Chapter Eight
Assata Shakur
Assata Shakur (JoAnne Chesimard) was born in 1947 in New York City. She spent most of her childhood in the segregated South, living in Wilmington, North Carolina, until her family relocated to Queens, New York, when she was a teenager. Shakur began her political education in radicalism when she enrolled as a student at Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC) in the mid-1960s. In the context of growing black consciousness and nationalist movements, she became involved with BMCC’s black and African student organizations. Her activism expanded to include the black liberation, student rights, and anti-Vietnam War movements. After graduating from college, Shakur began working with the Black Panther Party (BPP), but differences and dissatisfaction with the Oakland-based national leadership led her to the Black Liberation Army (BLA), an underground, military wing of the Panthers largely based o n the East Coast. A main target of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s COINTELPRO, Shakur was accused of numerous crimes and forced underground. Eventually in each of these cases, charges would be dropped or Shakur acquitted. In a May 1973 confrontation with New Jersey state troopers, she was seriously wounded, and her companion and BLA comember Zayd Malik Shakur was killed, along with state trooper Werner Foerster. Companion Sundiata Acoli (Clark Squire) escaped but was later apprehended. Following a change of venue in 1973 and a mistrial in 1974, in March 1977 Shakur was convicted as an accomplice to the murder of state trooper Foerster and of atrocious assault o n trooper James Harper with intent to kill. Despite the testimony of expert witnesses that argued medical evidence showed Shakur could not have shot either trooper, the all-white jury, of whom five had personal ties to state troopers, convicted her. Although the trial was held in a county where frequent pretrial press reports proclaimed her guilt, the judge refused to allow any evidence of COINTELPRO repression to be entered into the case and refused to investigate a burglary of the office of her defense counsel and the destruction or disappearance of important defense trial documents during that break-in.’ Shakur escaped from New Jersey’s Clinton Correctional Facility in 1979. Since 114