THE
NJ BLACK PANTHER PARTY COMMEMORATION COMMITTEE
973
202 0745; 973 738 2205
“To move a blade of grass is to change
the world…”
Huey P. Newton
July 3, 2017
FOR IMMEDIATE
RELEASE!
EXILED PANTHER ASSATA SHAKUR WILL BE FETED AT 70!
On Sunday,
July 16th, a cross section of activists, artists and
humanitarians will come together to salute Assata Shakur, the long exiled Black
Panther who resides in Cuba to mark her 70th birthday.
The gathering is called ‘For
The Love Of Freedom: Assata Is Always Welcome Here-An Honoring of 70 Years of a
Committed Life.’
It will not be the usual maligning of
Shakur in connection with the bounty on her head that comes from the NJ State
Police, the FBI and the law enforcement community.
Instead, it will be an evening of poetry,
dance, song, testimony and more, appreciating the activist’s lifetime
commitment to the struggle for human dignity.
Shakur was born on July 16th, 1947 to a proud,
independent Black family from Wilmington, North Carolina. At the turn of the 20th
century, Wilmington was the site of a vicious ethnic cleansing attack that
literally ran legions of African Americans from the town. Shakur’s grandparents
dared to be landowning business persons against this violently segregated
background. It is from this background that would emerge her own commitment and
courage that she would take into the Black Panther Party as a college student.
When the Black Panther Party was faced
with the dangerous distinction of being labelled
the ‘greatest threat to the internal security’ of the country by the FBI, and
when NY chapters of the Party came under particular attack after surviving the
NY 21 case, a case where 21 Panthers,
officers and rank and file members were put on trial for bogus conspiracy
charges to commit terrorist acts, charges that would have landed them in prison
for the rest of their lives, Shakur and
a number of other Panthers opted to go underground and create the Black
Liberation Army to continue their fight.
On May 2, 1973, Shakur was shot and critically injured in an incident on
the NJ Turnpike that would capture international attention. It is often
referred to as the ‘Turnpike Incident,’ an apparent racial profiling stop by a NJ
State Trooper. The incident left Shakur critically wounded, Zayd Shakur, the
apparent driver dead and Trooper Werner Foerster dead. At her trial, forensic evidence clearly
established that Shakur was shot with her hands up, and that the Trooper who
made the stop, James Harper, by his own admission, started the shooting and
fled the scene. Yet Shakur and her co-defendant Sundiata Acoli, now 80 and
still incarcerated, were each given sentences of life plus thirty years, after
being convicted for the murder of Trooper Foerster. On November 2, 1979, Shakur was liberated from what was then the
Clinton Correctional Facility in one of the most incredible moments in the
history of the Black Liberation Movement after enduring threats on her life
while in prison. She was since given exile in Cuba. She currently has a 2
million dollar bounty for her capture and was put on the FBI’s Domestic
Terrorist List retroactively several years ago.
Meanwhile, supporters of Shakur, and
many others in the human rights community believe that cases like hers should
be reopened in a context of a Truth And Reconciliation Commission that takes on
how racism drove police violence and repression during that period, a framework
comparable to what emerged in South Africa on their road to dismantling
Apartheid.
In 1987, Shakur penned a moving memoir
of her life story, Assata:An Autobiography. She has lent her voice to other
humanitarian efforts and to the support many other of her comrades from the
Black Panther Party who are still in prison as a result of the now well-known
COINTELPRO Operations that were empanelled to destroy the Party and other
important Black leaders. She is the subject of a moving film Eyes
Of The Rainbow done by critically acclaimed filmmaker Afro-Cuban
filmmaker Gloria Rolando Ocasio. While murderously maligned by mainstream press
and racist and opportunist politicians, she is considered a miraculous
surviving link to the Underground Railroad legacy of her ancestors.
“Assata was not even an officer or a
leader in the Party, and yet there was this obsession with going after her, or
rather with going after rank and file members of the Party, as intensely as
they were going after its leadership.
“What happened to her is a prime
example of the length that the government was willing to go to destroy the
Party,” said Zayid Muhammad, a longtime supporter of Shakur and a principal
organizer of the gathering.
“The fact that she survived her
incredible ordeal and was able to secure some semblance of freedom, albeit
exiled, is a testimony to the spiritual will of our people to survive the worse
expressions of oppression and to be free,” he finished
Just as this moving gathering will
feature poetry, song, dance, testimony from Shakur’s comrades, as indicated
above, it will also lay out meaningful support measures to be taken in support
of her Party comrades still in prison, appreciation of the Cuban Revolution and
its incredible solidarity with the African world and the oppressed, and more.
This moving afternoon will take place
at The REFAL Center, 271 So 9th Street, Newark at 4:30pm…
No comments:
Post a Comment