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Assata Shakur: a woman warrior
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TheBlackList CULLECTION
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Feb 06, 2007 21:34 PST
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Date: Mon, 5 Feb 2007 16:23:39 -0500 (EST)
From: ny-@olm.blythe-systems.com
Subject: [NYTr] Assata Shakur: a woman warrior
To: ny-@olm.blythe-systems.com (NY Transfer List)
Socialism and Liberation - Feb, 2997 issue
http://socialismandliberation.org/mag/index.php?aid=751
Assata Shakur: a woman warrior
By Alina Serrano
In December 2006, a gain won 17 years ago by City University of New Yorks
City College students came under sudden attack. A right-wing media campaign
prompted CUNY chancellor Matthew Goldstein and the college's administration
to demand that students take down the sign above the student center. The
center had been named the Guillermo Morales/Assata Shakur Community and
Student Center in the wake of massive 1989 protests against tuition
increases.
Morales and Shakur were both City College students in the 1960s. Morales is
a Puerto Rican revolutionary and active in the Armed Forces for National
Liberation (FALN), a group fighting for Puerto Ricos independence and
liberation. Shakur was a member of the Black Panther Party and later the
Black Liberation Army. Both are currently living as political exiles in
Cuba.
The media campaign against the Morales/Shakur Center was carefully timed.
It opened up only days after New York City cops shot and killed 23-year-old
Sean Bell in a hail of 50 bullets. It was a deliberate attempt to divert
public attention from the cop murder.
But the campaign also became an opportunity for todays students to learn
about a great revolutionary Black woman hero.
Assata Shakur was born JoAnne Chesimard. She took the name Assata, meaning
she who struggles, and Shakur, meaning the thankful one. She became
politically active as a student at CUNYs Manhattan Community College and
later at City College.
She joined the Black Panther Party, where she worked with the Harlem
office. In her autobiography, she describes the challenge of doing
revolutionary work -- she set up a Saturday liberation school for young
people -- in the midst of severe police repression and the FBIs
counter-intelligence program COINTELPRO.
After she left the Panthers, she began working with the underground Black
Liberation Army. "I wasn't one who believed that we should wait until our
political struggle had reached a high point before we began to organize the
underground," she wrote.
In the course of that work, Shakur was arrested on a series of charges
ranging from robbery to attempted murder. Each time she was acquitted.
But in 1973, she was arrested in an incident on the New Jersey Turnpike in
which a cop was killed. She was shot. One of her comrades, Zayd Shakur, was
killed and the other, Sundiata Acoli, was sentenced to prison for the
confrontation. He was recently denied parole for another 20 years.
Shakur charges that she and her co-defendants "were convicted [of killing
the cop] in the news media way before our trials." During the highway
confrontation, later forensics investigation proved that she was shot in
the back while her hands were raised, and evidence showed that she did not
fire a gun.
Shakur currently lives in Cuba as an exile. In 1979, supporters helped her
to escape from prison. In 1986, she was given asylum in Cuba, where she
continues to fight for equality, freedom and revolution for the Black and
Latino masses and all the working class.
Assata Shakur is a woman warrior who has worked and sacrificed tirelessly
in the struggle. She belongs in the legacy of African American
abolitionists like Harriet Tubman, who worked to free hundreds of slaves,
and Ida B. Wells, who fought for Black people's rights and women's rights.
Throughout the history of the African American people's struggles, women
heroes have shown that the only way to a better life was to organize and
fight in a disciplined way. Shakur acted with great dignity and courage
when she stood up to federal government and state repression throughout her
trials. She would very likely not be alive and in Cuba if it were not for
the well-organized communities that respected her work.
To this day, Shakur needs the support of the progressive movement in the
United States. The right-wing campaign at City College is part of a larger,
well-organized effort to recapture her. In 2005, she was classified as a
domestic terrorist by the U.S. government and had a $1 million bounty put
on her head.
Assata has said, "All I represent is just another slave that they want to
bring back to the plantation. Well, I might be a slave, but I will go to my
grave a rebellious slave."
More information on the campaign to defend Assata Shakur can be found at
http://www.handsoffassata.org.
[Alina Serrano is a student at City College of the
City University of New York.]
Articles may be reprinted with credit to Socialism and Liberation magazine.
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