New York Times writer and Howard University professor Nikole Hannah-Jones has long been controversial as a writer who explicitly rejects objectivity and neutrality in journalism. This was most evident in her “1619 Project,” which was ridiculed by historians and law professors for claiming that slavery was the driving force behind American independence. Nevertheless, despite glaring historical errors, the project was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Yet Hannah-Jones is back in the pages of the New York Times this month, rewriting history once again. This time she praises the cop killer and revolutionary Assata Shakur of the 1960s.
Hannah-Jones has been a lightning rod in her writings, from declaring that “all journalism is activism” to spreading anti-police conspiracy theories. Yet mainstream media, including the Times, have weighed in on Hannah-Jones, including the dean of the University of North Carolina who tried to quell criticism by reminding a reporter that they all need to defend Hannah-Jones.
Hannah-Jones’s latest project of historical revision is a sad memorial to Shakur, who displays the same disregard for facts in favor of a favored narrative.
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Born JoAnne Deborah Byron (and later taking the names Joanne Chesimard and Shakur), the violent revolutionary was a member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army. In 1977, she murdered New Jersey police officer Werner Foerster, 34, a Vietnam Army veteran who left behind a widow and young son. She later escaped from prison and fled to Cuba, where she died earlier this year. In 2005, she was declared a domestic terrorist. In 2013, the Obama administration placed her on its most wanted list.
You wouldn’t know much about that from the column in the New York Times. After all, according to Hannah-Jones, all journalism is activism, and if the facts don’t fit the story, the facts must go.
In her column, Hannah-Jones appears to reject the conviction as a result of an ‘all white’ jury. What is left out is that Shakur had a long and violent criminal record. She was previously shot in the stomach during a suspected drug-related crime at the Statler Hilton in Manhattan.
She was wanted for other crimes, including a bank robbery in 1971. When asked, Shakur later shrugged off such crimes as a kind of racial reparations: “There were foreclosures, there were bank robberies.”
She was also linked to a grenade attack that injured two police officers after they were identified by witnesses. In 1972, she was identified by Monsignor John Powis as one of the suspects in the armed robbery of Our Lady of the Presentation Church in Brownsville, Brooklyn. During the raid the priest was told: ‘We usually shoot off the heads of white men.’
She was also involved in the murders and ambushes of police officers for years before being apprehended on the New Jersey Turnpike on May 2, 1973 by State Trooper James Harper, who was assisted by Trooper Werner Foerster in a second patrol vehicle. The resulting gunfight left Harper wounded and Foerster dead.
Her trials included a variety of charges ranging from bank robberies to kidnapping, attempted murder and other crimes. However, when an acquittal and mistrial occurred on several charges (due to a pregnancy), she was eventually convicted of murder before escaping.
Yet the Times and Hannah-Jones move past that history to talk about Shakur and the effort to protect her, even describing the criminal network as akin to the famous system used to free slaves before the Civil War: “Shakur had been hidden in the United States for several years by some kind of underground railroad.”
The Times column laments that “freedom came at enormous costs for her and her family.” Not a single trace of sentiment for the widow and son her victim left behind in New Jersey, let alone the other victims of murders and assaults she was associated with as part of the Black Liberation Army.
Such feelings are obviously not allowed for real victims. For example, Hannah-Jones was republished by the New York Times, in which she wrote a column warning that memorials to Charlie Kirk are “dangerous.”
Hannah-Jones has also chastised other writers for publishing shoplifting stories because “that’s how you legitimize the carceral state.”
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Yet the New York Times is still actively involved in projects to rewrite history with Hannah-Jones. This is the same newspaper that excluded columns from Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., over his advocacy for the use of National Guard troops to quell violent riots, but published columns from “Beijing’s enforcer” in Hong Kong and from a University of Rhode Island professor who previously defended the killing of a conservative protester.
It is the same newspaper that has ousted a variety of editors who published opposing views or challenged partisan reporting and journalistic activism.
The Times column ends with a sentence that is breathtaking for its ahistorical and amoral message: “Shakur, who saw himself as an escaped slave, died free.”
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A convicted murderer and wanted terrorist died in one of the most blood-soaked, repressive regimes in the world… but Hannah-Jones and the New York Times want everyone to know she “died free.”
That’s reassuring. As for Werner Foerster, he just died and was not mentioned by name once in the Times column.
