The writer is a student at City College of the City University of New York.
 Photo: Bill Hackwell
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In December 2006, a gain won 17 years ago by City University of New York’s 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 Rico’s 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 today’s 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 CUNY’s 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 FBI’s 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 www.handsoffassata.org.
