JERSEY
PANTHERS COVER DOWN ON ASSATA
BLAST
BLACK HEAD OF STATE TROOPERS
by ‘little Red’
On Monday evening, July 16th, the New
Jersey chapter of the New Black Panther Party hosted a spirited birthday
celebration and teach-in in Newark in defense of political prisoner in-exile,
Assata Shakur, called ‘For The Love Of Assata/For The Freedom Of
Sundiata.’
The teach-in was a response to a renewed call for this valiant freedom
fighter’s head by the newly appointed superintendent of the New Jersey State
Police, Carson Dunbar, the first African-American to head the upsouth state’s
top law enforcement agency, notoriously known for starting and
institutionalizing racial profiling. Dunbar made the comments at a press
conference for NJ Congressman Steven Rothman several weeks ago. Rothman called
for a new congressional bill that he is calling ‘The No Save Haven In Cuba
Act.’ The bill says basically that the United States would not recognize any
democratically-elected government without Cuba first turning over
“fugitives” like Shakur.
Shakur, still referred to as Joanne Chesimard by her
former captors and their agents, was a member of the Black Panther Party and the
Black Liberation Army. On May 2, 1973, in what many say was one of the worst
examples of racial profiling, the car she and two other colleagues were riding
in was stopped and fired upon by NJ state troopers on the NJ Turnpike in New
Brunswick. When it was all over, she was critically wounded. Another colleague
Zayd Shakur and a state trooper Werner Foerster were dead. Later, Shakur was
tried and convicted along with Sundiata Acoli, the other surviving colleague, by
an all-white jury in a very prejudiced and sensational atmosphere for being
responsible for Foerster’s death and was sentenced to life plus 30 years.
On November 2, 1979, Black Solidarity Day, Shakur was liberated from what is now
known as the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility in Clinton, NJ. She has since
lived in asylum in revolutionary Cuba.
The teach-in began with a sensitive libation to
“our Black revolutionary ancestors.” The organizers then presented a warm,
holistic picture of Shakur almost opposite as a grandchild of proud landowning
and enterprising grandparents from Wilmington, North Carolina, as the daughter
of a fiercely independent Black woman, the late Doris Johnson, and how a bright
and talented young woman who was roundly introduced the great art traditions of
Black New York and of the whole city in general by her aunt Evelyn Williams, a
pioneering black female attorney, as a hardworking, understated, courageous
young woman who joined the Black Panther Party and who heroically, but
painfully, emerged as a singular target for FBI COINTELPRO operations. Operation
Chesrob was named and described by one of the teach-in’s facilitators as
being particularly aimed just at Shakur. The organizers explained that even
though Assata proved at her trial that she was shot with her hands up and
critically wounded, her all-white Morris County jury convicted her anyway. The
organizers also presented a bold open letter to Dunbar that they intend to send
out to the Black press “explaining just who Assata is because obviously he
doesn’t know.”
The teach-in also included a moving tribute to
Sundiata Acoli, Shakur’s co-defendant in the turnpike incident. They told how
Acoli was a gifted mathematician who graduated from the historically Black
college Prairie View University and who even worked for a short while at NASA
because of his exceptional gifts, but when he “heard the drum of struggle, he
answered in a very real way, and joined the Black Panther Party in
1968,”explained Muhammad who facilitated most of the teach-in.
“Look at what Sundiata had going for him. He could
easily be living a comfortable, cushy, bourgeoisie life, but he put it all on
the line, still is, so things could be better for us and our babies,” Muhammad
stressed.
Acoli is now in his 28th year of incarceration, making him one of the
longest held political prisoners in the United States.
Ras Baraka, a hip hop activist running for Newark City Council, had his
own impressions of Shakur.
“One thing that Assata taught me that I’ll never forget is that she
learned that is was important not just to organize for the people, but to
organize with the people, and that’s what we gotta learn to start doing.
Wherever the people are, and whenever the people are doing things, we have to be
there with them, and then we can show how take what they’re doing somewhere
else,” he said.
They finished by presenting a huge birthday cake to the children and the elders in the audience, which warmly read “We love you, Assata,” from what they called the ‘Assata Welcome Table.’ This was a kente-cloth covered table arrayed with a host of Assata memorabilia, including a framed picture of the Black Liberation Army poster which read ‘Assata is Welcome Here,’ that surfaced in New York’s Black community once Shakur was “liberated from prison by what was left of our underground.”
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©2001 all rights reserved
7/19/01