AN OPEN LETTER TO NEW JERSEY
GOVERNOR WHITMAN
KEEP YOUR HANDS OFF ASSATA
Governor Whitman:
Your grandstanding actions in seeking Assata Shakur's
return by placing a $50,000 bounty on her head is an insult to all
Black women and men who have devoted their lives to the freedom
of Black people. In seeking her apprehension by methods that
include "kidnapping," you have engaged in the kind of debased
moralism that the former slave masters in this country resorted to
when seeking the return of runaway Africans to slavery.
Your provocative and vindictive behavior is an insult to all
Black women and men who have devoted their lives to struggling
for the freedom of Black people. Is it by such means that you
hope to gain national prominence or to retain your current
position?
Assata, in leaving the dungeons of New Jersey where your
predecessors had hoped to bury her for the remainder of her life,
followed in the footsteps of Harriet Tubman, who instructed:
"There was one of two things I had a right to, liberty, or death; if
I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should
take me alive; I should fight for my liberty as long as my strength
lasted ..." The stellar example of Assata's commitment to the
liberty of African American people places her in the company of
not only Harriet Tubman, but also, Paul Robeson, Fannie Lou
Hamer, and Malcolm X.
We will never forget nor forgive the inhuman and barbaric
conditions that Assata and her co-defendant Sundiata Acoli were
subjected to following their arrests after a shoot-out on the New
Jersey Turnpike, May 2, 1973. New Jersey State Police, having
murdered Zayd Shakur, delighted in torturing Assata and Sundiata.
While shackled and chained to a bed, arms paralyzed and bullet
wounds in her chest, Assata was further forced to undergo the jabs
of shotgun butts by New Jersey State Troopers shouting Nazi
slogans and threats to kill her. **In the history of New Jersey, no
woman pretrial detainee or prisoner has ever been treated as she
was, continuously confined in a men's prison, under twenty-four-
hour surveillance of her most intimate functions, without
intellectual sustenance, adequate medical attention, and exercise,
and without the company of other women for all the years she was
in their custody.**
Moreover, while Assata and Sundiata were sentenced to life
in prison for the death of State Trooper Werner Foerster after
detentions and trials riddled with egregious human rights violations
and constitutional errors (e.g. massive negative publicity and
exclusion of African people from the jury), not one State Trooper,
to our knowledge, was ever punished for the murder of Zayd and
the torture of Assata and Sundiata. Twenty-five years later,
Sundiata, now 60 years, remains in prison, and if your Parole
Board has its way will be there into the next century.
Assata's strength and defiance in the face of her
brutalization and torture by New Jersey State Troopers and her
escape from the dungeon in which New Jersey imprisoned her are
a source of continuing inspiration to us and to all who sincerely
cherish and fight for freedom and justice. **Assata is Our Sister
and We stand in absolute solidarity with her right to live free of
bondage in Cuba. We applaud and thank His Excellency President
Fidel Castro and the people of Cuba for their solidarity with the
struggles of African people in Africa and the United States and for
providing a safe haven for Assata from the viciousness and
brutality of United States racism.**
In closing, we suggest that you focus your attention on the
real problems confronting the people of New Jersey. The people
of New Jersey, particularly people of African descent, other people
of color and the poor, as well as your political aspirations, would
be better served by your attention to reducing poverty,
unemployment, underemployment, the incidence of AIDS, police
brutality and corruption and improving housing, public education
and health care.
KEEP YOUR HANDS OFF ASSATA SHAKUR
S.E. Anderson
Soffiyah Jill Elijah, Esq.
Joan P. Gibbs, Esq.
Rosemari Mealy
Karen D. Taylor
TO ADD YOUR NAME TO THIS LETTER EMAIL:
rmealy@hotmail.com
JGibbs3926@aol.com
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