NYC NOW - May 2, 2023: Evening Roundup

Episode Date: May 2, 2023

New York City Mayor Eric Adams is condemning Texas Governor Gregg Abbott for resuming the busing of asylum seekers to New York and other major cities. Plus, fifty years after a shootout killed a New Jersey state trooper, WNYC’s Nancy Solomon takes a look at the complex legacy of Black power folk hero Assata Shakur.

Good evening and welcome to NYC now. I'm Junae Pierre for WNYC. New York City Mayor Eric Adams is condemning Texas Governor Greg Abbott for resuming the practice of busing migrants to New York and other cities. Adams also accuses the Republican governor of singling out cities run by black mayors. Governor Abbott sent asylum seekers to New York, black mayor, to Washington, black mayor, to Houston, black mayor, to Houston, black mayor, to Los Angeles, black mayor. Mayor Adams spoke to reporters Tuesday after the New York Post accused him of playing the race card. In a statement to WNYC, Governor Abbott says migrants are going to New York City willingly. He also criticizes President Biden for failing to address the

border crisis. Stay close. There's more after the break. Exactly 50 years ago, May 2nd, 1973, a shootout on the New Jersey turnpike between state troopers and three members of the Black Liberation Army left one officer and one activist dead. Today, the incident remains a flashpoint in New Jersey politics, partly because Asada Shakur, one of the activists convicted of murdering the state trooper, escaped from prison and is living in exile. The case now has new relevance, giving the increased scrutiny of violent police interactions with people of color. And to the Black Lives Matter movement and other activists, Shakur has become an icon of resistance. WNYC's Nancy Solomon reports.

In his song for Asada, the rapper Common praises Shakur as a black revolutionary. In the spirit of the Black Panthers, in the spirit of Asada, Shakur, we make this movement towards freedom. But it's a very different story when elected officials in New Jersey talk about her. For one thing, they refuse to use her chosen name, opting instead for her legal name at the time of the shooting. Joanne Chesimard. As it relates to Joanne Chesimard. The return of the cop killer, Joanne Chesimard. Asada Shakur joined the Black Panther Party in 1968, after members were targeted by the FBI, jailed and assassinated.

She helped form the Black Liberation Army, a small group of radicals who believed they should respond to government violence with violence. After her apartment was raided by the NYPD, Shakur went underground. I was captured in New Jersey in 1973, after being shot with both arms held in the air. It was May 2nd. She and two other members of the Black Liberation Army were stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike for a broken taillight, the kind of minor traffic infraction that has precipitated so many other deadly police interactions. Moments later, four people were shot, including Asada Shakur. One of her fellow activists was dead. So was state trooper Warner Forrester, killed with his own gun.

I was just ready to go to bed. I'd call about 11 o'clock. We had a shooting of a trooper on a turnpike, Jim. You have to come out here right away. James Challender is a retired New Jersey State Police Detective. He headed out to the Turnpike and found a bullet-ridden Pontiac abandoned alongside the road. The next thing you know, we said, there she is in the woods. And we came and we arrested Joanne Chesimar.

She had been shot. She was screaming in pain and everything. Challenger says he's convinced Shakur and the two other activists fired first. Prosecutors argued that blood on Shakur's clothing matched Forrester's, proving she'd killed the state trooper. But Shakur tells a different story. She says one trooper came to her window on the passenger side and suddenly told her to put her hands where he could see them. He had a gun in my face and I put my hands out like this.

And in a matter of seconds, I was shot. I mean, it was like a nightmare. She was shot twice by police. At her trial, medical experts testified that she had, indeed, had her hands up. In 1977, I was convicted in a trial that can only be described as a legal lynching. It was an all-white jury. She was sentenced to life plus 33 years, but she wouldn't stay in prison long. Good evening. Joanne Chesimard, who is serving a life sentence for the murder of a New Jersey State Trooper, escaped from the Clinton Women's Prison today.

At about 3 o'clock this afternoon, two armed men managed to walk right into the prison, and they got Joanne Chesimard out. Chesimard and her accomplices took two guards hostage and commandeered a prison van. It was 1979. Shakur was later granted political asylum in Cuba by Fidel Castro. Challender says it's an affront to him, and the state police more broadly, that she's not been brought back to serve her sentence. No one wanted to go that extra mile. to get her back. Why do you think that is?

I don't know. This whole case, besides the loss of Forrester and his family and all that. I'm talking about politically speaking. That's the thing that bothers me the most. But for the Black Lives Matter movement and other activists, the events that took place on the term pike that night raise many of the same issues that Black Americans face today. She's literally a symbol of liberation.

Donna Merch, a history professor at Rutgers University, wrote the book, What Asada Taught Me? It looks at the influence Shakur had on the Black Lives Matter movement. She did the impossible, which is to escape the prison system in the United States and to become a political exile who retains her voice in Cuba. In 1987, Shakur published Asada, an autobiography. More than half a million copies have been sold. Merch says many of the activist groups she studied begin their meetings with a poem by Shakur, and the circumstances of the shooting that landed her in prison can be viewed very differently now, partly due to another case that happened 25 years later. The state paid $13 million in a racial profiling lawsuit to four minority men.

In 1998, four black and Latino men were driving to a college basketball tryout on the same tournament. pike. The men were targeted and stopped on the term pike by two white state troopers, John Hogan and James Kenna. Moments later, three of them were shot multiple times. The men survived and sued the state police for racial profiling. Danny Reyes was one of them. Evidence uncovered in the case showed state troopers had been targeting minorities for traffic stops for decades. There was so much discovery done when it comes to, you know, the way that they even trained the troopers in Jersey how to profile minorities from way back. You know, it was bigger than just two bad troopers.

It was a whole system. The state police settled the lawsuit and agreed to reforms. All told, the state attorney general dropped charges against at least 77 people who said they were wrongly stopped because of their race. But those revelations never triggered any kind of review of what happened in Shakur's case. It's that one piece of the conversation, of the discourse that is always left out. Jason Williams is a professor of criminology in the Justice Studies Department at Montclair State University. When unpacking this, we have to talk about the overreach of the state, right?

She was on a run. She was a target. You only have to conclude that that had an impact to some degree on how that stop went. The New Jersey State Attorney General has a review unit that evaluative. U8's cases where a person claims they're innocent. But that process begins with a request from someone in prison. So Asada Shakur cannot ask that her case be revisited. She remains on the FBI's most wanted list. That's WNYC's Nancy Solomon. Tracy Hunt co-reported this story.

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