Citation Needed - Assata Shakur

Episode Date: July 1, 2026

Assata Olugbala Shakur (/əˈsɑːtə ʃəˈkʊər/ ə-SAH-tə shə-KOOR; born JoAnne Deborah Byron, July 16, 1947[a] – September 25, 2025) was an American political activist, revolutionary, and fugitive who was a member of the Black Panther Party, and later the Black Liberation Army.[3] In 1977, she was convicted of the first-degree murder of New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster during a shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike in 1973. She escaped from prison in 1979 and was wanted by the FBI, with a $1 million reward for information leading to her capture, and an additional $1 million reward offered by the New Jersey attorney general.[4] She was never caught and remained a fugitive for 45 years.

Hello and welcome. Citation Needed. A podcast where we choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia, and pretend we're experts. Because this is the internet, and that's how it works now. I'm Heath, and I'll be hosting this podcast about the Civil Rights Movement, along with four other white guys. It's one battle after another for us. Am I right? Am I right?

Tough. My white guy activ. nickname is going to be Malcolm Twitter and I'm joined by the rest of the panel. Eli, Noah, Tom, and Cecil. Gentlemen, choose your monikers.

Sex, handsome. I know it's not related to the theme. I just I was going to go with one and a half puck. It's a big joke. Penis joke. I'm going to go with my anarcho leftist drag name.

That's Antifa. Nice. Nice. Nice. I'm going to be the one fire enough to starting pistol on the revolution, so I'll be Carl Marx gets at go. So, Noah, let's get into it. What person, place, thing, concept, phenomenon, or event are we going to be talking about today? Asada Shakur. All right. So why Asada Shakur?

Yeah, so I think we've all felt for a while that this show could use more stories about women and about people of color. But as we were reminded in my essay about Queen and Zinga, the story is the story. of historically prominent black women are often really fucked up and they don't have a ton of comedy fodder in them. And Asada's life does have plenty of fucked up elements, but the attempts to screw her over are so comically inept. And she wins the story so fucking hard and so fucking often that I felt like her bio belonged on this show. Yeah, I think it's worth pointing out that the show is centered white men, but it's often white men who drink lead on television or strap dynamite to their balls underwater. So it's not like a supremacy argument here. Right.

It's the opposite, really. Yeah. So first I'll get to the question on everybody's mind. Yes, she's related to Tupac, sort of. She was his godmother and the forward of her autobiography identifies her as his aunt by marriage or great aunt, I think. But the word Shakur is an Arabic word for thankful or grateful. So it's a pretty popular surname for people adopting, you know, a new surname from the Islamic tradition, which is what she did. Right?

She wasn't born Asada Shakur. She was born Joanne. Chessamard on July 16th of 1947. Or sorry, actually, she was born Joanne Byron, but her last name changed to Chesemard when she was three years old and her mom remarried. So anyway, so she grew up Shefflin back and forth between her mom's home in Queens and her grandparents home in North Carolina. And despite having North right there in the name, North Carolina was part of the Jim Crow

South back then. So she managed to experience both the official and unofficial version of American segregation. segregation was in its fat Elvis stage at that time. Yeah, and now, Fat Elvis is really hitting the gym doing a glow up. Really is. Not great. So home life wasn't great for little Joanne.

She actually ran away from home frequently. At one point, when she was all of 14 years old, she ran away to Manhattan and got a job sitting around looking pretty and enticing guys into buying her drinks at a bar. Luckily for her, she had an aunt named Evelyn, who was a lawyer,

and thought she had potential to be more than professional jail bait. So she pushed young Joanne to get an education. And though it was rocky, she eventually wound up at the borough of Manhattan Community College and then the City College of New York. Now, her college years just so happy to coincide with the mid-60. So obviously, she was quickly exposed to a fully mature civil rights movement. And young Joanne was in. She got involved with protests and sit-ins and as if an intelligent, educated,

politically active black woman wasn't already enough to scare the shit out of the FBI. she also got into communism. Well, hold on now. What kind of communism we talk about seize the means of production or what they called Joe Biden after he said we should replace a few bridges, which one?

That's enough pinko talk from you, Cecil. Yeah, both, as it turns out. So after graduation, she moved to Oakland, California, and she went to work for the Black Panther Party where, despite the terrifying popular image of the BPP at the time, her duties included helping organize

community education programs and coordinating a program that provided free breakfast to children. But ultimately she found the group too macho, too unfocused, too ignorant of history. So she joined an offshoot called the Black Liberation Army. And it was around this time that she would take on the name Asada Olegbala Shakur. Activating white people's greatest fear of all. Black names we can't pronounce.

Right. Asada Olaqq. Asada Hussein Shikour. So just a quick note on the Black Liberation Army or BLA and sort of the state of black revolutionary groups in the 60s and 70s. I am a 50-year-old white guy. I have no business delineating the original intent of the Black Panther Party or the BLA or anything like that. But I do want to emphasize here that during this time the FBI was running the operation known as Cointel Pro. We've talked about that on the show before.

But it involved all kind of corrupt bullshit meant to undermine these groups. keep them fighting with each other, installing ineffective leaders, and making them look as bad as possible to the outside world. If an effective leader emerged for one of these groups, they would have that person arrested, and then undercover agents and paid snitches would push for the least effective leadership to replace them. And the FBI would collude with media companies to plant articles that exaggerated their rhetoric or extremism in an effort to attract more fringe people into those groups. Now, of course, all that being said,

the Black Liberation Army did some crime-ass crimes that included murder. Now, I'm not going to get into their justifications and shit because we are five white guys and I don't think we should really be commenting on that. All I'm going to say is that they scared the fuck out of the FBI and membership in the group was enough to put Assad on every list that there was.

In fact, at one point, she started to suspect that her phone was bugged, so she stopped paying the phone bill, and for years, her phone just magically kept working, even though she never paid a bill. Nobody ever would come to cut the damn thing off. Yeah, no, he's using a similar tactic. He got 100 bonus minutes from Verizon in 1992.

And I think he still has most of the... I do. You got a hodle. It's important. Got those diamond hands. Fuck yeah. Now, as to whether Asada did any crimes at this point, we just don't know, right?

So she was convicted of one little murder, but that was highly questionable. She was also charged with two bank robberies, one other murder, an attempted murder, and attempted robbery, and a kidnapping. And in every one of those instances, the charges were dismissed or she was acquitted. So it would be fair to conclude that every time a skinny black woman was involved in a fucking crime, the cops said it was a sata. Or maybe you believe that she actually committed a bunch of crimes, but they were so righteous that juries refused to blame her for them.

or maybe you believe she's actually just a cold-blooded killer, in which case you agree with Donald Trump. I'm just pointing that out. Okay, podcast listener, sorry, I just need to bring you in on this. I have spent years trying to get no allusions to yes and murder. And only today do I realize all I had to do to get there was have a black lady do the murdering. This has opened my world exponentially.

I don't think she murdered any fucking buddy. So good. Women have too much privilege. Now, it's also worth letting Chakur speak for herself a little bit here. While she never admitted to killing anybody, and I don't think there's good evidence that she did kill anybody, when she was asked. There's a quote about her killing people. Well, yeah, right. Here's a quote about killing people in general, not about her doing it.

When she was asked about the, and the Black Liberation Army's involvement in killing police officers years later in an interview, she said, quote, in reality, arms struggle historically. has been used by people to liberate themselves, but the question lies in when do people use armed struggle. There were people in the BLA who absolutely took the position that it was just time to resist, and if black people didn't start to fight back against

police brutality and didn't start to wage armed resistance, they would be annihilated, end quote. They're only going to kill bad guys, everybody. No, that's fine. Okay, there we go. That is fine. Did we hold a vase at the same time? No illusions.

We're both holding a vase. while lightning struck. I'm just curious. The citation needed morality translation would be you can't break a vigilante without stealing a few bites. Hey, this is murder, something our audience doesn't care.

All right. So regardless of how valid the laundry list of charges against her were, they were there. By 1973, she was wanted for Robin a Bank in Queens, Robin a Bank in the Bronx, Robin a Bank in Brooklyn,

Robin a Catholic church in Brooklyn and hand-grenating a police car. Also, a bunch of murders. So when her and two friends were pulled over for being black while on the New Jersey turnpike, things got ugly fast. A shootout ensued where one of her friends was killed, one of the cops was killed, and everybody else was wounded. At some point, even if you didn't do anything, if you're just going to get blamed for it, you may as well just start hand-grenating some shit, you know? Right.

Yes. And who hasn't hand-grenated one or two police guys? scars at some point in their lives. Now, Asada was arrested and taken to the hospital where she was treated for gunshot wounds in both arms and her shoulder, or actually mistreated, would be a better term for it. And that's not just my opinion or just her opinion. It was the opinion of the court as soon as her lawyer had a chance to file a petition to have moved to a hospital in a different police jurisdiction.

To be fair, her insurance required a prior authorization before being shot. So this was pretty much on her. Right. Okay. Yeah. No, that's fair. But despite the pre-existing

condition But despite the best efforts of the police and her jailers, Asada recovered enough to go on trial for the 12 days of Christmas list

as shit she was alleged to have done. And it turned out that she had a pretty goddamn good lawyer in the family. That same aunt that came to rescue her

when she was shaking down pedophiles for a living showed up again. That would be Evelyn A. Williams and she's as as much a hero

in this story as as anyone. From this point on in the story, she would go about methodically disassembling damn near every charge against Asada, despite the fact that the courts themselves were openly aligned against them. Yeah, they're going to be cheating and lying the whole time, but they're too stupid to know the right direction for their chance. You've got to love enough bad guys. We'll see how it goes for them after a quick break.

All right, everyone, I call to order this meeting of the white people boogeyman. As you all know, we are the wildly fictional concepts that keep white people in power up at night. Communists? Yes, Comfort. How goes the infiltration of the government with your collectivist agenda? Very good. We have a mayor of New York now. We have mayor of New York.

Now Muslim Caliphate, you both have the mayor of New York. We have him more. Anyway, gays, how goes the corruption of the schools? Oh, great. Come on, man. I mean, fabulous. Thank you. Thank you.

All right. Well, if anybody else has any... Sorry, sorry. Would you guys mind if I turned the AC down? I'm just a little bit chilling. Choose who run the world. Are you? Fictional?

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When we left off, the FBI was doing Intel Pro to undermine the civil rights movement. Malcolm X got assassinated and MLK got assassinated, among others. But then, Edgar Hoover died in 1973. So that was fun. And Nixon had to resign after Watergate got revealed. So now the justice system is much more enlightened. What's next? I mean, it might be more enlightened, but yeah.

So we got another guy who starts his name with one letter like J. Edgar. Oh, yeah. Next at the FBI. So it's looking good. We'll see what happens. 1973. So the first crime that Osada went on trial for was a bank robbery. Specifically, the manufacturer's Hanover Trust Company in the Bronx.

And it's hard to look at this case and not see an effort to railroad her. The charges came while she was like her and her lawyers were already preparing for a murder trial in New Jersey. So they asked for a six-month post-moment and didn't get it. This was only the first of many motions that would get denied. In fact, it got to the point where the trial was such a blatant sham with such a predetermined outcome that the lawyers for both Shakur and her co-defendant elected to stand mute throughout the trial. Shikor, however, did not stand mute. In fact, every time the jury was seated, she and that co-defendant would just yell about what a kangaroo court this all was

until the judge had them removed. Yeah. And since there was, in fact, gold fringe on the flag, that actually worked for them. It did actually. Now, to be clear, leading up to this trial, there were posters of Assad of Shakur plastering the entire tri-state area that said wanted for bank robbery.

everybody in the city knew her as bank robbery lady and yet the evidence against her was so flimsy that even in a trial where her lawyer stood mute where she was perpetually removed from the court and where the jury pool was made up of people who already

knew her from her wanted posters the trial ended in a hung jury a bunch of jurors misunderstood walked out disappointed this is bullshit my dick's not any bigger at all Now, but the system wanted her bad, damn it. So they retried her a day later. They just started the trial right over again.

And at this point, she'd pissed off her aunt that had been lawyering for her pro bono. So she ended up defending herself. And still, they could not get a conviction. The prosecution star witnesses were two guys involved in the robbery. One of the guys had spent eight months in a hospital for the criminally insane. The other guy admitted during cross-examination that he actually had been secretly in love with Asada. A fact made all the more awkward by the fact that she was the one cross-examining him at the time. Yeah, you totally did the robbery. That was you for sure. So anyway, what are you doing after this?

Now, in the end, this jury was in agreement that the charges were bullshit and both Asada and the other dude were acquitted. But winning that trial was a small victory since it just meant that she had to go, you know, back to the other prison on the other side of the Hudson and wait to be railroaded for a different trial. And they tried to hurry that trail along, but that was complicated by the fact that Assad suddenly turned up pregnant. And there was this amazing FBI investigation into how she possibly could have got pregnant while she was in custody until she was like, guys, every time you kicked me in my sperm-bearing co-defendant out of the courtroom in that bank robbery, you were locking

us together in the same room. What did you think we were doing it? Okay. There's like a redacted. FBI file somewhere with a little note in the margin that says, like, black people can do asexual reproduction. So, okay. So while that trial's on hold to wait out her pregnancy, New York tries to charge her with the attempted

murder of two police officers. But apparently she was less guilty than the metaphorical ham sandwich on that one, because even the grand jury was like, hey, didn't you guys already convict two different suspects for that crime? and then wait a full year before you suddenly decided that the most famous black criminal in the country was involved. Okay. You got to admit that'd be very confusing for the prosecution at that point, right?

They're just like, what are you talking about evidence? She's black. I feel like we've said it at least twice. What's happening right now? That's exactly what kept fucking happening. Tom, that's so exactly what was happening. So anyway, so she had herself a baby, but before they could restart the trial for the shootout on the New Jersey

turned pike, she had to stand trial for a charge that she was involved in the kidnapping of a drug dealer. Now, the claim here was that she tried to kill him by forcing him to overdose on his own product. Toxicology reports of his own blood disagreed, though, so she was ultimately acquitted in that trial as well. Is that a wanted poster of my baby? What the fuck, guys? Now, of course, throughout all of this, Asada's fame is growing. It's becoming clearer and clearer to anybody who isn't just sucking the FBI's dick at this point, that both the FBI and the media have been exaggerating her notoriety. Every time a jury has gotten their hands on these claims, they've been dismissed. And for years, she's been portrayed as like the cold-blooded queen

mother of one of the most notorious terrorist organizations in the country. It would be like if Osama bin Laden stood trial and they're like, oh, he had nothing to do with this 9-11 shit, right? And not only is she beating all these charges, but she's doing it with style. The whole time she was defending herself in court. She was like brand standing and making these dramatic speeches that had nothing to do with the trial and would she dramatically walk out of the court and then they drag her off because

she's still in jail. She'd dramatically get herself kicked out of court and she would just demand the media spotlight. So by the time this she went on trial for like a different bank robbery this time in Queens, the courtroom was packed with her supporters. She's like the original

influencer of the attention economy. She's kicking ass. Yeah, yeah. there's this amazing anecdote that she shared in her autobiography about this bank robbery and queen's that she was on trial for at one point in that trial the judge comes in and of course the whole room goes silent and everything and some random kid in the peanut gallery goes is that the fascist pig mommy nice that's awesome i feel like okay new law every defendant as a law should get one peanut gallery comment You can bring in comedians to do it.

Right. You should get people more engaged. And you should have to watch it. You should have a court appointed one if you cannot or will not afford one. I'd do that. And I agree. I think witnesses should also be introduced like surprise Jerry Springer guest. Just reach run in from the side, grab fistfuls of hair.

Let's fucking. Yeah. Let's have a good time. Fuck yeah, man. So yeah. So in the latest effort to make literally anything stick against her, they were charged in her in connection with the robbery of the bankers trust company in Queens. And even though she and Evelyn had made up, she still acted as co-counsel in this case,

mostly so that she could make an opening statement that highlighted her continued mistreatment in prison. Yeah. Thus inspiring a generation of people held in contempt when they could have just paid their parking tag. Well, yeah. Yeah. Now, as part of the case against her on this one, the FBI needed a picture of her at a particular angle, right? They were going to argue that a surveillance photo taken at the robbery was her in a

wig, and they wanted a picture of her from the same angle as that, as that photograph to use in court. So needless to say, she's not super cooperative when they're trying to get this picture. Eventually, several cops held her down while another one forcibly grabbed her head and turned it the way they wanted long enough to get the photo. And then they submitted that photo as evidence in the case. So this jury that had just heard an opening statement about how mistreated this. woman was by the courts and how she'd been held in solitary for years or whatever. They're looking at this picture where an obviously struggling woman is being manhandled by a pile of cops so that they can go, see, that looks like her cheek, doesn't it? Right? That way.

Now, suffice to say, that jury also voted to acquit. It probably helped that at one point, the bank manager testified in Asada's defense that it was definitely a different lady. God, these white people in the 70s are losing so hard. They're such fucking idiot. you had a team of spies constantly hailing her for years. You couldn't get one picture from the fucking side. We kept taking pictures of other black people, okay? It's hard. Is this her?

Now, but of course, all of this was just the undercard. The main event will be the trial in New Jersey, where Asada was charged with first degree murder, second-degree murder, atrocious assault and battery, assault and battery against a police officer, assault with a dangerous weapon with intent to kill, illegal possession of a weapon, and armed robbery. Hey, should we charge her with hasteful assault and battery? You know what? Let's be bold.

We're going for atrocious assault and matter. No, that was a charge, apparently. Is that a legal term? I guess. Apparently, it's a legal term. So the trial had already been paused once for her pregnancy. And another time, by the way, when they were doing jury selection, because one of the prospective jurors admitted that everyone in the jury pool was chatting about how guilty she was before they came in.

But by 1977, a full four years after she was arrested, they were ready to take her to trial for realcies. And jury, if you know she's guilty before we start, just do the like knowing nod at each other. Okay. A juror number Winky Face will please read your opening conclusions to begin the sham. A trial, trial. So the trial went on for nine weeks. You guys heard him say sham, right? So you do disregard?

The jury will disregard that I said, champ. So the sham went on for nine weeks and it was international news. Even though a fucking Soviet Union was following it closely. Civil rights demonstrators gathered outside by the hundreds every day of the trial rallying on behalf of Asada. And for this trial, she wouldn't be defending herself, nor would her a hint, Evelyn, be defending her. For this one, she'd retained one William Cuncelor, the legendary civil rights lawyer who

defended the Chicago 7. And it's worth pointing out that her first lawyer in the trial died under very mysterious circumstances. So this case came with a bit of risk. Yeah, I'm surprised they didn't try her for that murder as well. Honestly, yeah. Story's not over yet, Eli. Now, according to Shakur's account of the Turnpike Shootout,

she raised her hand to comply with a police officer, got shot in the back, fell to the ground, and remained there throughout the gunfight, got shot twice more while on the ground. The medical evidence vis-a-vis where the bullets went in and came out seems to back up that claim. Critically, the second bullet that hit her, which was fired early on in the exchange, severed the median nerve in her right arm, and a neurologist testified during the trial that that would have made it impossible for her to pull a trigger with her right hand afterwards. Her arm was paralyzed for months after that, which is what the prosecution, of course, claimed that she did. Hold on. Hold on. Neurology.

I wasn't ready for that. I didn't finish the prosecution thingy. Maybe she went. Lefty behind the back. But despite all that, the all-white jury didn't find her evidence convincing. And after 24 hours of deliberation, they voted to convict her. She was sentenced to life in prison plus 20. 26 to 33 years if she ever comes back as a zombie or a reanimated cyborg of some sort, I guess.

And also, the judge, this bit is true, added an additional 30 days for refusing to rise when he came into the court every day. And by the way, that's the first 30 days. So my extra fucking tight thing counts. It's the first ones. Now, Cuncelor and the whole defense team insisted that Chakur had a solid chance of beating the conviction on appeal. But understandably, after nearly a decade. in prison, she'd kind of given up on the U.S. judicial system. So she appealed to somebody else entirely, which is how it came about that in November of 1979, a splinter group from the BLA in conjunction with the May 19th Communist Organization decided to get her out themselves. So this group, known as the family, financed the operation with a six-figure heist of a department store in Paramus, New Jersey. Hard to believe there's ever that much money in New Jersey at one time. And I'm not really sure where all the money went. Because ultimately what they did is just pretended to be visiting her. And then the dumbass guards forgot to search them.

And then they went in. They're like, oh, so we have 45 caliber pistols and a fucking stick of dynamite. Come on. Did they all get in jail with that? Yeah. So they grab us out. They take two guards as hostages. They steal a prison van and they take off.

And importantly, for these fucking bloodthirsty murderers, right, despite all the mistreatment she had been handling at the hands of these fucking guards, nobody was hurt in the breakout. the two guards were left unharmed in a parking lot. Yeah, but they were playing hot potato with a lit stick of dynamite. So it was. All right, we're stuck here. I'm thinking of a thing. Is it dynamite?

It is. So for the next five years, Asada lived underground as the FBI searched for her ever more desperately. This, of course, quickly descended into a bunch of raids of buildings in New York just because they had a lot of black people in them and maybe one of them was Asada. Now,

eventually that became politically. untenable and every time they would put out a wanted poster for her, a supporter was bound to cover it up with an Asada welcome hero sign. Okay, who replaced the mugshot with her headshot? This is serious. And now eventually, she would make it out of America altogether. In 1984, she was granted political asylum in Cuba, where she would live out her days pissing off a long succession of American presidents, most recently when Trump discontinued the thaw in relations with Cuba under Obama. One of the preconditions he put on reopening negotiations was the extradition of, in his own words, quote, the cop killer Joanne Chesemard, end quote. In 2013, she became the first woman to ever make

the FBI's top 10 most wanted list. And despite a $2 million price on her head from the U.S. federal government in conjunction with the New Jersey state government, she lived out her life in peace in Cuba and she died at the ripe old age of 78 in September of 2025. All right. And if you had to summarize what you've learned in one sentence, what would it be? It's a shame the revolution wasn't televised. This shit sounds awesome. And are you ready for the quiz? Always. All right. Noah, we covered the prison escape portion as part of an episode way back on episode 175. So listeners with sharp memories will recall that the prison escape was only possible because,

A, visitors just sign themselves in without an ID. So you can just show up to break someone out of prison as dude McGuye and no one would ask you any questions. I'm a Sagittarius. Fuck you. Just let me in. B. They did in fact have metal detectors installed to find weapons, but they didn't bother to use them. Huh. And C. A stick of dynamite is a hell of a patroness to ward off the de mentors. Okay. Yes. I think it's a secret answer D. All of the above. All of the above, in fact, is true.

Noah, one of the lawyers in this died under mysterious circumstances. How was he killed? A. Throwing starry decisis. B. Pled to death. C. Magistrate Razor or D.

A pellet gun. Oh, dude. A pellet gun is so fucking good. It's got to be D. It is deep. It's pretty great. It's pretty great. All right.

Podcast listener, bring it in. this lady totally killed a cop and she didn't absolutely robbed some banks well maybe maybe robbed a bank the way that Noah I believe it's pronounced hoompslusions told this story

fucking baffling to me why oh my god this is going to get so much mail it's so much mail it's sure it sure is I can't wait. Go ahead, baby.

A, black ladies are owed at least two banks. Okay, that's fair, though. They are. B, a New Jersey cop in the 70s probably had it coming. That is also probably true. C, and I need you to look at two pictures here to realize how great this is. No illusions is Asada Shakur. Don't turn my head that way.

Don't turn my head that way. Or D, the citation. needed Zytegeist has finally won him over. All right, secret answer, E, reject the premise. Yeah, you're Asada Shakur. It was C, you are Asada Shakur, but you still win somehow. Oh, okay, all right, interesting. Well, I would like a Tom essay next, by the way.

All right. Okay, well, for Cecil, Noah, Tom, and Eli, I'm Heath. Thank you for hanging out with us. We'll be back next week. Tom will be an expert on something else. Between now and then, you can listen to cognitive dissonance, the no Rogan experience, skeptics with a K, you can hear some more Marsh,

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Steven Spielberg makes the movie, just everybody remembers the way that the movie went instead of the real So smart. Anyways, I got to go, fellas. You mind if I take some of these muffins with me? Oh, those are kind of supposed to be like... White phosphorus. Go ahead and grab a couple for the road, too. Yep.