding and abetting” statute. Under New Jersey law, if a person’s presence at the scene of a crime can be construed as “aiding and abetting” the crime, that person can be convicted of the substantive crime itself.

Judge Theodore Appleby charged the jury that they were permitted to speculate that Assata’s “mere presence” at a scene of violence, with weapons in the vehicle, was sufficient to sustain a conviction of the murder of Trooper Foerster. She was also convicted of possession of weapons – none of which could be identified as having been handled by her and of the attempted murder of Trooper Harper, who had sustained a flesh wound at the time of the shootout.

Now, 32 years after her conviction, a new, fabricated version of Foerster’s death has emerged:

There is absolutely no evidence to support statements made by Col. Joseph R. Fuentes, superintendent of the New Jersey State Police, who said that “It was later determined that Werner Foerster’s service weapon was ripped from his holster as he lay wounded on the pavement, and he was executed with two shots to the head from his own service weapon.”

But his motivation for making those statements is clear:

1. To justify Assata being placed on the domestic terror watch list along with Osama bin Ladin. He said, “Anyone with a mindset that would execute a police officer once they were on the ground is dangerous enough to be considered a domestic terrorism threat.” But Assata is the only person convicted of a single domestic crime who has been classified a terrorist and put on the terrorism watch list, thereby nullifying the very definition of “terrorism”

2. To justify the $1 million dollar bounty to be paid from tax payers money. He said, “The reward money should make Chesimard a much more attractive quarry for professional bounty hunters.”

New Jersey State Assembly Speaker, Albio Sires, a longtime member of CANF (Cuban American National Foundation, representing Cuban exiles), said: “If Cuba’s citizenry could be informed of the $1 million bounty and the real story of Chesimard’s crimes, there is an increased likelihood of her being brought to Justice….

"We want the Cuban people to know the real story about Joanne Chesimard and not the deceptive representation advanced by the Castro regime. We want people to realize that she is not a hero and she is really a violent criminal who is wanted for killing a State Trooper and escaping justice.”

By falsely asserting that Assata shot Foerster in the head while he lay helplessly on the ground, killing him “execution style”, the US Justice Department hopes to strip Assata of any of the sympathy and political support she now receives in the United States and from the citizens of Cuba.

By labeling her a cold-blooded cop killer, the hope is that the real circumstances of the NJ Turnpike as well as all the years prior to that event during which time Assata was relentlessly hunted with the stated purpose of killing her on sight for having committed crimes of which the government knew she was innocent, will be forgotten.

But even as official lies are now being manufactured to convert Assata into a terrorist, so that Cuba can be accused of “harboring a terrorist” and to justify kidnapping her, there are, in fact, two well-known and admitted, convicted terrorists who are now being given safe harbor in the United States.

The US government has refused to extradite admitted terrorist, Luis Posada Carriles, (charged with the shoot down of a Cuban airliner in 1976, killing 73 civilians and convicted of other terrorist acts including the Bay of Pigs).

The US government has also refused to extradite Posada’s convicted fellow terrorist, Orlando Bosch, who escaped from Venezuela and came to Miami in 1987 with the assistance of the CANF, Jeb Bush and his father, the then US Attorney, Gonzalez, who personally approved the bounty, also approved prisoner torture at Abu Ghreb. Or that the approval came after New Jersey resident, Michael Chertoff, was named Secretary of the Department of Homeland Defense.

There are the facts. Let us not forget them.

- Evelyn A. Williams

Spanish: http://www.assatashakur.org/forum/foro-abierto/8989-declaracion-de-hechos-en-el-juicio-de-nj-de-assata-shakur.html
French: http://www.assatashakur.org/forum/assata-shakur/28633-evelyn-williams-declaration-concernant-les-faits-du-proces-d-assata-shakur-au-nj.html

Assata Shakur: Re-Imaging "Terrorism" Into the Face Of a Black Woman

Assata Shakur: An Autobiography book cover released in 1987. Shakur, who was granted political asylum in Cuba during the 1980s, has been placed on the FBI's most wanted terrorists list., a photo by Pan-African News Wire File Photos on Flickr.

DID OBAMA FBI RE-IMAGE BOMBERS INTO FACE OF BLACK WOMAN TO COUNTER SMILING, WHITE-BOY-NEXT-DOOR-LOOK OF THE BOSTON BOMBERS?

May 8, 2013 by Alexandra Valiente
By Ezili Dantò
HLLN

On Thursday, May 2, 2013, Assata Shakur became the first woman added to the FBI’s most wanted terrorists list. The reward for her capture was doubled to $2 million. Shakur is the second person originally from the United States to be placed on the FBI terrorist list.

Assata Shakur is 65-years old and living in exile in Cuba. She was a member of the Black Panther Party For Self-Defense, the Black Liberation Movement and the Anti-War Movement back in the 1960s. She was falsely convicted in 1973 for killing a New Jersey state trooper during a gunfight where she was shot twice while having both her arms held up in the air, and also shot in the back.

Shakur is the step-aunt and godmother to famed Hip-Hop artist and poet, Tupac Shakur and has always maintained her innocence and accused federal authorities of political persecution under Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO operations to destroy the Black power movement for human rights.

A surgeon who examined her wounds after the shooting said it was “anatomically necessary” for her arms to have been raised for her to receive the bullet wounds she did and that her hand wounds made it “anatomically impossible” for her have fired the shot that killed the state trooper. No gun powder was found on her hands. In 1979, Shakur escaped from jail, later fleeing to Cuba where she received political asylum.

After holding the press conference to suddenly declare Assata Shakur a domestic terrorist who killed a state trooper “execution style” (which grossly misstates the documented and reported evidence), the FBI proceeded, 40-years after the incident, to place huge “most wanted terrorist” billboard photos of Assata in New Jersey.

“We’re talking about a woman who was shot twice while attempting to give herself up to police who were co-operating with Federal authorities to target and assassinate or otherwise eliminate members of the Black Liberation movement just as they had done and admitted in a civil lawsuit to doing to Martin Luther King Jr.” – Scotty Reid, Black Talk Radio.

In these fascist heydays of the morally corrupt financial elites, effectively represented by Barack Obama, the billboard photo simply re-images bombers and terrorists with the face of an African woman.

For psychological purposes, for white supremacy, its vampirish, cannibalistic taste, its world-renown avarice, for the Euro minority’s desperate historical and world lies to keep working, it seems that the kind, smiling, curly-haired white-boy-next-door-look of young Boston marathon bomber Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev or of Connecticut’s Adam Lanza – had to be countered pretty fast, no? Even if Obama’s FBI had to reach back 40-years to re-make reality for today.

It seems, Obama’s FBI found it convenient in this climate when the US public is reeling from shock and fear, after the Connecticut Sandy Hook school massacre and the Boston marathon bombings, to confuse the issue. Re-imaging bombers and mindless gunmen with the face of an African woman freedom fighter and putting her pictures on billboards in New Jersey serves not to find Shakur but only to intimidate the Black community and other civilian justice advocates legitimately protesting the prison industrial complex and US police departments killing unarmed, innocent citizens with impunity.

Adam Lanza, 20. Shot his mother and then fatally shot twenty children and six adult staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut in cold blood.

If the FBI’s mandate is to preserve and protect the lives of the innocent, then FBI resources would best be applied to reign in the rogue police departments in the US that kill unarmed innocent citizens, especially in the Black community, with impunity. The FBI would better serve the public if they paid more attention to these domestic terror cells or concentrated more on finding the potential Lanzas and Tsarnaevs before these mentally disturbed folks caused public harm.

Attacking and re-imaging a 65-year old Black woman, not even living in the US as a dangerous “domestic terrorist,” who presumably would, like the mindless, gun-toting Lanza, hurt innocent school children, or like the two white Boston bombers, indiscriminately kill marathon watchers and participants is an outragous misuse of the public trust and a gross distortion of the 1960s Black liberation struggle.

This is the very same FBI that’s accused of dropping the ball on the elder Boston bomber, Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

It is amazing — and pathetic — how swiftly the FBI felt compelled to frame the domestic terrorism conversation around a Black revolutionary living in Cuba, instead of two White men from Boston. - Kirsten West Savali, Newsone.com

The huge Assata Shakur “FBI most wanted” billboards, plastered in New Jersey where Obama’s FBI know Assata Shakur is not living, is, as many have noted, about politically repressing the Black community. A pretext to invade, send drones to Cuba? Shut up human rights avocates who struggle against tyrannical US foreign and domestic policies? Repress public dissent by dehumanizing and misrepresenting justice advocates as psychopaths or cold-blooded executioner?

“This is not about Assata Shakur, it is about sending a message to the Black community and those that live within it who stand up to police violence, oppression and murder of residents, one of the very reasons for the formation of the Black Panthers. It is about the political repression of those who advocate on the behalf of the many political prisons being held by the United States government often in torturous conditions. It is about sending a message to anyone who would take up arms in defense of life, liberty and true freedom in a country that is home to the largest prison population in the world which the federal government and various corporations use as slave labor. It is about sending a message to those that would dare stand up and point out that the US government is the most violent entity on the planet and one that commits acts of terrorism against non-white people and nations on behalf of maintaining the American imperialist status-quo.”

The Black collaborators and sell-outs who uphold white supramacy

The colonial role of Bafyòti yo, the Black collaborators like Obama, Eric Holder, and the Black FBI agent that was put up-front to help make the announcement at their press conference- are critical.

Haiti has proven this and showed the way out with the Bwa Kayiman call to action for all Africans and liberty lovers.

The Black collaborators and sell-outs for the enslavers fulfill an essential role for the colonial blueprint and false narrative to work and for the Empire’s key stakeholders, for these white minorities to rule the world’s masses they’ve contained-in-poverty, infected with deadly diseases, killed, imprisoned, brutalized, repressed, falsely accused, hunted down or coopted. (But, see “They wait without hate“.)

It is critical to highlight over and over again how Obama is used to distract and cover up the recolonization, AFRICOM/US militarization, drone warfare in Africa, US occupation in Haiti and to whitewash the absolute police and economic repression in Black communities in the USA. White supremacy continues because of the behavior of the Black collaborators, the poor and disconnected who are daily bought out.

Assata Shakur was targeted by the FBI’s COINTELPRO program and forced into exile. But it is sadly under Barack Obama and Eric Holder that, 40-years later, Assata becomes the first woman freedom fighter added to the FBI’s most wanted terrorist list as a “threat” to the US government with the reward for her capture doubled to $2 million.

Freedom warriors like Assata Shakur and others in the Black Liberation Movement helped pave the way, during the sixties liberation movement, for an Obama, Eric Holder, Susan Rice, Cheryl Mills to attend previously segregated schools of higher learning. Helped pave the way for them to hold the positions they hold today. Black culture in America evidences that death is not the worst end for a human being and thus Blacks have endured the various stages of white tyranny with dignity for over 400 years , not becoming what their Ancestors fought against.

Yet, in one fell swoop, under Obama, the FBI is projecting upon the Black community perhaps their boss’ personal failures as the head of the white supremacist, profit-over-people world structure. It speaks to the dangerous effectiveness of the power elites Obama services that his presidancy can, without much outrage, attempt to destroy the Ancestors’ dignified legacy as today’s impoverished Black community is being falsely colored as mindless mass bombers who kill innocent civilians.

It’s ironic how Black collaborators, who are also inheritors of Assata Shakur’s freedom work, are now the bounty hunters hunting down anew Assata Shakur who clearly represents universal freedom for all, not mindless terrorism as they would have us believe.

Washington knows she’s not a terrorist. They just want to shut her up because Assata Shakur continues, even while in exile like Mumia Abu Jamal on death row, to exercise her freedom of speech, her right to advocate for “revolutionary changes in the structure and principles that govern the United States.”

Lennox Hind, her attorney since the 1970s says: “The act she was (falsely) convicted of had nothing to do with terrorism.”

The revolutionary Assata Shakur, once described as the soul of the Black Liberation Movement in the 1970s has pointed out that the same US/white power structure of yesterday’s COINTELPRO still practices, with the complicity of the corporate media, systemic terror, racist tyranny against the Black community.

“COINTELPRO utilized and received full cooperation from the corporate media to demonize and alienate freedom fighters from the people who supported them, corporate media today is still fulfilling that role. The concept of a free and independent press in America has always been a fraud and it remains so today.” – Scotty Reid, FBI Billboards not about Assata Shakur, it is about politically repressing the Black community.

The Haiti Parallels and Bwa Kayiman Wisdom

The US government making false accusations to criminalize, marginalize or get killed civilian dissenters to its structural injustices happens not only in the US but in Haiti, regularly. And yet if they used the same standards.

Which is why Ezili HLLN writes the non-colonial narrative for Haiti.

Why, for instance, this week when the corporate media had a field day plastering the “news” that the defunct, Wyclef Jean charity Yele Haiti, was being sued for not paying its bills. We posted it thus:

“Wyclef’s Yele Haiti hit with $100K lawsuit. When will Red Cross, Chemonics, DynCorp and Clinton Foundation be sued?” (See also, Ezili Dantò’s Note: The sea of injustice we live in will have you believing Wyclef Jean stole the earthquake monies in Haiti.)

But the Haiti voice keeping track. Asking why the whites stealing with impunity get no media coverage. Just advocating for “revolutionary changes in the structure and principles that govern the United States”, or for self-determination, self-reliance and self-defense is criminalized and, as in the case of Assata, will bring the might of the FBI or other authorities on the justice seekers’ head, for life.

But still, “live free or die” is Desalin’s imperative. So we must face evil straight up, not become media zombies. For Haiti, one must always ask again and again why is the world allowing the lawless UN to hide the US occupation of Haiti with impunity? Why is Wyclef Jean always getting sued, but the UN, the Clinton Foundation, Red Cross, Dyncorp, Chemonics, “Partners & Death”, USAID, their large NGOs, et al, are not also being sued for legal improprieties, money laundering, ethical conflicts of interests, over-reaching, switch ‘n bait, not meeting their obligations to Haitians and for stealing Haiti earthquake funds?

Is it because, the white saviors of Haiti, both from the Left and Right Washington duopoly, benefit like bandits, by constantly securing their paternalism and elevating “the Haitians are corrupt” narrative?

Assata Shakur’s life and struggles evidences how the radical, transformative voice against these parasites is systematically suppressed by (Ndòki) the elites, their intelligence agencies, NGOs, medias, military arms.

Haiti women, like Sesil Fatima, Gran Guitonn, Mari Jann, Defile, Grann Toya, Sanit Belè took up arms in self-defense to abolish slavery, forced assimilation, colonialism, the Euro-slave trade that sold their babies as cargo and to create Ayiti.

In the US, it was the FBI’s COINTELPRO that was unleashed to prevent a “Black messiah” from rising.

In Haiti, Jean Bertrand Aristide and the Democracy Movement was destroyed and overthrown twice by the US, its client-states and Haiti-supported oligarchs and death squads.

She was betrayed, captured, put to death by firing squad by the French along with her husband, General Belè, who tried to save his soldier-wife by trading his life for hers. Napoleon’s soldiers killed them both after agreeing to the swap. Sanit’s courage and how she died is what Haitians remember.

She refused to be blindfolded. “Fire,” she urged the French enslavers, baring her naked chest to Napoleon’s firing squad. “You didn’t put a blindfold on my husband. I don’t need your blindfold. This is how a woman warrior dies.” (Ezili Dantò’s Haiti Work: The non-colonial narrative.)

Haiti has been under US occupation since the 2004 bi-centennial US regime change. Its sovereignty grind down to bitter ash with the help of the international economic hit men and the White Savior NGO Industrial complex, headed by the likes of Dr. Paul Farmer, the UN, USAID, the Clintons, George Soros, the Bushes, the Washington “beltway bandits” consulting firms ( DynCorp, Chemonics…) and their Black collaborators.

Haiti is today occupied, terrorized, pillaged, re-enslaved.

“My name is Assata (“she who struggles”) Shakur (“the thankful one”), and I am a 20th century escaped slave. Because of government persecution, I was left with no other choice than to flee from the political repression, racism and violence that dominate the U.S. government’s policy towards people of color.”.” — Assata Shakur

Assata Shakur my sister, djab la di l ap manje w, se pa vre.

Recall Haiti’s Bwa Kayiman – the call, the prayer, the greatest struggle for rebirth ever told…and still unfolding. E, e, Mbomba, e, e! Kanga Bafyòti. Kanga Mundele. Kanga Ndòki. Kanga yo!

Kenbe la Assata. Nou la, nou la. Pa lage. Lamou pa nou an, li pli fò ke lanmò. Chèn sa pap janm kase! Nou fè yon sèl kò. Boukmann pa te fè Bwa Kayiman pou Assata Shakur sevi etranje.

“People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.” — Assata Shakur

Ezili Dantò of HLLN
Desalin’s Descendant
May, 2013

Review of Docudrama on the Life of Assata Shakur

Assata Shakur in Cuba Where She Was Granted Political Asylum From US Imperialism
Originally uploaded by Pan-African News Wire Photo File.

Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

April 10, 2007
Assata Shakur

http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/04/10/assata-shakur/

Last night I attended a private screening of “Assata”, a 93 minute ‘docudrama’ written and directed by my old friend Fred Baker. Despite the obvious shoestring budget, the film has more impact that the average Hollywood blockbuster costing 1000 times more. It is the story of Assata Shakur, nee Joanne Chesimard, the sixty year old Black liberation activist who fled from a New Jersey prison in 1979 and was granted political asylum in Cuba.

Along with Mumia and Leonard Peltier, she was one of the most prominent victims of the American injustice system. For many young people first coming around the Black liberation movement today, she is a symbol of resistance as the New York Times reported on December 13, 2006:

The chancellor of the City University of New York yesterday directed the president of City College to remove the names of two fugitives linked to violent crimes from the entrance to a student clubroom.

Matthew Goldstein, the chancellor, called the designation of the room as the Guillermo Morales/Assata Shakur Community and Student Center ”unauthorized and inappropriate.”

Ms. Shakur — once known as Joanne Chesimard — was a member of the Black Liberation Army convicted in the 1973 killing of a New Jersey state trooper. She is currently a federal fugitive living in Cuba. Mr. Morales, also in Cuba, was a leader of the Puerto Rican independence group known as the F.A.L.N., which claimed responsibility for a tavern bombing in Lower Manhattan that killed four people and injured others. Both were students at City College…

But the students were not ready to acquiesce.

Rodolfo Leyton, a City College senior and the center’s director, said students planned to speak to a lawyer, Ronald B. McGuire, and possibly ‘’seek legal remedies.” The center sued college and university officials in 1998 when it discovered a surveillance camera in a smoke detector across from it. That suit is still pending.

Mr. Leyton also said that while others view Ms. Shakur as guilty, ”we see her as a leader in her community who was framed and unlawfully convicted.” He said minutes of college proceedings in September 1989 dedicated the room to one of the groups still using the center, Students for Educational Rights. Others also use the space.

Fred Baker blends documentary-type material, including interviews with former Panther leader Kathleen Cleaver, now a law professor at Emory University in Atlanta, with a love story revolving around two young African-American characters who are both committed to finding out the truth about Assata Skakur. Justin (Charles Everett) is a documentary film maker who we first meet filming an outdoor jazz concert on a New York street. (As the director of acclaimed jazz films featuring John Coltrane, Stan Getz and others, Baker must have a strong identification with this character.) During filming, Justin runs into Asha (Erika Vaughn), a pretty college student who falls in love with him in a rather old-fashioned way. After a few visits to his apartment, she discovers a bookshelf full of material on Assata Shakur. This leads to a showdown with Justin to see how involved he is with her story. It turns out that he is very involved. The remainder of the film is structured around his recounting of Assata’s arrest and flight to freedom to Asha.

In a way, his passion for finding out the truth reminds me of the young African-American film-maker Keith A. Beauchamp’s dedication to Emmett Till. The martyrs and heroes of the Black Community have a way of inspiring succeeding generations of truth-tellers.

As somebody who had only very limited exposure to her case in the 1970s, I found Fred Baker’s film most instructive. Like many “old leftists” (Trotskyist, to be specific), I found much of the Black Panther and Black Liberation Army activities that Assata Shakur was involved with to be an ultraleft diversion from more pressing tasks in the mass movement. My political differences might have even led me to assume the worst about her, a mistake that the movie very effectively corrects.

Despite her reputation as a “terrorist,” there is no evidence that she actually shot a New Jersey State Trooper on January 23, 1973. Doctors testified that she was shot when her hands were up, while one of the arresting officer’s testimonies was riddled with contradictions. In one of the more dramatic scenes of the film, we see a recreation of the confrontation on the New Jersey highway that led to her arrest. It has the same kind of chilling effect as Earl Morris’s recreation of a similar incident in “The Thin Blue Line,” in which the police testimony is revealed to be full of holes. If there is anything that can be learned from cases such as Mumia’s or Assata Shakur’s, it is to take the word of the cops with a wheelbarrow full of salt.

In the early 70s, Assata Shakur became a kind of symbol of evil in the minds of white racist America that Nat Turner was in an earlier age. The police were anxious to hold her practically responsible for every crime that the Black Liberation movement was accused of around that time to the point that it became ridiculous.

Assata was never forgiven for her flight to freedom. Last May she was identified as a “domestic terrorist” and a one million dollar bounty was put on her head. Such is the state of the American justice system that she is still being hounded, while mass murderer Luis Posada Carriles is released on bond from a Texas jail. For news and information on Assata Shakur, check the website: http://www.assatashakur.org/

Fred Baker

In the Q&A last night, Fred Baker mentioned that his movie would eventually have a website. When it does, I will post a link to it. Considering the state of racial relations in the USA, with Don Imus’s “joke” about the Rutgers women basketball players and a white cop firing 31 bullets at an unarmed and unresisting Sean Bell, such a film is more urgent than ever.

Assata Shakur (1947-2025), A Revolutionary Life

Veteran of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army, former political prisoner, spent decades in Cuba under the protection of the socialist government

By Abayomi Azikiwe

Editor, Pan-African News Wire

Monday September 29, 2025

Political Review

On Thursday September 25, 2025, indications began to appear over social media that Assata Shakur, a longtime activist in the Black Liberation Movement, had died while living in exile in the Republic of Cuba.

Over the last few years, the whereabouts of Assata was not widely known due to the escalation of the news reports which focused on her being granted political asylum in Cuba.

The State of New Jersey and the United States government had placed a substantial bounty to be paid for her capture dead or alive. When she was captured earlier in May 1973, the corporate media in the U.S. had labelled her as a dangerous terrorist out to kill law-enforcement personnel. 

Although she was accused in the killing of a New Jersey state patrolman, Assata always maintained that she did not shoot anyone. Assata also conveyed that when arrested she had already been shot twice while her hands were up. Another BLA comrade, Zayid Malik Shakur was killed during the incident. Sundiata Acoli, also a member of the BLA, was captured and spent nearly five decades in prison. (https://www.nytimes.com/1973/05/08/archives/panther-buried-in-us-cemetery-shakur-navy-veteran-died-in-jersey.html)

This was by no means an isolated incident. Hundreds of African American activists were hunted down and placed in prison on trumped-up charges. Dozens were killed after being targeted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and various police agencies. 

Between 1967-1973, innumerable clashes occurred that led to the deaths of African Americans and law-enforcement personnel. The Justice Department under successive administrations conducted counter-intelligence operations against domestic political groupings. These armed battles involving the police, national guard and other law-enforcement agencies stemmed from the efforts to prevent a viable revolutionary movement in the U.S.

During this period in the mid-to-late 1960s and into the 1970s, other organizations were also subjected to campaigns of disruption and liquidation. Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Fred Hampton, Mark Clark, among many others lost their lives as a result of government machinations. 

Consequently, it is not surprising in retrospect that a section of the African American people would take up arms as a defensive measure against political repression. Assata explains in detail her transformation from being a student organizer, to joining the BPP and eventually the BLA in her autobiography entitled: “Assata, An Autobiography.” (https://files.libcom.org/files/assataauto.pdf)

After the 1970s, there was exponential growth within the prison-industrial complex in the U.S. This expansion of prisons and the further criminalization of the African American people took place during the same decades as the reemergence of imperialist military interventions in Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other geo-political regions in the aftermath of the defeat of U.S. imperialism in Southeast Asia in 1975. 

Repression Breed Resistance

The narrative put forward by the New Jersey police, the U.S. Justice Department and the corporate press sought to turn the public away from supporting Assata, the Black Panther Party and the BLA as a whole. Nonetheless, it was the repressive apparatus of the U.S. government which forced African American revolutionaries underground and into an armed posture. 

Yet those who met Assata while she was still in the U.S. or during visits to Cuba, described the veteran Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army organizer as a warm and kind individual. There are numerous oral interviews, articles and documentaries which reveal her motivations for joining the Black Liberation struggle during the late 1960s.

While attending the Borough of Manhattan Community College, Assata joined an African American student organization which placed a strong emphasis on African history and cultural heritages. During the late 1960s, these organizations arose at thousands of high schools and higher educational institutions around the U.S. 

These African American student organizations put forward the demands for Black Studies and Pan-African Studies programs on predominantly white campuses as well the HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities). The demand for Black Studies prompted other proposals to establish Latin American, Asian, Women’s Studies programs on urban and elite colleges and university campuses. These demands for curriculum reforms were made with the backdrop of urban rebellions and the advent of broader community organizations which would serve as a political rear base for the youth challenging the Eurocentric and capitalist-oriented educational system. 

Assata and Sundiata Acoli after 1973, were convicted and placed in prison. Assata was liberated by her BLA comrades and members of the Weather Underground in November 1979. She was granted political asylum in Cuba in 1984.

Black Liberation and International Solidarity

It is not surprising that Assata Shakur would be granted political asylum in revolutionary Cuba under its co-founder and longtime President Fidel Castro Ruz. Since the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in early 1959, legal edicts were issued abolishing racism and discrimination inside the country.

Early on in the revolutionary process, a policy of Pan-African solidarity and internationalism became enshrined in the foreign policy of Cuba. When the Congolese government under Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was overthrown at the aegis of its former Belgian colonial rulers aided by U.S. government, Che Guevara, the Minister of Economic Planning in Cuba denounced the assassination of Lumumba and threw his support behind the revolutionary forces still operating in the former Belgian Congo. 

In subsequent years, the Cuban government assisted the newly formed National Liberation Front administration in Algeria to defeat an attempted coup against their revolution. The Cubans would assist the revolutionaries in Guinea-Bissau, Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Ethiopia, Guinea, etc. to achieve and maintain their anti-colonial gains. 

This solidarity held firm in relations to the attempts to isolate African American revolutionaries during the 1960s through to the 1980s and beyond. People such as Robert and Mabel Williams took refuge in Cuba when they were forced into exile as a result of racial incidents in Monroe, North Carolina. Others such as Eldridge Cleaver, Huey P. Newton, Nehanda Abiodun, etc. were granted political asylum in Cuba. 

During the 2000s, President Castro announced a program to award scholarships to students in the U.S. from nationally oppressed communities to study medicine free of charge in Cuba. The program represented a repudiation of the cancellation and even outlawing of affirmative action admissions policies at universities in the U.S.

The Significance of a Revolutionary Life

With the transition of Assata Shakur in this monumental year of 2025 warrants a pause to reflect on the importance of her life and the inter-generational struggles to end racism, colonialism, imperialism and all forms of oppression and exploitation. The Black Panther Party during the late 1960s warned African Americans and all peoples in the U.S. about the potential of a fascist state.

In July 1969, the BPP called for and held a National Revolutionary Conference for a United Front Against Fascism. This dayslong event was held in Oakland, California, the birthplace of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in October 1966. The conference was attended by thousands of activists from the Bay Area and around the country. 

At this time the full force of the U.S. military and intelligence structures were focused on defeating the revolutionaries fighting for the total liberation of Vietnam along with suppressing the African American people in their genuine aspirations for complete freedom. This dual war domestically and internationally continues today albeit in different forms.

In the U.S., the administration of President Donald Trump has moved with rapid speed in dismantling the gains made by working and oppressed peoples over the last 70 years. The attempted erasure of African American history and that of other oppressed and exploited peoples is occurring right before the eyes of the world. 

The genocide in Gaza against the Palestinians serves as a warning about the dangers of imperialist impunity in the 21st century. With the expansion of the BRICS Plus Summit (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa and others), along with the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and other alternative plans for global development, is forcing U.S. imperialism into a desperate situation.

These current threats to the development and well-being of the majority of the world’s population will require the building of revolutionary organizations and alliances. Therefore, the work and experiences of Assata Shakur and the period in which she grew out of, will prove quite instructive to the battles facing the people in the 21st century.