WHY WE MUST SUPPORT ASSATA SHAKUR By Richard S. Dunn
Posted by NEWS SERVICE on October 18, 1998 at 17:41:31:
HANDS OFF ASSATA!
WHY WE MUST SUPPORT ASSATA SHAKUR
By Richard S. Dunn
"Some of us, white and Black, know how great a price has already been paid to bring into existence a new consciousness, a new people, an unprecedented nation. If we know, and do nothing, we are worse than the murderers hired in our name. If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own which it is and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night."
James Baldwin wrote those words in an open letter to Angela Davis 28 years ago, when she was one of the victims of the government's counter intelligence program (COINTELPRO). Sister Angela Davis was fighting for her life because she was a political activist an activist that confronted U.S. imperialism and racism. Twenty-eight years later, Sister Assata Shakur (Joanne Chesimard) is fighting for her life. She is fighting for her life because, like Davis, she too dared to confront imperialism and racism, challenging the enemy in the cause for peace, democracy and social progress.
Attorney Lenox Hinds of the National Conference of Black Lawyers says: "It is racist America that provides the context for the making of this Black revolutionary."
This is why we must support Assata Shakur!
Ever since our arrival on these shores and even 136 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, Black people's Holocaust continues. Political repression, although covert at times, is unabated. Everyone who has engaged in struggle for our liberation has either been framed, arrested, followed, phone tapped or assassinated. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, Stokely Carmichael, Elijah Muhammad and others have all been subjected to the diabolical actions of the ruling class through its operatives in government.
W.E.B. DuBois 20 years before Angela Davis and 26 years before Assata Shakur met with a similar fate at the hands of a corrupt and decadent system. Said DuBois: "What turns me cold in all this experience is the certainty that thousands of innocent victims are in jail today because they had neither money, experience nor friends to help them...and of this army of the wronged, the proportion of Negroes is frightful... There is desperate need to oppose this national racket of railroading to jails and chain gangs the poor, friendless and Black." This is why we must support Assata Shakur!
Space will not permit a review of the CIA, FBI and various police departments' participation in the COINTELPRO activities, but some brief outline is needed to put the matter of Assata Shakur in context.
The primary objective of COINTELPRO was to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit and otherwise neutralize Black nationalist organizations and their leaders." This was J.Edgar Hoover's directive to the FBI, the agency which he headed. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Nation of Islam, Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Republic of New Africa and Black Panther Party were each targeted for decimation by the FBI and other governmental agencies. These organizations were infiltrated by paid informers and agent provocateurs who fomented strife and disorder as a tactic to derail the Black liberation movement. Hundreds of civil rights workers and political activists were indicted, sometimes convicted and imprisoned based on false charges and cover-ups by government and local law enforcement officials. Today there may be over 100 political prisoners in jails across the country.
The irony of this situation is that the general media has consistently orchestrated a campaign of lies, distortion and vilification of these people. Therefore, it is extremely difficult to organize mass support for these causes.
The United States has vehemently criticized other countries for their "human rights" record and the incarceration of citizens because of their political beliefs or affiliation. This is bald-faced hypocrisy just ask Dhoruba Bin Wahad. Dhoruba served 19 years of a 25-to-life sentence for a crime that he had fought tooth and nail to prove he did not commit. After release, he was still engaged in ferocious legal battles to remain free. The New York appellate court supported the decision in 1990 that federal, state and city officials suppressed evidence that would have exonerated him. Dhoruba Bin Wahad was a member of the Black Panther Party.
Geronimo Ji Jaga (Pratt) was denied parole at least 13 times and served 24 years in jail. It was reported that Geronimo was in Oakland when the crime for which he was convicted occurred in Los Angeles. Despite the suppression of evidence and questionable integrity and credibility of the key witness, he was still imprisoned. Geronimo was a member of the Black Panther Party.
On May 13, 1985, MOVE, a Philadelphia Black organization, had their headquarters bombed; eleven men, women and children were killed. Some were shot and killed while fleeing while others were forced back into the burning building. Several blocks of homes were destroyed as the fire spread to adjacent buildings. This action was not carried out by "foreign terrorists," but by local law enforcement officials to the highest levels.
Mumia Abu Jamal was targeted after he advocated on behalf of the MOVE group. Today, he sits on death row, where he has spent the past 14 years (Correction: 18 years) of his life. Despite conflicting testimony by some witnesses, one of whom a prostitute was offered a deal by the DA and the presence of one key witness who could corroborate Mummy's story and who did so at the precinct, this witness was never called. In short, Mumia was railroaded because he, too, was a member of the Black Panther Party.
Elijah Muhammad was jailed in 1942 for encouraging Black men not to join the army, or fight in the imperialist war of 1941 to 1945. There is also the case of Leonard Peltier, an activist from the American Indian Movement, who is still languishing in jail in Colorado. In Cairo, Illinois a minister named Charles Koen was jailed for arson for allegedly burning down a bank which he was trying to open. Consider someone struggling to open the first Black rural bank in the country and then setting fire to it. It makes no sense.
Herman Ferguson of the Malcolm X Commemorating Committee was forced into exile. Ferguson fled to Guyana in order to escape trumped up charges against him. Marcus Garvey, the early Pan-Africanist and revolutionary, was charged with mail fraud: the key witness was an informant working for the government.
On April 2, 1967, New York and federal law enforcement officers raided the home of Rosemary Byrd with the objective of searching for weapons and other illegal items. Nothing incriminating was found and an officer notified his supervisor to that effect. However, that same officer retrieved a knife from the sister's kitchen drawer and charged her with criminal possession of a weapon; 21 people were arrested in subsequent raids that morning. These so-called "felons" had 150 counts against them and battled in court for nine months. The trial ended in acquittal for every single one of them. Rosemary Byrd was a member of the Black Panther Party and so too was all the others who were arrested. This was the infamous case of the "Panther 21."
Shortly after joining the Black Panther Party, Assata Shakur was charged with armed robbery of the Hilton Hotel in New York City in 1971. There was no trial and the case was dismissed. In August of the same year, she was charged with another bank robbery and was acquitted in 1976.
In September 1972, Shakur was arrested on another bank robbery charge. After a hung jury on December 14, 1973, she was finally acquitted on December 28.
On December 28, 1972 she was charged with the crime of kidnapping a drug dealer and was acquitted on December 19, 1975. Five days after the December 1972 charge on January 2, 1973 she was again charged with the murder of a drug dealer; there was no trial and the case was dismissed. Then came January 23 and the charge of attempted murder of a policeman: again there was no trial and the case dismissed.
The harassment and vilification continued on May 2, 1973 when Shakur was charged with the murders of two New Jersey State troopers. Shot and seriously injured in the incident on the New Jersey Turnpike, Assata Shakur was on the most wanted list of the FBI, although there were no outstanding warrants. Orders were given for her capture dead or alive, because she was supposed to be armed, dangerous, a kidnapper and murderer. At the subsequent trial, experts testified that an injury prevented her from pulling a trigger; another injury she sustained could only be received being seated and with her hands raised. Tests done on her hands showed she had not fired a weapon and none of the weapons she was charged with possessing was proved to have her fingerprints.
Assata was liberated from prison where she most certainly would have been killed under what would be called "mysterious circumstances." Although sentenced to life imprisonment, her constant transfers to different facilities, the types of inmates she was locked down with and her treatment by prison authorities, were setting the stage for her assassination a political assassination. Assata Shakur was a member of the Black Panther Party. That is why we must support Assata!
Refusal to support Assata is tantamount to offering her up as sacrifice at the altar of injustice and reaction. Many democratic gains enjoyed by us today were derived by people who dared to confront imperialism and racism. All of us who are the surviving descendants of the worst Holocaust in human history, all us as beneficiaries of the legacy of the civil rights movement; all of us who have an interest in peace, democracy and social progress, must support Assata Shaker. We must support Assata because we have a moral obligation and a political responsibility to do so.
Some, who eloquently speak of their admiration and association with Martin Luther King, appear to have selective amnesia. Martin Luther King did not confine his struggle against oppression to sermons from his pulpit. He was a man of action. His marches, sit-ins and boycotts were deliberate, practical actions that confronted imperialism and racism. His overall strategy and fixation with tactic is not at issue here. What is primary is that he was not afraid to face reaction. King believed he had a moral obligation and a political responsibility to help right the wrongs that have been done to us. He paid dearly for that decision.
Like Angela Davis in 1970, Assata Shakur is fighting for her life. The social history of the United States is replete with examples of the ruling capitalist class, through its state machinery, using the judicial system to intimidate and silence those who speak out or act against injustice.
Mary Frances Berry in her book "Black Resistance White Law," cites numerous, substantiated and compelling examples of how the ruling class, in whatever period, have used and abused the Constitution and the judicial system to suppress and decimate Black rebellion. Laws developed over the years especially as it relates to dissent were meant to control, limit and prevent Black resistance. These laws were racially motivated, founded and enforced: the Constitution provided the ideological justification.
We must intensify our support and bring to international attention the case of Assata Shakur. Like Angela Davis in 1970, thousands in countries all over the world demonstrated, marched and striked to expose the hypocrisy and moral debasement of the United States. Those of us who are active in the fight for real liberation from oppression are not immune to surveillance and frame-ups. Our fate is tied up with that of Assata Shakur. When the right time comes, none shall escape. That is why we must support Assata!
HANDS OFF ASSATA!
KEEP THE PRESSURE ON!
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