![]() ![]() Those who want to see her returned to live out her sentence believe she got away with killing a cop in 1973.īut despite a racial profiling scandal that forced the state police to enact reforms, the shootout with Black radicals a half-century ago has never seen a formal review from state authorities. She was convicted of murdering a state trooper, and she’s living in exile. Shakur’s story rankles many in New Jersey, especially those involved with law enforcement, who typically only refer to her legal name, Joanne Chesimard. “In so many of the different organizations of Black Lives Matter, they start their meetings with a poem from Assata,” said Donna Murch, a historian at Rutgers University and author of the book “Assata Taught Me.” “The phrase that they use in order to talk about racism is ‘anti-Black violence’ and ‘anti-Blackness.’” ![]() But to others, she’s Assata Shakur, a folk hero of the civil rights movement. Some people know the surviving woman at the center of the story as Joanne Chesimard, a cop killer on the lam. Five decades after a shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike left a state trooper and a radical Black activist dead, the case remains a flashpoint. ![]()
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