Racist New Jersey guv wants liberation fighter behind
bars
By Monica Moorehead
New Jersey Gov. Christine Whitman plans to tape
an appeal demanding the extradition to the United States of
Assata Shakur-to be broadcast to Cuba by the anti-communist,
U.S.-financed Radio Marti.
Shakur, a former member of the Black Panther Party and the
Black Liberation Army, escaped from a New Jersey prison in
1979. She was granted political asylum by President Fidel
Castro and has lived in Havana, Cuba, since then.
On May 2, 1973, two white state troopers stopped Shakur and
two other Black political revolutionaries, Sundiata Acoli and
Zayd Malik Shakur, on the New Jersey turnpike.
Why? One cop said they looked "suspicious." The cops
reportedly drew their guns and fired.
Assata Shakur was hit twice-once in the back. Zayd Shakur
was killed. One of the cops also died.
No one was charged in the death of Zayd Shakur. But both
Assata Shakur and Sundiata Acoli were convicted in the death of
one cop and the wounding of the other.
Acoli has been in jail ever since. Shakur was sentenced to a
life sentence plus 33 years by a predominantly white jury.
Remember the Fugitive Slave Act
In December, the New Jersey police wrote Pope John Paul II a
letter asking him to demand that the Cuban government return
Shakur to the United States.
While the pope was in Cuba, a New York television station
interviewed Shakur from Havana. In the interview she answered
the New Jersey police and told her story.
The interview reportedly infuriated Whitman so much that she
posted a $50,000 reward for the return of Shakur.
This racist attack against Assata Shakur is also politically
motivated. Posting a bounty against Shakur is a diversion from
all the attacks Whitman has been carrying out against public
assistance and urban education.
Whitman may run for president. She wants to prove to the
Wall Street bosses that she is capable of carrying out their
program of cutbacks while at the same time providing more money
to build more prisons.
New Jersey is 78-percent white. But 75 percent of its
prisoners are Black and Latino people. Eighty percent of female
prisoners are women of color.
Whitman is also bidding for support from the reactionary
anti-Cuba lobby that wants to tie any legislation easing the
U.S. blockade on Cuba to the demand that the Cuban government
turn over Shakur.
Whitman's bounty on Shakur brings to mind the Fugitive Slave
Act of 1850. That law gave non-slave states the green light to
return runaway slaves to their masters.
In the eyes of Whitman and the New Jersey police, Assata
Shakur is a runaway slave.
But of course, Cuba is truly free territory and would never
return her to a certain death.
"It's ludicrous. It's character assassination," Shakur said
in response to Whitman's ploy. "I am a political activist and I
was a victim of a U.S. government counter-intelligence program,
set up by the FBI, to neutralize political activists."
This is why the progressive movement must continue to
elevate the demands made by the Jericho '98 protest on March 27
and fight for unconditional amnesty for all political
prisoners-be they in U.S. jails or forced into exile because
they dared to speak out against social injustice and capitalist
repression.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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