Assata Shakur, FBI’s white whale?
By William Boardman
Why does the FBI consider a 65-year-old woman a “Most Wanted Terrorist?”
NOTE: As you consider this article, keep in mind an undisputed, convicted terrorist who bombed hotels and nightclubs in Havana and a Cuban Airliner, killing 73. Luis Posada Carriles has denied the airliner, admitted the rest. The U.S. has refused to deport him to either Cuba or Venezuela or to prosecute him for terrorism because, after all, he was our terrorist, an anti-communist and a CIA asset.
BI Terror List: Bombers of U.S. Embassies, Pan Am Flights, Khobar, & USS Cole
The World’s Number One Terrorist on the FBI web site, at the top of the FBI’s official list of “Most Wanted Terrorists,” is Joanne Deborah Chesimard, whose birth name is Byron and whose current name is Assata Shakur.
Shakur, 65, is the aunt and godmother of the late hip-hop icon Tupac Shakur. A fugitive since 1979, she has lived in Cuba under political asylum since 1984. In her twenties, she was a leading black liberation activist in New York, relentlessly pursued by authorities until she was jailed in 1973. Dubiously convicted of murder in 1977, she escaped from prison while her appeal was pending. In 2005, the FBI, without alleging any terrorist acts, retroactively labeled her a “domestic terrorist.” And on May 2, 2013, the FBI named her the Terrorist List’s first woman, first black woman, first mother, first godmother, and perhaps even first grandmother.
“She’s a danger to the American government,” said Aaron T. Ford, the agent in charge of the FBI’s Newark, New Jersey, division at a news conference called to make the Most Wanted Terrorist announcement. The FBI scheduled the media event on the 40th anniversary of the crime for which Shakur was convicted in 1977, and about which she has always maintained her innocence.
“She continues to flaunt her freedom in the face of this horrific crime,” State Police superintendent Col. Rick Fuentes said at the same news conference, where he called the case “an open wound” for troopers in New Jersey and around the country.
Officially, the FBI Says, She “Should Be Considered Armed and Dangerous”
As it turns out, she’s not widely perceived as a threat by much of anyone. She continues to advocate revolutionary change, she writes books and shorter pieces, she has a YouTube channel, “Assata Shakur Speaks Out.” Her life and work are included in black studies courses at colleges like Bucknell and Rutgers. The Cuban government pays her something like $13 a day to help keep her alive.
Outside the law enforcement community, those who know about Assata Shakur perceive an entirely different person. The newly-elected mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, considers her “wrongfully convicted.” A sociology professor at Columbia University says there’s “just no material evidence” to support the lone conviction that resulted from seven different trials. A New York City councilman has called for the bounty on Shakur to be rescinded.
For both sides, for all Americans, this case represents some of the unfinished business of the “Sixties.”
The critical event that is perceived so differently by different people took place on May 2, 1973, when two white New Jersey State Troopers, in separate cruisers, stopped a Pontiac LeMans with Vermont plates on the New Jersey Turnpike for a “broken taillight.” The car held two black men and Shakur, all members of the revolutionary Black Liberation Army. In the shootout that followed, a trooper and one of the black men died. Shakur and the other trooper were wounded. The other black man, Sundiata Acoli, drove away in the Pontiac with Shakur seriously wounded, and they were arrested separately not long after.
FBI Says, “Her Standard of Living Is Higher Than Most Cubans”
The FBI’s current version of the event has no ambiguity: “On May 2, 1973, Chesimard [Shakur], who was part of a revolutionary extremist organization known as the Black Liberation Army, and two accomplices were stopped for a motor vehicle violation on the New Jersey Turnpike by two troopers with the New Jersey State Police…. Chesimard and her accomplices opened fire on the troopers. One trooper was wounded and the other was shot and killed execution-style at point-blank range. Chesimard fled the scene, but was subsequently apprehended. One of her accomplices was killed in the shoot-out and the other was also apprehended and remains in jail.”
In fact, Shakur was shot twice, apparently with her hands up, while turning away. The bullets wounded her upper arms, armpit, and chest, all of which is undisputed. Expert medical testimony at trial held that her wounds rendered her incapable of firing any weapon. There was no forensic evidence to show that she had fired a weapon, no gunpowder residue, no fingerprint on any weapon. The surviving trooper admitted on the stand that he had lied to the Grand Jury and testified at trial that he had never seen Shakur with a gun. After a New Jersey legislator reportedly lobbied the jury for conviction while they were sequestered, the all-white jury delivered a guilty verdict.
FBI COINTELPRO Crimes Give Context to Assata Shakur’s Actions
One of her attorneys, Lennox Hinds, now a law professor at Rutgers University, put this event in the context of the time, when the FBI was regularly violating the law with its COINTELPRO program that targeted people the FBI deemed too radical, especially anti-war protestors and black power advocates. The FBI says all COINTELPRO operations ended in 1971, adding somewhat delicately: “COINTELPRO was later rightfully criticized by Congress and the American people for abridging first amendment rights and for other reasons.”
Those other reasons might include law breaking, since COINTELPRO activities included burglaries, wiretaps, physical threats, vandalism, and other illegal actions, even alleged assassinations. There have been no prosecutions of COINTELPRO crimes.
As Lennox Hines told DemocracyNOW! the day after the FBI’s Terrorist List press conference:
In the FBI’s own words, they wanted to discredit, to stop the rise of a black messiah – that was the fear of the FBI – so that there would not be a Mau Mau, in their words, uprising in the United States. And they were, of course, referring to the liberation movement that occurred in Kenya, Africa.
Now, the FBI carried out a campaign targeting not only the Black Panther Party. They targeted SCLC. They targeted Martin Luther King. They targeted Harry Belafonte. They targeted Eartha Kitt. They targeted anyone who supported the struggle for civil rights, that they considered to be dangerous.
William Kunstler, one of Shakur’s several defense attorneys, had successfully introduced COINTELPRO evidence at a trial of members of the American Indian Movement (AIM). His motion to do so in Shakur’s trial was denied.
Perjury to Indict, Jury Tampering to Convict – The New Jersey Way?
Referring to the FBI’s sometimes criminal political repression, attorney Hines said:
It is in that context we need to look at what happened on the New Jersey Turnpike in 1973. What they call Joanne Chesimard, what we know as Assata Shakur, she was targeted by the FBI, stopped. And the allegation that she was a cold-blooded killer is not supported by any of the forensic evidence.
If we look at the trial, we’ll find that she was victimized, she was shot. She was shot in the back. The bullet exited and broke the clavicle in her shoulder. She could not raise a gun. She could not raise her hand to shoot. And she was shot while her hands were in the air.
Now, that is the forensic evidence. There is not one scintilla of evidence placing a gun in her hand. No arsenic residue was found on her clothing or on her hands. So, the allegation by the state police that she took an officer’s gun and shot him, executed him in cold blood, is not only false, but it is designed to inflame.
An example of such inflammatory rhetoric came from Special Agent Ford at the May 2 press conference: “Openly and freely in Cuba, she continues to maintain and promote her terrorist ideology. She provides anti-U.S. government speeches espousing the Black Liberation Army message of revolution and terrorism. No person, no matter what his or her political or moral convictions are, is above the law. Joanne Chesimard is a domestic terrorist who murdered a law enforcement officer, execution-style.”
Inflammatory Rhetoric Can Help Distract People from Facts
Presumably Agent Ford is aware that Sundiata Acoli remains in prison for killing the “law enforcement officer execution style,” that the label “domestic terrorist” was arbitrarily applied in 2005, and that Assata Shakur considers “Joanne Chesimard” her slave name – and that acknowledging any of those facts would run the risk of possibly humanizing this sexagenarian “danger to the American government.”
The FBI press release of May 2 dishonestly fudges the case, saying, “Chesimard [Shakur] and Squire [Acoli] were charged, convicted, and sentenced for the murder,” as if there hadn’t been two separate trials, four years apart; and as if the second trial of Shakur hadn’t taken place while the convicted murderer of the trooper was already serving his sentence.
The point that the first person convicted of the trooper’s murder has been in prison since 1973 goes unmentioned in most media coverage of the Shakur case. In an egregious example of slanted reporting, The New York Times on May 2 not only fails to mention Acoli, but frames the story with the trooper’s “execution,” thus leaving the reader little room to infer anything but Shakur’s sole guilt, even though that’s false even if she’s partly guilty as an accomplice according to law.
Special Agent Ford Sounds a Bit Obsessed As He Hurls Verbal Harpoons
According to NBC News, Ford said there was no specific new threat that led the bureau to add Shakur to the list. He said she “remains an inspiration to the radical, left-wing, anti-government, black separatist movement…. Some of those people, and the people that espouse those ideas, are still in this country. So we’d be naïve not to think that there’s some communication between her and the people she used to run around with.”
While comments at a press conference might be hyperbole in the heat of the moment, Agent Ford’s comments were much the same three weeks later in an interview with Christine Amanpour as reported by Yahoo! News on May 23:
It’s unfortunate that someone involved in the murder of an officer, kidnappings, hostage takings and robberies in a 14-year span is revered by a segment of society…. For us, justice never sleeps, justice never rests. We’re looking to bring her to justice because she committed a heinous act. She is a member of an organization [Black Liberation Army] which espoused hate against the U.S. government….
Agent Ford was apparently not asked how one should feel about the U.S. government when it executes such illegal programs as COINTELPRO. And he didn’t say what the government knows of Shakur’s communications through NSA’s PRISM program or other electronic surveillance.
Can the FBI Distinguish Between Thought Crime and Terror?
Talking about a 65-year-old woman effectively confined to Cuba, Agent Ford called her “a supreme terror against the government” and said without apparent irony: “We absolutely still consider her a threat. She is a menace to society still. She has connections and associations from members of that party she belonged to years ago. They are still espousing anti-government views….”
In 1997, when Pope John Paul II was planning to visit Cuba, the New Jersey superintendent of state police wrote asking him to intervene on the state’s side in the Shakur case by persuading Cuba to extradite her. Superintendent Carl Williams did not make his letter to the Pope public, but he made sure his request was well publicized.
Learning of this, Shakur wrote the Pope her own open letter, which she also broadcast. Aired on Democracy NOW! in 1998 and again on May 2, the letter details her story of her life and resistance, with an early reference to the secret New Jersey letter:
Why, I wonder, do I warrant such attention? What do I represent that is such a threat? Please let me take a moment to tell you about myself. My name is Assata Shakur and I was born and raised in the United States. I am a descendant of Africans who were kidnapped and brought to the Americas as slaves. I spent my early childhood in the racist segregated South. I later moved to the northern part of the country, where I realized that Black people were equally victimized by racism and oppression….
The Letter Has Biography, Polemic, Analysis, Confession
Later she admits to harboring the very thoughts the FBI still considers criminal: “I think that it is important to make one thing very clear. I have advocated and I still advocate revolutionary changes in the structure and in the principles that govern the United States. I advocate self-determination for my people and for all oppressed inside the United States. I advocate an end to capitalist exploitation, the abolition of racist policies, the eradication of sexism, and the elimination of political repression. If that is a crime, then I am totally guilty.”
At the end of her fundamentally political, 1800-word-plus statement, written on Martin Luther King’s birthday, she concluded with her request to the Pope:
I am not writing to ask you to intercede on my behalf. I ask nothing for myself. I only ask you to examine the social reality of the United States and to speak out against the human rights violations that are taking place.
To judge by the public record, the Pope chose not to get involved.
Pursuing Assata Shakur Has Taken On a Ritual Aspect
The FBI and other agencies first became interested in Assata Shakur (then still Chesimard: she changed it around 1970) in the mid-1960s, perhaps at the time of her first arrest in 1967, when she and about 100 other students demonstrated at the Borough of Manhattan Community College. Many charges and sometimes arrests followed, but she wasn’t held or tried, not even in 1971, after she was shot in the stomach. (Later she reportedly said she was glad she was shot, so she wouldn’t be afraid to be shot again.) That case was dismissed.
In the early 1970s, Shakur had been accused of enough crimes that she was the subject of a nationwide manhunt as the “revolutionary mother hen” of a Black Liberation Army cell accused of a “series of cold-blooded murders of New York City Police officers.”
Deputy Commissioner Robert Daley of the New York City Police called Shakur “the final wanted fugitive, the soul of the gang, the mother hen who kept them together, kept them moving, kept them shooting.”
By early 1973, the FBI was issuing nearly daily reports on Shakur’s status, activities, and allegations. She was even the apparent namesake of the FBI operation CHESROB, though it was not limited to her in focus. For all the attention and allegations, when Assata was captured on May 2, 1973, she was not charged with any of these crimes.
Assata’s Prosecutors Had a Big Problem Finding Credible Evidence
Starting in December 1973, once Shakur had recovered sufficiently from her gunshot wounds, various jurisdictions brought her to trial for various charges, with mostly dismal results:
Dec. 1973 – bank robbery – hung jury, dismissed.
Dec. 1973 – re-trial, bank robbery – acquitted.
Jan. 1974 – murder of NJ trooper – mistrial due to her pregnancy.
May 1974 – two separate murder indictments – lack of evidence, dismissed.
Sept. 1975 – kidnapping – acquitted.
Jan. 1976 – bank robbery – Acquitted.
Feb. 1977 – murder of NJ trooper – convicted.
Shakur would spend more than six years in various prisons, often under deplorable conditions, with brutal treatment. In 1979, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights found that her treatment was “totally unbefitting to any prisoner.”
The UN investigation of alleged human rights abuses of political prisoners cited Shakur as “one of the worst cases” – in “a class of victims of FBI misconduct through the COINTELPRO strategy and other forms of illegal government conduct who as political activists have been selectively targeted for provocation, false arrests, entrapment, fabrication of evidence, and spurious criminal prosecutions.”
On November 2, 1979, Shakur’s brother Mutulu Shakur brought two other men and a woman to see her in the prison visitors’ room. Prison officials did not search them. Prison officials did not run checks on their false identification papers. They had guns. They took two guards as hostages and left with Shakur. No one was hurt, the guards were left in the parking lot.
The Hunt for Assata Shakur Goes On in Fourth Decade
For the next five years, Shakur was a fugitive with the FBI searching for her, and her community protecting her. Three days after her escape, more than 5,000 demonstrators rallied in her support. The FBI circulated wanted posters; her supporters circulated “Assata Shakur Is Welcome Here” posters. In 1980, the head of the FBI complained that residents weren’t cooperating. Residents were alienated by heavy-handed police tactics including a crude, door-smashing raid that turned up nothing and by surveillance of Shakur’s daughter going to grade school.
Although the intensity of the search has waned – the FBI knows where she is, after all – both the FBI and the New Jersey State Police reportedly have an agent assigned to the case fulltime.
In recent years, the pursuit has taken on an anniversary pattern. On May 2, 2005, the FBI named Shakur a domestic terrorist and posted a $1 million reward for her capture. On May 2 this year, the FBI promoted her to the Most Wanted Terrorist list and New Jersey added another $1 million to the reward pool.
How and why these decisions are made is unclear. In response to an inquiry, the FBI Office of Public Affairs stated: “The inner workings of how people get selected to the List are not something the FBI shares with the general public.” According to the same office:
People are added to the List when they meet the following criteria:
- They have threatened the security of US nationals or the national security of the USA.
- They are considered a dangerous menace to society.
- They are the subject of a pending FBI investigation and have an active federal arrest warrant.
- The worldwide publicity must be thought to be able to assist in the apprehension of the terrorist.
The FBI did not respond to a request for a definition of “terror” or “terrorist.” Nor did the FBI respond to specific questions about Chesimard/Shakur “due to the ongoing investigation into her whereabouts.”
Joanne Deborah Byron, then Chesimard for three years ending in 1970, took her new name then for its specific meaning: Assata (“she who struggles”) Olugbala (“for the people”) Shakur (“the thankful one”).
All She Asked of Her All-White New Jersey Jury Was Fairness
At her trial in 1977, Shakur gave an opening statement to that all-white jury that concluded:
Although the court considers us peers, many of you have had different backgrounds and different learning and life experiences. It is important to me that you understand some of those differences. I only ask of you that you listen carefully. I only ask that you listen not only to what these witnesses say but to how they say it. Our lives are no more precious or no less precious than yours. We ask only that you be as open and as fair as you would want us to be, were we sitting in the jury box determining your guilt or innocence. Our lives and the lives that surround us depend on your fairness.
Hip-Hop Turned This Expatriate in Cuba into a “Rebel Without a Pause”
Ten years after her trial, Shakur was living in Cuba, re-united with her daughter there, but still an engaged activist. In 1987, she published “Assata: An Autobiography,” which remains available as an e-book. That same year, in Public Enemy’s hip-hop hit “Rebel Without a Pause,” Chuck D shouted “supporter of Chesimard” and brought her to the attention of a new generation.
Assata Shakur became a hip-hop meme. The hip-hop artist Common was unapologetically supportive in “A Song for Assata.” This allowed others to raise a stink when Common played the White House on 2011.
Writing in The Grio, Chuck “Jigsaw” Creekmur sees Assata Shakur’s appeal this way: “In a quintessentially American way, some folks in hip-hop just appreciate the raw ‘gangsta’ of a woman who didn’t back down, stood firm in her convictions, completely bucked the system, and lived to tell The Pope about it.”
The Question for History May Be: Which Side Needs Rehabilitation More?
An attorney who once represented Shakur, himself a longtime black nationalist, Chokwe Lumumba was recently elected mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, by a wide margin. He told DemocracyNOW!:
“I’ve always felt that Assata Shakur was wrongfully convicted, so she shouldn’t be on a wanted list at all. She never should have been in prison. She was actually shot herself and wounded and paralyzed at the time that the person who she was convicted of killing was shot. So she obviously couldn’t have shot him. And she also was arrested, which caused the incident, for about eight different charges which she later was found not guilty of or were dismissed. So I think it’s unfortunate. Assata Shakur, I believe, will historically be proven to be a hero of our times….”
That’s just what the Ahabs of the FBI seem to fear most.
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
