They love her for the violence she committed and advocated.
C uban authorities have not said what caused the late Joanne Chesimard’s death. They say only that the 78-year-old passed away from health complications arising from old age, and we have no reason to disbelieve them. Chesimard spent the last 40 years residing comfortably in Havana as a guest of the communist state: a teacher, a writer, a lecturer, and, most important — indeed, her foremost value to the Cuban regime — a fugitive from American justice.
The nom de guerre by which Chesimard is known to most Americans, Assata Olugbala Shakur, is more likely to trigger dim recollections of the crimes that made her into a figure of veneration among those who promote the notion that the United States of America is an illegitimate regime. In his book, Days of Rage, the author Bryan Burrough described her as “the purest expression of revolutionary ardor” — “a ferocious, machine-gun-toting, grenade-tossing, spitting-mad Bonnie Parker for the 1970s, an archetype for a series of badass heroines heralded in Foxy Brown, Get Christie Love!, and other blacksploitation films of the day.”
A City College student before falling in with elements that would later compose the Black Liberation Army, Shakur was an instrumental element of many of the outfit’s plots, most of which were designed to foment revolution in America by first killing cops. Shakur evaded justice until 1973 when she and her BLA associates were pulled over on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike.
According to law enforcement’s account, Shakur was among the BLA assets who started shooting when an officer discovered a semiautomatic pistol magazine in the vehicle. Trooper James Harper was wounded in the exchange of fire. His colleague, Trooper Werner Forrester, was shot twice in the head with his own gun. Assata Shakur would be wounded before her arrest — her compatriot, Zayd Shakur, was shot and killed.
Chesimard’s allies maintain that her injury was sustained only after she had surrendered to police, but a jury saw fit to convict her of, among other charges, first-degree murder. But two years after her conviction, and with the aid of other militant groups of the era — including the all-female communist guerilla group “May 19” and an insurgent outfit calling itself “The Family” — Assata Shakur was freed from New Jersey’s Clinton Correctional Facility for Women, eventually making her way to Cuba in 1984.
Shakur’s story has long endeared her to America’s radicals. But whereas we could once say that the radicals were relegated to the fringes of American public life, they are front and center today — in command of some of the country’s most influential institutions.
Evidence of her enduring cult of personality is apparent in her erstwhile alma mater, City College, briefly naming a community center after the convicted cop killer, as well as a 2017 social media post by the Women’s March organization hailing Shakur’s accomplishments on her birthday. “A woman’s place is in the struggle,” wrote the outfit that Senator Kirsten Gillibrand would later call “the suffragettes of our time.” It was apparent in a 2013 Washington Post profile of Shakur that celebrated her enduring cultural relevance. She is name-checked in the “Rapper Common’s ‘A Song for Assata’” and the hip-hop group Public Enemy’s oeuvre. It was betrayed by the slogan that adorned T-shirts during the riots that engulfed Ferguson, Mo., in 2014 and Baltimore, Md., in 2015: “Assata Taught Me.”
That cultish reverence has been out in force since news of Shakur’s death hit the wires over the weekend.
“To many Black people she was a folk hero,” the New York Times matter-of-factly declared. “For decades, Assata Shakur has been a towering figure in American movements for black liberation and racial justice,” NPR host Alisa Chang mused. Her interlocutor, NPR’s national correspondent, Adrian Florido, agreed. “Assata Shakur was a central figure in the Black Liberation Army,” he noted, “who took up arms in the fight against the oppression of black people.” After a prolonged recitation of the radicals’ version of the events that led to Shakur’s arrest, conviction, and flight from justice, Rolling Stone magazine reprinted the text of Shakur’s unrequited 1998 letter to Pope John Paul II. “I advocate an end to capitalist exploitation, the abolition of racist policies, the eradication of sexism, the elimination of political repression,” she wrote while living comfortably under the protection of the repressive, exploitative, and, indeed, racist regime in Havana. “If that is a crime, then I am totally guilty.”
Some of the more revealing eulogies came from quarters of American society in which the radicals are less predisposed to temper their enthusiasm for revolutionary violence. “The American state brutally oppressed Assata and her Black Panther Party Comrades,” the Democratic Socialists of America declared. “The Cubans welcomed her and other Black Revolutionaries with asylum, and their solidarity and loyalty allowed Assata to live out her days in Havana.” Not to be outdone, the Chicago Teachers’ Union — an institution that now lacks any compunction to hide its subversion from skeptical eyes — sounded similar notes. “Today we honor the life and legacy of a revolutionary fighter, a fierce writer, a revered elder of Black liberation, and a leader of freedom whose spirit continues to live in our struggle,” wrote the people who advocate on behalf of educators. “Assata refused to be silenced,” they continued. “Rest in Power, Rest in Peace, Assata Shakur.”
All this hagiography represents an admission against the progressive left’s interests. The story that Shakur’s defenders retailed for years maintains that their hero was innocent. She never fired a shot on that New Jersey highway, they insist. In fact, she was in the process of surrendering when she was wantonly wounded, and the charges against her were as dubious as those that resulted in dismissals, acquittals, or hung juries over the course of her long career in the BLA’s revolutionary underground.
In posthumously recognizing Shakur’s militancy, these and other outfits tacitly admit that what endears her to the radical left is not her poetry but the violent example she set as an outlaw. They love her for the violence she committed and advocated. That violence does not detract from her personality cult; it is the whole basis for it.
Shakur is hardly the only militant of this era to have a martyrology crafted around her. Indeed, similar cults have sprouted up around so many violent radicals in that age. But whereas we might once have disregarded that unhealthy expression of radical zeal as a quirky feature of America’s political fringes, the chickens that project incubated are coming home to roost. We no longer have the luxury of pretending these sociopathic expressions of understanding for those who commit anti-American political violence don’t have any real-world consequences. They most certainly do.