Fifty years ago: Assata Shakur before her Cuban exile

Fifty years ago this month, JoAnne Chesimard’s most serious legal troubles began in earnest. An Aug. 23, 1971, Queens, N.Y., bank robbery was the issue. She could face a long prison sentence and concomitant future of doom and gloom. She had other ideas.

Many of the prominent among JoAnne Chesimard’s 20-something contemporary protesters, activists and rabble-rousers of the 1960s and early ’70s college campuses — both the African American and Caucasian variety — have settled into middle-class respectability. JoAnne Chesimard’s life journey dramatically differs from that of all of her infamous peers.

I met married students Louis and JoAnne Chesimard at the City University of New York’s Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC) in 1970. As secretary of the Black Faculty Association, I expressed concern that anti-establishment white professors who had their prestigious advanced degrees were encouraging Black ghetto students more toward political activism than studies.

“We’re not stupid,” came the response from Black student JoAnne Chesimard. Fair enough; the African American students could manage the Caucasian professors’ management of them.

What youngsters could not manage was the petite poet titan Sonia Sanchez, a Black Arts Movement founder who joined BMCC’s new Black and Puerto Rican studies department and insisted that the head of its Black studies program be African American, not African. Demanding the removal of the African coordinator, in about the spring of 1971, professor Sanchez, the Chesimards, faculty member Jim Blake and about 50 student protesters launched a sit-in/ takeover at the office of the first African American BMCC President Edgar Draper, whose presidency the Black faculty had divined.

What would become her most celebrated poem, the year-old “We a BaadDDD People,” was read by Sonia Sanchez to the attentive students sitting in. A former written word-loving street kid and English tutor myself, I bristled at the poetic license.

After those refusing to leave President Draper’s outer office were arrested, Dean Sample Pittman and I bailed out of the “Tombs” (Manhattan’s lockup) professors Sanchez and Blake, the Chesimards and the Third World Coalition student protesters, most of whom had overnight become practicing Nation of Islam Muslims, including the leader-poet. Their campus activism quickly dissipated. And they had traded their urban-chic rags for snappy Fruit of Islam bow ties, severe scarves and sensible floor-length skirts.

JoAnne Chesimard graduated from BMCC and the City College of the City University of New York, and was a short-time Black Panther Party member. The Chesimards divorced.

As Assata Shakur, she joined an outfit known as the Black Liberation Army (BLA). She and other members were indicted on charges related to bank robberies, murder and a plethora of serious other crimes. On the run, the radicals were in a shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike in 1973. A state trooper and a BLA member died. Wounded on that highway, Assata Shakur defiantly surrendered, B-movie style.

After a series of legal machinations following her arrest in May 1973, Assata Shakur was held accountable for crimes old and new, real and imagined. Mostly case dismissals and acquittals resulted for her. She and Kamau Sadiki did go to trial for a Sept. 1, 1972, Bronx, N.Y., bank robbery.

The prisoners were not model co-defendants. The judge carried out his threat to remove the belligerent pair from the courtroom, requiring them to witness their own trial on loudspeakers from an outer room.

Within weeks, a mistrial was declared because Assata Shakur was pregnant. Impregnated while incarcerated? How could a woman in custody come to be expecting a baby? Recall that trial over loudspeaker; the couple were not just listening in to court ... if at all.

In 1979 she was convicted of murder of the New Jersey state trooper as well as the BLA comrade (on a legal technicality) and was sentenced to life and 33 years.

Assata Shakur’s most notable achievements in her notorious young life came four years apart. She delivered a prison baby in 1974 and herself upon the world by escaping prison in 1979.

In 1984, Assata Shakur the fugitive emerged in Cuba as Assata Shakur the international iconic something. She had become a fugitive from justice or injustice, one’s perspective being the arbiter. If ever in Cuba, the left-wing faithful must make pilgrimage to Assata Shakur, who has been granted political asylum. She is a 74-year-old grandmotherly elder stateless person of the far-left causes of the world and godmother of murdered rap legend Tupac Shakur. She also has a $2 million bounty on her, a result of being on the FBI’s list of the 10 most wanted terrorists.

Sonia Sanchez, who later taught at the University of Pittsburgh, emerged in the 21st century as one of the top five lionized Black American poets and is professor emeritus at Temple University. We spoke of the wild BMCC days at the 2012 Pittsburgh meeting of the American Association for the Study of African American Life and History, at which we two expatriate Harlem street- kid New Yorkers had prominent roles.

Following the BMCC sit-in, the college’s Black studies leader from Africa was not fired for being African. Today, in the intervening 50 years, many — if not most — scholars who chair African American studies nationwide are immigrants or their children from Africa or the Caribbean.

In 2009, Assata Shakur published “African: An Autobiography.” According to The Associated Press, in 2017 President Donald Trump called for the extradition to the United States from Cuba of “the cop killer JoAnne Chesimard.” I uncovered no extant evidence that the still- empowered President Trump directed that any Jan. 6, 2021, insurrectionists against the United States of America face justice for their deadly attack against police at the nation’s Capitol that the 45th president inspired.