Common gets a bad rap on Assata Shakur
by Jonathan Farley, guardian.co.uk
May 14th 2011
She was stunningly beautiful. I still remember the sheen of her black hair, her
creamy complexion. She was at the San Francisco Book Festival, hawking a book
of photographs. She seemed to be 25, although I learned later that her skin
held fast to her secret. Her name was Fredrika, widow of Dr Huey P Newton,
co-founder of the Black Panther party: the greatest – perhaps only – American
heroes of the last third of the 20th century.
I was too shy to speak with her, then, but in time, I had affairs with almost
all the women leaders of the Black Panther party. Save one. We shall come to
her by and by.
Instead, I spoke to Fredrika's colleague, David Hilliard, a compact, gruff old
man with a raspy voice, at one time fourth-in-command of "the greatest threat
to the internal security" of the United States, according to America's top law
enforcement agent, FBI director J Edgar Hoover.
The following winter, I was at Hilliard's house, and in our two-hour
conversation, I told him that there should be a Black Panther party tour in
Berkeley and Oakland. A few months later, Hilliard started one, garnering
coverage on CNN; celebrities like California governor Jerry Brown went on it. I
called up Fredrika Newton to ask her why they didn't want me involved, and she
told me she'd had the idea eight years earlier. Apparently, she just hadn't
gotten around to doing it. That was the end of that affair. (I never said these
were love affairs.) But there were others.
On the hallowed ground of the University of California at Berkeley, I organised
a 30th anniversary commemoration of the event that made the Black Panthers
world-famous – the March on Sacramento ("Arrest them all. On anything") – with
guest speaker Tarika Lewis, the first woman to join the party. Ericka Huggins,
who had faced execution when police framed her in New Haven, Connecticut,
declined to come; more precisely, when I invited her, she hung up on me after
demanding to know how I had gotten her phone number. (A one-minute affair.) But
later, I brought Elaine Brown, the first woman to lead the party, to speak to a
standing-room-only audience at my conservative, Confederacy-commemorating
university; and I had dinner for two with Kathleen Cleaver, the regal former
communications secretary for the party.
Perhaps because of its essential female element, the essence of the Black
Panther party lay not in confrontations with the police – as thrilling as
stories of Huey Newton facing down 10 cops are – but in serving the people. The
party gave away free groceries and shoes, ran free health clinics and schools,
and assisted the elderly. The Black Panthers were lovers of humanity who sought
to realise the social gospel: to heal the sick, give sight to the blind,
comfort the broken-hearted and set the prisoners free.
Oh, the enemies of civilisation will trot out the same slander, stories of
irrational violence, drugs and misogyny. Terrorists, they'll cry, murderers,
racists, reverse Ku Kluxers, thugs, thieves, addicts. And most Americans, black
and white, will believe the lies.
It's true, some Panthers had criminal pasts: Newton was once a burglar,
Cleaver's husband was a rapist, and, worst of all, party co-founder Bobby Seale
was a comedian. But if we can forgive American president Thomas Jefferson, a
slaveholder, torturer and rapist, we can forgive the Panthers. At that moment
in American history, the heroes wore the black hats.
So, cue conservative outrage over Michelle Obama's inviting rapper Common to a
White House poetry reading, because Common wrote an adulatory song about Black
Panther Assata Shakur. The New Jersey state police protested.
Is it possible that the vile New Jersey police – just this week it was
announced that Newark's police department is being investigated by the justice
department for multiple civil rights violations – and their rightwing
puppetmasters do not know about COINTELPRO? That while Soviet tanks crushed
Prague's spring, in America, police assassins, provocateurs and slanderers
felled our saints as they slept? That the US government admits it had a
programme to "neutralise" the Black Panther leadership? That J Edgar Hoover
confessed that this was not because the Panthers were committing any crimes,
but because they were feeding children? That medical experts testified that
Assata Shakur could not have shot the New Jersey policeman for whose death she
went to jail?
Like Geronimo Pratt, whose murder conviction the courts overturned after 27
years, when evidence emerged that the government had framed Pratt to remove him
from the Panthers' leadership, the US government wanted Assata Shakur because
she dared to say that she has the right to defend her kin against murderers,
such as the white policeman who shot a black 16 yearold in the back in Teaneck,
New Jersey.
Conviction or no, the honour of our African Eowyn is pristine. Decades of
racist propaganda cannot alter the fact that there is no greater homage than to
say, "Assata Shakur, Black Panther".
Today, admittedly, when America's president is black, Assata's rhetoric seems
foreign, anachronistic. Today, I, like most African Americans, would not stand
with Assata Shakur.
No.
In her presence, we should all kneel.
Original Page:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/may/14/common-michelle-obama?CMP=twt_fd
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