THE MALCOLM X COMMEMORATION COMMITTEE
973 202 0745; 917 346 8142
“I have no mercy or compassion in me for a society that will crush people,
and then penalize them for not being able to stand under its weight…”
Malcolm X
November 13, 2025
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE!
ASSATA HONORED IN NEWARK!
On Saturday, November 15th, the Malcolm X Commemoration Committee (MXCC) is proud to join with the newly emerging chapter of Community Movement Builders and Express Newark to honor the late Assata Olugbala Shakur.
Shakur, a veteran of the Black Panther Party’s legendary New York chapter and the Black Liberation Army, passed away on September 25th from natural causes in Cuba.
She was 78.
Although her work was centered in New York with the Party and the BLA, it was her ordeal in New Jersey that cemented her legend.
It was on the evening of May 2, 1973, that she, along with Sundiata Acoli and Zayd Shakur, were faced with a racial profiling stop by state troopers that erupted in gunfire that left Zayd Shakur and State Trooper Werner Foerster dead. Shakur, who had proven that she was shot with her hands up, has always claimed her innocence. In the end, she and Sundiata were convicted and sentenced to life plus 30 years.
On November 2nd, 1979, an interracial BLA strike force in the tradition of the Underground Railroad, liberated Shakur from the Clinton Correctional Facility in Clinton New Jersey without incurring any casualties on either side!
She would ultimately find asylum in Cuba in the 1980s where she was able to pen her seminal narrative, Assata: An Autobiography, and become a beacon of international solidarity. Later in January 1988, the first book party in the country for her autobiography also took place in Newark New Jersey.
In 1999, she would face a 1M bounty by the State of New Jersey with its then Governor Christine Whitman. Whitman would go so far as to ask the Pope to push Cuba to return Shakur back to New Jersey. Her Open Letter to the Pope has also become another seminal document that she penned. The Obama Administration doubled the bounty to 2M and named her a ‘domestic terrorist.’ It forced Cuba to limit Shakur’s public exposure like never before. She was considered one of the reasons why the U.S. government has put Cuba on an international State Sponsored Terrorism list beyond the already repressive 63 year old Blockade. In spite of that, Cuba has never wavered from its principled reasons for protecting Shakur and the world continues to denounce the age old Blockade at the United Nations
Sundiata Acoli, who incredibly left NASA as a mathematician to join the Black Freedom Struggle in Freedom Summer ’64, would endure 49 years in prison for the ordeal, however, until his recent release on Parole. He is now 88.
“It is our prayer that we are sharing a tribute to Assata that captures her legacy in all of its fullness and provides the clear points of action that she has always pointed us to,” said MXCC chair Zayid Muhammad, a long time supporter of Shakur who organized the 1988 book event.
2003 saw the FBI railroad Kamau Sadiki, the father of Assata’s daughter, into prison for not cooperating with them to have her returned. He was charged in a 1970 cold case of an Atltanta police officer and put before Judge Stephanie Manis, who just several years earlier, oversaw the railroading of Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, the former H Rap Brown to prison for the killing of a Fulton County Sheriff.Both are facing life sentences in the Georgia State prison system. Both faee serious medical challenges including, most urgently, Imam Jamil facing terminal cancer while fighting to clear his name. The event will feature the screening of two films Eyes Of The Rainbow, a stunning documentary on Shakur by Afro Cuban filmmaking legend Gloria Rolando Ocasio and Dare To Dream, a critically acclaimed film by local filmmaker Jen Wager on Cuba’s legendary international medical school known by the acronym ELAM.
Special surprise guests will be a part of each panel discussion.
This moving gathering also takes place on the anniversary of the passing of Kwame Ture, formerly known as Stokely Carmichael. Ture, a close friend and comrade of Shakur, passed away on November 15, 1998.
This moving gathering will take place at the Express Newark facility, located at 54 Halsey Street Newark at 1pm.
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