THE
NEW BLACK PANTHER PARTY
THE
GREATER NEW YORK-NEW JERSEY CHAPTERS
OFFICE
OF CHIEF OF STAFF
P.O.
BOX 25332
NEWARK,
NEW JERSEY 07101
973-776-3901,
EXT. 2966
An Open Letter To Carson Dunbar*
Sir,
Since you are so terribly and pathetically out of touch with just who
you are insultingly calling Joanne Chesimard, and since you are so outta your
Afrikan mind, let’s get this straight…
Her name is Assata!…
Although her enemies and the enemies of our people insist on calling her “the notorious, copkiller Joanne Chesimard,” as they continue to demonize her, her name is Assata…
To be sure, it is actually ‘Assata Olubala Shakur,’ or ‘she
who struggles, loves her people and is grateful’…
For the bravest of our ancestors who have gone on
before us,
for the strength of her family, like her
grandparents, who taught her from the time that she was a child how to stand up
to racists,
for having had comrades who were heroically rich in
courage,
and for the compassion, love and tongueless support
of those who helped her on her way along those blazing trails of the
underground, with her incredible life commitment, with her very blood spilt from
her tender torso several times, she has indeed proven herself to be most
grateful…
She was born on July 16, 1947, in the People’s
Republic of Brooklyn to the late Doris Johnson, a proud Black woman who took no
shorts…
Her maternal grandparents, the Freemans, were
fiercely independent Black people from Wilmington, North Carolina. As
landowners, entrepreneurs and Klan-resisters, they personally understood what
Malcolm tried to get us to understand, “that land is the basis of all
independence!”…With that clarity, they valiantly fought off the rednecks and
the bloodsuckers to hold onto their own choice land on Wilmington’s beachfront
for decades!…
Her aunt, Evelyn Williams,** a trailblazing Black
female attorney in her own right who called our sister her little “Joey,” as
a child, and who would later be her attorney,…this woman taught our sister to
inhale intellect, excellence, the arts and culture, and all of the world as it
came thru New York that she could...
Together, these strong family anchors would shape
Assata into becoming the fearless, precocious, artist, dancer, poet, writer,
organizer, mother, grandmother and warrior woman that she would ultimately
become…
As a college student seeking her true self, she was
deeply impressed with the emergence of young people rising up to change the
world…To become apart of that she dared to join the Black Panther Party
because she deeply affected by its unique, obvious and special place in the
whirlwind, a vehicle that uniquely allowed for the most disconnected and
disaffected of our youth at that time to enter onto the stage of history as
revolutionary agents of change, and as perhaps the boldest example of attempting
to implement Malcolm’s line in the teeming slums of this country’s upsouth
northern cities…
It was apart of the New York chapter of the party
that she became a ‘Shakur,’…along with other fearless Panthers from those
ranks like Afeni Shakur, Tupac’s mom, like Lumumba Shakur, a brother who got
things done and wore his dredlocks with regal ease way before they ‘got in
style,’ like a young Mutulu Shakur, who later become Dr. Mutulu Shakur, a
pioneering acupuncturist who used this ancient tradition to get people clean,
and who is now one of our political prisoners and like Zayd Shakur, a
resourceful organizer who tragically did not survive ‘The Turnpike
Massacre’…
Assata worked in the Party’s medical cadre,…their
sickle cell clinics, their portable free street clinics, who worked hard making
the Party’s example of a socialist alternative within a racist and capitalist
paradigm that cared nothing about its poor, especially its black poor!
Then came COINTELPRO, …the government’s obsession with destroying our movement. When they failed to get convictions in the Panther 21 case of 1971, they forced people to go underground, isolating them and charging with criminal offenses all along the way. On top of that, the enormous drama surrounding what would come to be known as ‘The Split,’ the terrible internal rupture within the Party, would all combine to effectively destroy the Party as an aboveground organization.
But some like Assata vowed to ‘carry it on’! They
formed the Black Liberation Army. Although they continued to raize hell, the
government moved from counterintelligence to counterinsurgence. The government
then went after these brave men and with a vengence! As a consequence, Assata,
and many of her comrades, would then become targets of a particular
counterintelligence operation known as ‘Operation
Newkill,’ anytime a policeman came under fire, they would seek out former
Panthers to blame for it. For Assata, they even had one called ‘Operation
Chesrob,’ an operation aimed specifically at her to make it impossible for
her to ever live any semblance of a normal life ever again…
And then came May 2, 1973…
Somewhere between 10 and 12 that night, the car
Assata was in on the New Jersey Turnpike, was pulled over by state trooper
Harper on the basis of an alleged taillight violation…Shots were fired…and
in the end, Zayd Shakur and trooper Werner Foerster were dead; Assata and
Sundiata were critically wounded and captured…
Once captured, Assata was tortured and literally put
under a Middlesex County Jail. While awaiting trial, she would be forced to
stand trial nearly a dozen times in a variety of bank robberies in New York (the
playing out of Operation Chesrob). In spite of her prosecutors and
persecutors going all out to make some of those charges stick, she was acquitted
in all of them!…Only to be convicted of murder in 1977, along with Sundiata,
by an all-white jury in Morris
County, the whitest and richest county in New Jersey, for the Turnpike incident,
even though she forensically proved that she could not have fired any weapons in
that incident because her hands were up when she got shot!…
Once convicted and sent to prison, the torture and abuse would continue. She was deliberately put in life-threatening situations, like being left alone with Klanwomen in the Alderman, West Virginia federal facility.
That all changed suddenly on November 2, 1979,
however, when the whirlwind blew Oya-like*** through that backwards
upsouth state in which we share a residence. It was Black Solidarity Day, and
forces from the underground came to what is now known as the Edna Mahan
Correctional Facility in Clinton, New Jersey and liberated our sister!
Feeding off the heroism of Assata and her comrades,
some of our people, even though their homes and communities would come under
siege in response to what became known as ‘Assata sightings,’ …some of the
people boldly celebrated Assata being liberated…Up went posters which boldly
said ‘Assata Is Welcome Here!’
The people were not going to let the two-legged
police dogs, the government and the media turn them against this valiant freedom
fighter…
And so we say today, as they still try to villainize,
demonize and terrorize our minds’ eyes with more of their lies, we know who
our heroes are and who our enemies are…
Because of her commitment, because of her special
place in the whirlwind, we boldly say now what we said as we rolled over 60 deep
with our Assata Shakur Freedom Fighters Caravan Straight Outta Jersey to the
Million Youth March, that ‘Assata Is Always
Welcome Here!’ …
Mr. Dunbar, you may have carried around Trooper Foerster’s picture with you and identify with him, as a fellow law enforcer, to remind you of “the dangers of the job,” as you put it, but the people, who are the heart, flesh and soul of the movement and the resistance that put you in your job, we identify with that brave sister, forced underground by government repression for standing up for justice and whose only crime was that she survived one of the worst expressions of racial profiling in the history of its practice!…And she was placed there by nothing more than the color of her skin, no matter who she identified with!…
Your masters may find your bootlicking and pathetic
stance becoming and reassuring, but we, the people who continue to resist, do
not…
Hands Off Assata! Free Sundiata!
Ban Racial Profiling!
Free All Political Prisoners! Free The Land!
Long Live the Cuban Revolution!
Black Power!
All Power To The People!
Bro.Zayid Muhammad,
Regional Chief of Staff, New Black Panther Party
July 16, 2001, the anniversary of the ascension John Henrik Clarke to the ancestry, the birthday of Assata Shakur…
*Dunbar
is the first African-American to head the N.J. State Police…In June 2001,
Dunbar, in pure masterserving form, stood with New Jersey Congressman Steven
Rothman, a doublespeaking ‘Clinton’ Democrat,
in support of Rothman’s call for ‘The No Safe Haven In Cuba Act,’
renewing the State of New Jersey’s call to have Assata extradited back to New
Jersey as a necessary precondition for the normalizing of any relations with
Cuba…
**Evelyn
Williams own narrative Inadmissable Evidence is a must companion read to Assata:The
Autobiography…
***Oya…the
Yoruba orisha associated with storms…
’Bro. Zayid’ Kazi Angaza Kikongo Muhammad
7/19/01