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As President Donald Trump and his administration take on the latest wave of left-wing violence, an obituary reminds us what happens when political killers get away with their crimes.
The law never caught up with Joanne Chesimard, aka Assata Shakur.
She died Thursday, age 78, an honored guest of Cuba’s Communist regime — and honored, disgracefully, by tenured radicals in America’s universities, too.
Professors have placed this convicted murderer on lists of “African-American heroes” and present her as a model for activism.
Stanford University’s dean of students, Mona Hicks, quoted a “loving refrain from Assata Shakur” in a campus email at the time of the George Floyd riots:
“It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.”
That language wasn’t metaphorical — when Shakur said fight, it was a call to violence.
She wasn’t just an activist; she was a terrorist, a self-styled “revolutionary” of the Black Liberation Army, a Marxist-Leninist radical group in the 1970s.
Revolution for them meant robbing banks, planting bombs and killing cops.
Shakur was already on the run from the law when she and two other BLA members were pulled over by New Jersey state troopers in 1973.
She and her associates shot at the officers — killing one, Werner Foerster, and wounding another; she took a few bullets herself, and one of her fellow radicals died.
Police took Shakur into custody, but she became a cause celebre with progressives — who called her a political prisoner — and in 1979 a BLA offshoot called “The Family” sprang her from prison.
Fidel Castro’s dictatorship granted her asylum, then refused decades of US entreaties to extradite her so she could face justice.
All that’s in the past, though, and now so is Shakur; yet her evil example is still very much with us.
It’s not only gray-haired professors and college bureaucrats lauding her violent politics.
A teacher’s union in Chicago affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers signaled its approval with a post on the social media site X that noted her death and dubbed her “a revolutionary fighter, a fierce writer, a revered elder of Black liberation, and a leader of freedom whose spirit continues to live in our struggle.”
This was a woman who, without remorse, defended the armed robberies her group committed as class-war “expropriation.”
In interviews she gave from her Cuban exile, she called cop-killing “armed struggle.”
Shakur was hardly the only radical of the 1960s and ‘70s who became a hero to the academic left.
Others left bombs and bullets behind and settled for poisoning the minds of future generations.
Angela Davis, a black extremist and longtime Communist Party stalwart who bought the shotgun used in the murder of a judge, is today “Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies” at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Bill Ayers, the founder of the Weather Underground domestic terrorist group, eventually retired as “Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar” at the University of Illinois, Chicago.
In the 1990s, Ayers worked with a promising young “community organizer” who’d go on to bigger things, a fellow by the name of Barack Obama.
The left-wing extremists of the 1960s and ’70s didn’t pay a very high reputational price — nor, in many cases, much of a legal price — for their violent politics.
Instead they were welcomed into the institutions that shape the outlook of rising generations.
America is now reaping the harvest of those seeds, with a new crop of student radicals who cheer for violence — and all too often commit it.
This time the country, including government and the universities themselves, will have to react differently: There must be no tolerance for such political violence.
Those who perpetrate it, including by beating up or harassing speakers on campus, must be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
And those who applaud thuggery or more extreme violence must face professional consequences.
They shouldn’t be teaching anyone’s children, for one thing.
Yes, the First Amendment enshrines their right to tell the world they idolize Assata Shakur’s bloody legacy.
But Americans also have the right to choose their associations, their employees, and where their tax dollars go.
They should make the choice not to promote or subsidize the likes of Shakur, Davis or Ayers — and not to entrust their children to anyone who worships them.
Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review and editor-at-large of The American Conservative.
