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CUNY students fight to keep Shakur-Morales center

For about 10 hours a sign honoring Puerto Rican freedom fighter Guillermo Morales and former Black Panther Assata Shakur once again hung over a student center at City College of New York.

Assata Shakur

City Council member Charles Barron replaced the sign at a Feb. 8 press conference at the Guillermo Morales/Assata Shakur Community and Student Center. In December the university had sent a crew to take the sign down in the middle of the night in reaction to a campaign against the center and the revolutionaries it is named after.

After Barron replaced the sign, university authorities again had it taken away during the night. This time school security guards removed the students in the center first. “Myself and two other students in the building were escorted out just after 11 o’clock,” said Lydia Shestopalova, an activist with the center. She saw no other students being escorted from the building. Students are permitted to remain in the building after 11:00 p.m. once they sign in, so the action of the security guards was stunning.

The sign had hung at the center since the group was founded in 1989 during a struggle over budget cuts. Students had taken over administration buildings and school officials gave them the room to end the takeover. The students named the center after Morales and Shakur, former CCNY students. Morales, one of the leaders of the open admissions strike of 1969, helped integrate the school system. The name was fitting as the center is devoted to social justice.

“It was a violation of our rights and our very being to question our right to have the sign up,” Shestopalova said.

The attack on the center began after a CUNY student wrote a letter to The Daily News denouncing the center for taking the name of Assata Shakur. The Daily News followed the letter up on Dec. 12 with a front-page headline “Disgrace” and an article calling Assata “a terrorist and cop killer.”

Instead of standing up for the students and against the absurd and racist media attacks, the university joined the campaign. Two days after the news article ran, it took the sign down. The center says Acting Vice President of Student Affairs Ramona Brown threatened to suspend or expel students if they replaced the sign. City Council member Barron did so on their behalf.

The students are now battling the university in court. A federal judge denied their request for a temporary restraining order and has yet to rule on the university’s motion to dismiss the students’ complaint.

Meanwhile, members of the center are building community support. “The sign represents what the students that founded it were fighting for,” Shestopalova said. “Social justice and freedom for all, particularly the most oppressed in the city and the world.”