Why Is FBI Going After Assata Shakur
Now?
By: Peniel E. Joseph
Posted: May 3, 2013 at 12:38 PM
The first woman on the Most Wanted Terrorists list
is exiled in Cuba. That may be a key reason. [Or maybe
there’s just no statute of limitations on murder.]
(The Root) -- The FBI's recent addition
to its Most
Wanted Terrorists list has reopened long-dormant
wounds from America's racial past. Assata Shakur's (formerly Joanne Chesimard)
distinction of being the
first woman on the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists List evokes
the triumphant and tragic legacy of the black power movement. [Triumphant? Dr. Joseph’s gonna have to go pretty far to find
that legacy. Let us join the cakewalk, shall we.]
It was during an era whose high point, between the
mid-1960's and mid-1970's, witnessed the exhilarating highs of Stokely
Carmichael's defiant declaration of "black power" and the
street-swaggering bravado of the leather-jacketed Black Panthers, as well as
the low points of fratricidal violence among militants. That violence was aided
and abetted by illegal surveillance of law-enforcement agencies, most notably
the FBI's notorious Counterintelligence Program, or COINTELPRO. [And the amazing stupidity, arrogance and bloody minded thirst for
violence of Huey Newton’s drug dealing Panthers and Maulana Ron Karanga’s
United Slaves, AKA US. From all of this grew the street gangs that we know
today The Crips, the Bloods, the Latin Kings and the syndicate in Chicago known
as The Black Stone Rangers.]
For almost 30 years, Shakur has resided in an
undisclosed location in Cuba. She is recognized by its government as a
revolutionary fugitive in exile, even as U.S. authorities have sought to
extradite her as a cold-blooded cop killer. [Notice the
masturbatory revolution fantasy? Young Joanne, in a leather jumpsuit, AK-74 at
the ready; yum, I’m getting hard already! It’s a shame she’s ballooned up to 200
lbs., and that’s on the light side. Gotta watch those rice and beans honey.] Shakur's
life in Cuba has been marked by a tenuous duality: She is at once venerated by
supporters -- including the Cuban government, which contributes to her living
expenses -- and increasingly vilified by U.S. officials, who have placed a $2
million bounty on her head. [That wouldn't be the same Cuban
“government” that has no problem sending out gangs of thugs to beat up The
Women in White when they ask for the status of their disappeared husbands, sons
and loved ones in peaceful street demonstrations. And isn’t it strange how so
many of these women and the prisoners they care about are black? But you ask, “How
can that be JimG33, when so many supporters of the Castro dictatorship in
Amerikkka are African-American?” Just a quote on that point---“N**ger!” taunted my jailers between tortures,” reported the
world’s longest suffering black political prisoner about his torment. “We
pulled you down from the trees and cut off your tail!” laughed my torturers.
For months I was naked in a 6 x 4 foot cell. That’s four feet high, so you
couldn’t stand. But I felt a great freedom inside myself. I refused to commit
spiritual suicide.” --- Eusebio Peñalver a black Cuban who spent 29 years in
Castro’s gulag. Just sayin’.]
To understand Joanne Chesimard's evolution from a
doe-eyed black teenager living in Queens, N.Y., to the black revolutionary
named Assata Shakur, accused of murder, requires going back more than 45 years
to an era of national civil unrest marked by anti-war protests, campus strikes
and deteriorating relations between blacks and whites that had liberals and
conservatives openly discussing the possibility of a race war. [The only people calling for a race war were Chesimard and
the other knuckleheads who believed that crap, I’m pointing at you Malcolm the
Tenth.] (Assata was part of the New York City Panthers, some of whom
took the surname "Shakur." The group's members included Afeni Shakur,
mother of rapper Tupac. Assata is also Tupac's step-aunt.)
By the time of Martin Luther King Jr.'s April 4,
1968, assassination, race relations in America had reached bottom, highlighted
by waves of urban riots that militants characterized as "rebellions"
and government bureaucrats called "civil disorders." The Black
Panther Party emerged from the burning embers of urban unrest at the vanguard
of a revolution that would, paradoxically, be fought with guns and butter. The
organization patrolled the streets of Oakland, Calif., brandishing legal
weapons, and simultaneously established free breakfast programs, health clinics
and anti-poverty measures that made it perhaps the era's most pragmatic
revolutionary group. [When the Panther’s accountant,
white, had discovered how much of that “free breakfast” money had ended up in
the pockets of Huey and the boys, and had been used to finance their coke
business, she ended up face down in the Golden Gate (check out Destructive Generation by David Horowitz
for this story). And the legal guns, they were for two reasons (1) to push out
the Mafia from the drug business in Oakland, (2) to hunt and kill police.]
The Panthers wrestled with this dual identity, with
advocates of armed revolution breaking off into the Black Liberation Army, an
entity inspired by the early writings of Panther leaders Huey P. Newton and
Eldridge Cleaver as well as successful guerrilla revolts in the developing world,
most notably Cuba. [Just what every little Amerikkkan black
boy wants to grow up to be, a domino playing unemployed nobody on the decaying
streets of Havana. Well they could whore themselves out to the touristas.]
It's within this historical context that Chesimard
became a black power activist, member of the underground BLA and convicted
felon after being convicted accused of killing a New Jersey state
trooper after a traffic stop gone [really] bad
in 1973. Ironically, Newton, the Black Panthers' minister of defense, had been
similarly accused of murdering a police officer six years earlier. The
subsequent "Free Huey" movement galvanized the New Left radicals and
black power activists, eventually leading to Newton's release in 1970. [By 1980 he had “earned” a PhD in The History Of Consciousness,
the kind of degree that guarantees a life of “You want fries with that?” On August
22, 1989, Newton was fatally shot in West Oakland by 24-year-old Black Guerrilla Family
member and drug dealer Tyrone Robinson shortly after Newton left a crack house.
He must have been lecturing on consciousness in the Middle Ages. Why else would
he be in such a place.]
Shakur's daring escape from jail in 1979 [She’s a regular Jimmy Cagney in White Heat!] and the publication of her gripping
autobiography, Assata, in
1987 turned her into an icon, elevating her to the status of revolutionary cult
figures such as former Panther/taxi driver Mumia
Abu-Jamal. [Another cop killer who should have
ridden Ole’ Sparky decades ago.] Their supporters remain as convinced of
their innocence as their detractors are of their guilt.
Over the past quarter century, Shakur has
intermittently made headlines, with former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd
Whitman vowing to pursue her case. Shakur has become a kind of totemic figure,
with young aspiring revolutionaries seeking her out as a living repository of
an era they find both inspiring and confounding. [The
era is only confounding to those who still don’t get why the USSR, and every
other Marxist dictatorship, collapsed or is living on life support from the
guilty West.]
Although the FBI has characterized Shakur as a
domestic terrorist, it's important to note that BLA members defined themselves
as revolutionaries in the mold of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and (in certain
instances) George Washington and the soldiers in the American Revolution who
engaged in asymmetrical warfare against a superior enemy. [That is a boldfaced lie of moral equivalence. Washington met
the enemy in the field with an army and the political backing of the Continental
Congress; he didn't set coach bombs in London, or even in British occupied New
York.]
However ill-advised their vantage point, Shakur and
hundreds of other "underground" soldiers of this era (including the
Weather Underground, a violent offshoot of Students for a Democratic Society)
viewed themselves as participants in a domestic war for liberation that was
less about skin color and the fear of a race war and more about institutions
(such as law enforcement and the federal government) that they found to be
authoritarian, oppressive and therefore illegitimate. [And yet every year there are elections in Amerikka, power is
peacefully passed from politician to politician. We have the dance of the
parties and only people like the ones presented here throw bombs and murder
people. And why, so we can live under their ”liberation” like the Marching
Morons of The People’s Republic of North Korea?]
Cuba, not surprisingly, plays a central role in this
drama. Its improbably successful 1959 revolution [Cuba
went through a series of revolutions since their liberation from Spain in what
we call The Spanish American War. For some reason, and I suspect it has to do
with the Latin American allergy to the concept of personal liberty, these “revolutions”
continued till Fidel and his party ended the bloody dance, and the politics of Cuba were frozen.] became a North Star for civil rights radicals and black power
militants who, both before and after the State Department's travel ban, visited
the island and praised its government's seeming commitment to racial equality. [Another lie. The deep seated racism of Ernesto “Che” Guevara,
and by extension, Fidel Castro should be better known. Some examples---. "We're
going to do for blacks exactly what blacks did for the revolution. By which I
mean: nothing." "The Negro is
indolent and lazy, and spends his money on frivolities, whereas the European is
forward-looking, organized and intelligent." "Mexicans are a band of illiterate
Indians." "Given the
prevailing lack of discipline, it would have been impossible to use Congolese
machine-gunners to defend the base from air attack: they did not know how to
handle their weapons and did not want to learn," The final example was his
Bolivian adventure in which he didn't have time to learn Qitchwa, the language
of the Inca still spoken by the local Indians. He actually expected them to
rise up in revolt when the superior white man told them to. After all he was
from Argentina where the Indians had been destroyed long ago, and I don’t mean
moved onto reservations.]
Fidel Castro responded in kind, providing safe
harbor for black fugitives Robert F. Williams and Cleaver, vowing to protect
Carmichael from the reprisals of the U.S. government and offering a haven for
representatives of the black liberation struggle that seemingly had no
expiration date. [This had to do with the Revolution;
otherwise they would have been just another set of uppity niggers to the Cuban
ruling elite.]
That is, at least until now. The declining health of
Castro and the advancing age of his brother Raúl have triggered rampant
speculation that Cuba's socialist experiment is poised to conclude, or at least
change dramatically. [Hell the Army and the Party have
a deep bench, I guess, just hope they can move on when Fidel and Raul slip the
mortal coil. But maybe there’ll be a civil war, who the fuck knows.] By
announcing Shakur's new status, the U.S. government is perhaps throwing out a
trial balloon to test the contemporary strength of past commitments. Fidel
Castro's Cuba, on principle, would never give up Shakur to what it views to be
an imperialist U.S. government with plans to imprison her. However, this is not
Castro's Cuba. [How did he figure that out?] Indeed,
the easing of travel restrictions is only one example of the ongoing thaw in
Cuban-American relations.
Whether or not Shakur will be used as a sacrificial
lamb to ensure further progress remains to be seen. For now her reappearance in
national media headlines (including on the Internet, which did not exist during
black power's heyday) reminds us of the ways in which our complicated racial
past continues to inform our imagined post-racial present. [When it comes to an intellectual like Dr. Joseph, who has so
much invested in the continuation of segregation such bloody minded “scholarship”
will continue passing as, well, scholarship. Otherwise he would also face a
life of “Do you want fries with that?]
Peniel E. Joseph is founding director of
the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy and a professor of history at
Tufts University. He is also the Caperton Fellow for the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute
at Harvard University. He is the author of Waiting
'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black
Power in America and Dark
Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama. His
biography of Stokely Carmichael will be published next year by Basic Books. He
can be reached online at penielejoseph.com. Follow
him on Twitter.
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