[music]

Florencia: How would you define freedom?

Speaker 2: How do I define freedom? To be able to be in my own body, in any space at any time.

Speaker 3: An extension of my ancestors. Like, what they didn't have for freedom, I do wholeheartedly, I multiply it, to honor them.

Speaker 4: Oh my gosh, that's heavy. As feeling like your obligation is to your own happiness and well-being.

Speaker 5: As the ability to do what you want do, but not in a way that would hurt somebody else for me it's through dance. As to be accepted for who you truly are and no one saying anything about it. As a soul that is free from suffering.

Speaker 7: As no limitations put upon a person.

Speaker 8: As being able to speak without permission. It shouldn't be, "Can I?" It is what it is. I woke up. I'm free.

[music]

Kai Wright: It's Notes from America. I'm Kai Wright, welcome to the show. Raoul Peck has led quite the life. He's been a global citizen from the Congo to Germany to the US. He served as Minister of Culture for Haiti, which is his home country. He has made several films that challenge viewers to face hard truths about our societies. In 2017, his documentary, I Am Not Your Negro, was nominated for an Academy Award. The film is a lyrical journey into the mind of James Baldwin and a book that Baldwin pitched to his editor but never actually wrote.

The film won widespread acclaim, but Raoul Peck sees it as part of a suite of documentary work in which he's exploring how injustice and, frankly, just cruelty in American history live in the present tense of people's lives. This past fall, Peck released his latest film in that loose collection, a film called Silver Dollar Road. It tells the story of a Black family in North Carolina and their harrowing struggle to hold on to land they owned since emancipation. The film is adapted from an investigation published in The New Yorker.

The executive producer of our own show, André Robert Lee, is also a documentary filmmaker, and Raoul Peck is one of his heroes. André sat down with him to talk shop.

André Robert Lee: Raoul, thank you for joining us today.

Raoul Peck: Thank you for inviting me.

André Robert Lee: We're in a moment right now where there's an effort to suppress the kind of history you tell in your films. Are you explicitly trying to challenge that with your work?

Raoul Peck: [chuckles] My work is like, I feel like we should have truckloads full of material, and I feel like I just have a bucket to carry every week because we have so many stories that we should be telling, and entering the film industry is a very modern thing. We came in very late in the pictures. When I do research about the last two centuries, everything I bumped in are photos from the colonizers, wherever I look. I have, in my work, find a way to deconstruct them and use them to tell my own stories. At the same time, I have to create something new and not getting bogged down in the same narrative.

We have to be sociologist, we have to be historian, and we have to be storyteller at the same time. I came to cinema not because I wanted to be in the movie industry. I came to cinema from a political standpoint, a way to get a hold of my own history, my own stories, and be able to construct something different and give to this generation and the next generation the weapons for their own fight.

André Robert Lee: Your new documentary, Silver Dollar Road, expands on a 2019 ProPublica article co-published with The New Yorker. The article, like your documentary, follows the Reels family in their battle to keep ownership of their land. How did you first come across that story?

Raoul Peck: I was approached by ProPublica and Amazon production and as well JuVee production, which is a Viola Davis and Julie Tennon production company because they were working on the scripted version of the story and they approached me to be an executive producer on the documentary. After reading the article and some of the documentation, I met the family and I realized this is a film that I should make. The story is so strong, and I could see how to make it very clearly. I also could see how I could attach it to my two last film, I Am Not Your Negro and Exterminate All the Brutes.

For me, it became a sort of trilogy, where this last portion of the trilogy is much more personal, much more raw, because it's a real family that is involved in a decades-long fight. That's how the whole story came along.

[music]

Kai Wright: The whole story began more than 100 years ago when a Black man named Mitchell Reels bought what was then undesirable coastal property in Beaufort, North Carolina. The 20th century is full of stories of Southern Black families acquiring unwanted land, turning it into something for themselves, and then losing it to theft and violence and legal trickery. The Reels kept their land through all of that history, or so they thought. Silver Dollar Road tells the story of how developers actually laid claim to this now valuable waterfront property, and what happened when Mitchell Reels's great-grandsons simply refused to leave.

André Robert Lee: The great-grandsons fought a complicated legal battle that landed them in jail for eight years on a contempt of court charge. It's incredible. I'll let people get the whole story in the film itself, but would you say the story of the Reels family is actually part of a much broader history about land and racism that you want people to understand?

Raoul Peck: If we see it on an historical level, after the end of slavery, or let's say the official end of slavery, Black people were promised land, the famous 40 acres and a mule, which never happened. Black people wanted to build a new life for themselves. Having land is the key to come to some sort of economical wealth. They were not asking for much. They said, either give me land or we'll find ours. This is what a lot of them did. They bought what was accessible for them, usually swamp lands and coastal land that are very sandy.

They make the land work for them. They really invest in that land. They worked the land hard, and after a few years, they start earning returns. That, in turn, created jealousy. That's when the whole trouble started. We used to think that lynching was primarily about racism. It started about property. It was the former enslaved basically start doing something for themselves when other poor white didn't see the same thing for themselves. They start basically terrorist act killings, burning down, pressuring Black to leave their land.

To come back to the Reels family, the patriarch Elijah Reel had bought 75 acres along Silver Dollar Road to the coast. At one point, he lost it because of taxback payments. His brother bought it, and his brother died. That's one of the major problem in particular in the South, is that Black families did not trust the justice system. They didn't write a will, thinking that when you leave your property to the whole family, it's more secure but in fact, it's the contrary. You don't have really, deeds. You don't have the whole paperwork that you need, and you don't have access from government help.

André Robert Lee: You mentioned 40 acres in a mule in the film and tell the story of that promise, which was never kept. There's a meeting between General Sherman and 20 Black ministers in Savannah, Georgia. Tell us a bit more about that actual meeting for what you discovered with your research.

Raoul Peck: There was several of them, but Sherman asked the Reverend, "What do you want? What can we do?" They basically, as any normal human being would say, "We need land to be able to make our own living. We don't want to work for anybody else and we are capable and able to make our own fortune and just make land available to us as it has been for all the pioneers, the Homestead Act, et cetera." They were never given that land. The whole story from the get-go was totally biased.

When you hear even today, the thing about pulling yourself with your own bootstrap, if it wasn't so dramatic, it would be really ironic and funny. Black people and Indigenous people never were able to really profit from land. They never had the head start like everybody else and we are still paying that today.

Kai Wright: I think you did that so well, really bringing forward that story and digging deep into this. I remember watching that and just jumping out of my seat and yelling at the screen, like, "Yes, yes." I was once at a screening of one of my films and someone said, "Why do you do this work? Documentaries don't pay a lot of money." I said this and I say it often, "I do it for very selfish reasons so I can sleep better at night."

Raoul Peck: Just a parenthesis to that, when you ask the same question to Baldwin, "Why are you doing this?" He says, "Because I have no choice." That's how I see my work and you probably see yours as well. We have no choice.

[music]

Kai Wright: We need to take a break. We'll be back with more of this conversation between documentary filmmaker Raoul Peck and our executive producer André Robert Lee. Raoul Peck's latest documentary is called Silver Dollar Road. This is Notes from America. I'm Kai Wright. Stay with us.

[music]

Kai Wright: Welcome back. It's Notes from America. I'm Kai Wright. This week, our own executive producer, André Robert Lee, is in conversation with documentary filmmaker Raoul Peck. Peck is best known for his 2017 Oscar-nominated rumination on the work of James Baldwin called I Am Not Your Negro. His latest film is called Silver Dollar Road. It's the story of a Black family's harrowing decades-long fight to keep ownership of land they acquired generations ago in North Carolina. A big part of this story is the fact that in many southern Black families, property has been passed down communally, meaning without a will.

That's precisely what made the land vulnerable to legal theft. Here's André again.

André Robert Lee: Do you have a will, Raoul?

Raoul Peck: At my age, I should. [chuckles] I've been scribbling stuff for at least the last 10 years but never managed to really finish something. I do have a few properties in Haiti, which is my home country because I understand what lands mean because my father inherited some land from my grandmother. When I started going more often to Haiti, starting around '86 after the end of the dictatorship, one of the first things I did is go with my father everywhere he had a piece of land and see how it was. It was getting back my own history and having him tell me the story of that land.

He was an agronomist so I come from a family of people who are close to land. He was very clear in matter of papers, et cetera, and I just start to take it from him. For me, it's important. It's like a family history. I really understand what it means and so my personal story is also linked to that.

André Robert Lee: I asked the will question because as I listened, I thought about that myself. I think about we see major cases in the world right now, some pretty famous folks who left this world without wills and I always say to folks it's more complicated. It's not just someone's lazy. It's much more complicated than that. I think that we often talk about the generational information and behavior that we inherit. I don't have a will either, which I've been thinking about, especially after watching this movie.

Raoul Peck: It's a good sign too, because it means we don't have that much to leave behind. [laughter] Because that's the reality too. The core problem is that minorities, in particular Black minorities, were never able to accumulate wealth and to pass it on. That was an incredible, difficult process. The numbers is staggering. From 1920 to, I think, 1997, Black landowners lost 90% of their properties. 90%. I think the last evaluation was the equivalent of $356 billion, so you imagine this wealth gap. It explains everything else.

André Robert Lee: It really does.

Raoul Peck: By the way, it's not at all complex. Each person should learn that in school. You have people who came from Europe, who stole land from the Indigenous people and then took other people and merchandise them to make them work on the land. Then when everybody got wealth, you tell the others, "You still can't have access to that wealth." Then later you complain about them that they are lazy, that they are no good, and that they don't know how to work. When they create that wealth for you, they create that wealth for you.

[music]

André Robert Lee: There's a lot of talk these days about Black joy. I want to talk about the ways in which you brought that idea to Silver Dollar Road. There's an opening scene at the barbecue with the matriarch of the Reels family. Her name is Gertrude. Tell me about why you opened the film with that scene.

Raoul Peck: That was something I knew I had to do. I didn't want to make a film about victims. I didn't want to make a film about sorrow or any kind of regret. Of course, people were angry watching the film at times, but they also laugh. They also cry, but not because there is some weird story, but because it's us. It's our families. In Gertrude, I see my own grandmother. The film started by you connecting to the family. I wanted to show them as human beings first. The land stealing is just a moment of their life. It doesn't determine who they are.

Who they are is what they have done with that land, is how they have created a family, how they have created a culture, how they have built a community. I wanted to show that first because we have a way to watch movies about ourselves from the point of view of victims or problems. The problem is exterior to who we are. To come back to Baldwin, Baldwin said, "I don't wake up and look at myself in the mirror and say, 'Oh my God, I'm Black and there are problems.'" No, it comes from the exterior.

He turned the mirror toward the one that looked at us a certain way and say, "I think the problem is with you, not with me. I can live without you. I don't need your racism. I don't need anything from you. I just need everything that everybody else had. I want the same chances. I want my children to go to the same schools with the best teacher. I want to have access to bank credit like everybody else. I'm not asking for privilege. I just want what belongs to me as a citizen, because I created that wealth. I don't have to beg for anything." It's important to state the film in that context.

André Robert Lee: Yes. You've answered one of my big questions of, "How do you show up in the film?" and I think you just explained it right there. When I saw Gertrude, I saw my grandmother also, and when she's sitting in that chair out the window, I was thinking, "I can't wait until I'm Sunday sitting in my chair looking out the window like that. [laughs]

Raoul Peck: Exactly.

André Robert Lee: You had many people as part of your story. You had Ms. Gertrude, you had Kim, you had Mamie, Melvin, Lee Curtis, and all these people were what I used to call characters in the movie, but I had a native person say to me, "Don't call me a character. I'll be a participant. I'm a human being." With all these participants in your movie, are you still in touch with them? Have you built a relationship?

Raoul Peck: I always make sure that I stay in contact with all the participant and usually they become friends. The way I made this movie, you can see there is no ending. There is no Hollywood ending where you say, "Okay, now I saw a story. It's finish. We know who the bad guys are and the good guys are, and I can go home. I just consume a nice story." No, the life of the family continue. There is a party at the beginning. There is a party at the end, but there are trauma as well, but it's part of life and the fight continue.

It's the same. My relationship is like, when I work with people like this, I can't fake it. I'm not a mercenary. Sometimes some professional people say, "I can go anywhere and work and then go out." No, I can't do that. In order to find the right emotion in further, in order to find some sort of truth or truthful moments, you need to be real. You are asking people to trust you. You can't fake.

André Robert Lee: Yes. Open their lives to you.

Raoul Peck: Even if it's more work to keep the link with so many people on so many different territories, it's key part of the work I do. By the way, we are working with them in making sure that the rest of the land doesn't become a problem as well. It's a good occasion to say the family have also open a GoFundMe page. Go to silverdollarroad.com. I think there is a link to that. We make sure that they have a group of lawyers that works with them to make sure the rest of the land is secure to work on different scenario about what to do to make that land economical for them, for their livelihood, et cetera.

We can't just turn our back. In the same way, it's important for me. I usually say a film for me is the beginning of something, not the end. I'm not making consumer good. I'm not making a product. I'm making a tool. I can say that for all my films, they are tools for actions.

André Robert Lee: Yes. That's phenomenal. I completely agree with that. I, like you have the longest time said my films are-- they're tools for action.

Raoul Peck: Yes.

André Robert Lee: Let's change this world. There's a way for us to bring this forward. I'd ask people, "Show up and think about where your heart and your mind meet and decide how you will go forward from this moment." Thank you so much for your part to say that.

Raoul Peck: I make sure that it's still a film. It's not a propaganda instrument. It's a film that you can watch Silver Dollar Road several time because I'm telling a story and you get into the story each time. You can watch it several times and you would see a different film because you are part of making the film as well.

André Robert Lee: I want to ask you about something I heard you say a while ago about one of your previous films. You said this following quotation. "As writers, creators, and filmmakers, we have no choice than to reflect on societies and provide knowledge and challenges in addition to mere entertainment, and as artists, we need to break the limits of our art." Tell me more about that.

Raoul Peck: I told you how I came to filmmaking from the political angle and political in the sense that, I am a citizen of wherever I was. I left Haiti when I was eight. I went to Congo and I felt Congolese. I grew up with my Congolese friend. When I went to France, well, I fought for injustice in France. When I went to Germany the same, I was in the streets protesting Reagan wanting to put missile in Germany. In New York, it's the same. My older brother went to Vietnam. We engage in whatever the fight is. I always saw what I do as part of being a citizen.

We cannot just look at ourself and just, "I just want to make a living for myself." No, my happiness depends on the happiness of everybody else. I cannot be happy if I have tons of money and my little thing and everything else outside of me, I can see the drama, I can see the poverty, I can see the homeless. I can see a lot of things. For me, the work that we do is being an artist is a privilege. Whereas in the US many times people see art as a business, in particular cinema as a business, it's entertainment.

Most of the time, whether they are conscious of it or not, entertainment is like, "We have to make people happy." It doesn't have to do with reality. It's like a dreamland. I never saw a contradiction of making entertainment and content that makes sense. There are many layers of film that can be made. I see the richest of cinema throughout the world, African cinema, Asian cinema, Latin American cinema. I grew up with those cinemas. I was never brainwashed by Hollywood. I take from Hollywood some of the skills.

I take the way you do certain storytelling, but I usually break that structure, that famous three-act structure that at the end of a film leaves you like in a world that is good. Usually decide that there is one bad guy. If we talk about police brutality is like, there are some bad policemen, but it's not a structural problems. That's the way Hollywood operate its storytelling. That's why in Silver Dollar Road, it's important for me to show the structure of all this. It's not just the Reels family, but is the structure and how even the Reels family or somebody like Mamie analyze it.

When she said by example, "What are they going to do with us Black people?" She start to say Black people, and then she correct herself. She said, "with us poor people." She gets it. She understand how it works. It's much more about class than about race. We are poisoned by the race conversation, that we of course need to have all the time but that's not the center battle. That's why I made exterminate all the roots to go to the roots of that story so that nobody can say, "I didn't know."

André Robert Lee: I've always noticed with your work. Your work is very existential. It's very deep in philosophy, loss of thought, and attention to exploring who we are. I feel like I saw you go through an existential moment talking about how we exist in this world, looking at Baldwin as Black people, and do our best to keep the exterior world from corrupting who we are truly. We talk a lot on this show about what Black freedom is. I want to posit that freedom is a multidimensional concept, and I want to know what you think it is. How is freedom experienced?

Raoul Peck: Wow. That's a tough question. Especially because today the word is used so improperly.

André Robert Lee: Yes.

Raoul Peck: Like freedom not to be vaccinated.

André Robert Lee: Right. [chuckles]

Raoul Peck: What is that? What kind of freedom or my freedom go over everything else but they forget your freedom stop where the freedom of the others start. The word freedom was used in this country when millions of people were enslaved. We need to pause about the use of that word. It's always a matter of historical context, political context. There is not such a thing as freedom per se. There are all sort of freedom as well, but unfortunately, I think the word today is insufficient to deal with the problems we are dealing with today.

A lot of people think in fact of personal freedom, not a collective freedom, and that's a different ballgame.

[music]

André Robert Lee: I want to thank you, Raoul Peck, for joining us today. It's truly an honor to spend some time with you. Your work means so much to so many of us. Thank you for all that you do.

Raoul Peck: Thank you for the invitation. Thank you again. It was nice talking to you.

Kai Wright: That was documentary filmmaker Raoul Peck in conversation with our executive producer André Robert Lee. Raoul Peck's latest film, Silver Dollar Road, is streaming now on Amazon Prime. Coming up, 2023 marked the 50-year anniversary of an infamous encounter between New Jersey State troopers and a group of Black activists that ended in deadly gunfire, how Assata Shakur became an icon to many and an enduring political villain to others. That's next.

It's Notes from America. I'm Kai Wright. On this show, we've had several conversations about guns and fear. There is a recurring theme in stories about anti-Black violence, whether it's the kind of police violence that killed George Floyd or the vigilante violence that killed Ralph Yarl. Over and over, we hear about a deep irrational fear of Blackness. In our conversation last week, we also talked about the fact that at points in our history, Black people have responded to this fear by arming ourselves as well.

For as long as Black people have been in these United States, there have been thinkers and leaders and movements saying, "Hey, at minimum, we have got to defend ourselves against this madness. We need guns too." The outcome has been complicated. This week, we're thinking about one particularly complicated story in the history of Black self-defense movements. 50 years ago in April 1973, three Black activists were pulled over by state troopers on the New Jersey Turnpike. Tragically, guns were fired and people were killed.

The aftermath, which we have to say is ongoing really, one of the Black activists involved, Assata Shakur, became a cultural icon to many and an enduring political villain for others. Nancy Solomon and Tracie Hunte have been looking at this moment in our history and at the many unanswered questions that raises. They're going to share their reporting with us. Nancy sets the scene.

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Nancy Solomon: We start with what we know about that night. On May 2nd, 1973, Shakur and two other members of the Black Liberation Army are driving a '65 Pontiac, South on the New Jersey Turnpike. State Trooper James Harper stops them for a broken taillight. Another State Trooper, Werner Foerster, backs him up. Shots are fired. The passenger in the backseat is fatally wounded, and the Trooper Werner Foerster is also killed. Assata Shakur and the second trooper are injured.

James Challender: I was just ready to go to bed. I'd a call at about 11 o'clock, "We had a shooting of a trooper on the Turnpike, Jim. You have to come out here right away."

Nancy Solomon: James Challender is a retired New Jersey State police detective. He heads out to the Turnpike immediately and finds a bullet-ridden car abandoned alongside the road. The back window is shot out.

James Challender: As I got out of my car, I walked into the weeds and there was a Black man lying there with a state police gun under his body.

Nancy Solomon: Zayd Shakur, the passenger who'd been in the backseat of the car, lay there dead.

James Challender: Another state police detective was there. Next thing, we said, "There she is in the woods." We came and we arrested Joanne Chesimard. She had been shot. She was screaming in pain and everything.

Nancy Solomon: Challender says he went with her to the hospital and processed the physical evidence.

James Challender: There was only one person in that shooting scenario that had AB-negative blood, and that was Werner Foerster. That came to be an important factor in the case because part of Chesimard's clothing, especially her socks, were saturated with AB-negative blood, which was Werner's blood.

Nancy Solomon: Assata tells a different story. She says her friend driving the car got out to present his ID to one trooper. The other officer came to her window on the passenger side. He asked her where they were going and then suddenly told her to put her hands where he could see them.

Assata Shakur: He had a gun in my face and I put my hands out like this, and in a matter of seconds I was shot. It was like a nightmare. It was like--

Nancy Solomon: Assata was just 25 years old. For me, the big question is how did she even end up in that car on the New Jersey Turnpike? What were the forces that put around that path? Assata was born JoAnne Byron in 1947. She was an only child and she grew up in Queens with her mother. After high school, she worked a few office jobs, got married, and became JoAnne Chesimard. It's at Manhattan Community College that she meets Black activists for the very first time.

Assata Shakur: It was like an awakening here with these Black people and they were talking about dashikis and Africa. It just was like-- It made me feel alive.

[music]

Nancy Solomon: She got involved in student government and community organizing. During this time, the Black Panther Party is gaining momentum in Oakland. They cut a striking image, black leather jackets, black berets, and guns. They said they carried guns to protect their community from the police.

Black Panther: [chanting] No more pigs in our community. Off the pigs. No more pigs in our community. Off the pigs.

Nancy Solomon: One of the founders of the Black Panthers, Eldridge Cleaver, explained they had a 10-point program for improving the lives of Black people.

Eldridge Cleaver: We wanted an end to police brutality and the murder of Black people by the police. That was point number seven. It turned out that we really didn't have time for anything but point number seven.

Nancy Solomon: When the Black Panthers set up in New York City, Assata joined them. She volunteered with the Free Breakfast program and worked on several education projects. Immediately they were under surveillance by the Police Department and COINTELPRO, an FBI program that infiltrated disrupted, and attacked civil rights organizations. The police killed Fred Hampton, a leader in Chicago. The NYPD arrested 21 Black Panthers in New York. Assata left the Panthers and formed the Black Liberation Army, a group that believed it should fight violence with violence.

During this period, her apartment was raided by the police and she disappeared underground.

Lennox Hinds: Now, the FBI carried on a campaign targeting not only the Black Panther Party, they targeted SCLC, they targeted Martin Luther King.

Nancy Solomon: Lennox Hinds, a longtime attorney for Assata Shakur, argues that her story must be understood as part of an overall attack against the Civil Rights Movement. He spoke on the news show, Democracy Now! in 2013.

Lennox Hinds: They targeted Harry Belafonte. They targeted Eartha Kitt. They targeted anyone who supported the struggle for civil rights that they considered to be dangerous. It is in that context we need to look at what happened on the New Jersey Turnpike in 1973.

Nancy Solomon: At that time, the NYPD suspected her in several bank robberies and the attempted murder of two police officers. After her capture, she was found innocent of the robberies and the attempted murder charges were dismissed by a judge for lack of evidence. Not so in New Jersey. As far as the state police and prosecutors were concerned, when they found Assata shot by the side of the Turnpike, they had Werner Foerster's killer, and they had a trooper who survived the shooting as their key witness.

Assata Shakur: In 1977, I was convicted in a trial that can only be described as a legal lynching.

Nancy Solomon: It was an all-white jury, and she was sentenced to life plus 33 years.

News Anchor 1: Good evening, JoAnne Chesimard, who was serving a life sentence for the murder of a New Jersey state trooper escaped from the Clinton Women's Prison today.

News Anchor 2: At About three 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.

Nancy Solomon: They quickly abandoned the van and released the guards.

Assata Shakur: I escaped. It was a clean escape. No one was hurt. I planned it as well as I could plan it. That's all I got to say about it.

Nancy Solomon: Assata surfaced in Cuba just a few years later. In a TV interview with the journalist Gil Noble, Assata said she didn't even have Castro's permission before arriving.

Assata Shakur: I came and I said, "Here I am. Now, y'all got to make a decision and [unintelligible 00:40:00] because you can't call them, [crosstalk] "Hi. Can I come back?" [laughter] That was impossible.

Tracie Hunte: She was granted political asylum. In 1987, she released her book, Assata: An Autobiography. More than half a million copies have been sold and it has inspired several generations of Black women.

Donna Murch: I read her book when it first came out. For me, it was just transformative.

Tracie Hunte: Donna Murch is an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University.

Donna Murch: I'd gone to very conservative Catholic schools in Western Pennsylvania. I didn't have a Black teacher until I went to college. Assata, in the late 1980s, for me, opened up a whole different way to understand Black Liberation.

Tracie Hunte: It was the middle of President Ronald Reagan's second term and the promises of the Civil Rights Movement had yet to materialize.

Donna Murch: A third of Black people are living under the poverty line. You had the crack crisis, the war on drugs. It was a really painful time.

Tracie Hunte: In the midst of all that, she found Assata Shakur.

Donna Murch: Her conviction and then incarceration and her own refusal to give in, 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. She's literally a symbol of liberation.

Tracie Hunte: Murch says that's why we're still talking about her. She wrote the book, Assata Taught Me, about how current-day Black activists are trying to continue her legacy.

Donna Murch: So many of the different organizations in Black Lives Matter, they start their presentations or they start their meetings with a poem from Assata; It is our duty to fight for freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love and protect one another. We have nothing to lose but our chains.

Nancy Solomon: Assata's status as a hero is a painful subject for many in New Jersey who believe she escaped justice. Nowhere is that more true than state police headquarters in Trenton. When I met with the retired trooper James Challender, he gave me a tour. There's a plaza with the names of troopers engraved on bricks, historic relics like an old police car, and they've created a small museum.

James Challender: This is the Hall of Honor here.

Nancy Solomon: The Hall of Honor, a long corridor with photos of every trooper who's died in the line of duty. There are a lot of them.

James Challender: Robert Merenda, he was killed on the Turnpike. Tommy Dawson was a narcotics detective, got killed in a car accident. There's Phil Lamonaco, he was killed by the terrorists. Oh my God. All these guys. Here's Werner Foerster.

Nancy Solomon: Werner Foerster is the trooper who died that night in 1973. Challender remembers the scene at the hospital when Foerster's wife, Rosa, arrived.

James Challender: She's screaming. I can still see her screaming today. I couldn't stop her.

Nancy Solomon: It's an affront to Challender and the state police more broadly that the Cuban government hasn't been forced to turn over Assata to serve out her sentence.

James Challender: No one really made an effort to get her back. No one wanted to go that extra mile to get her back.

Nancy Solomon: Why do you think that is?

James Challender: I don't know. This whole case, besides the loss of Foerster and his family and all that stuff, I'm talking about politically speaking, that's the thing that bothers me the most. I know, for lack of a better word, the juice they have, if they want to use it, they can get her back.

Nancy Solomon: The state troopers have been successful in making it a political issue.

Speaker 19: Return the cop killer, Joanne Chesimard.

Speaker 20: We have a Joanne Chesimard in the last--

Speaker 21: Of the cop killer, Joanne Chesimard.

Nancy Solomon: This is where the standoff remains. The issues Assata Shakur was fighting for haven't been resolved. Consider an incident on the very same New Jersey Turnpike 25 years later involving state troopers.

Speaker 22: The state paid $13 million in a racial profiling lawsuit to four minority men. The men were targeted and stopped on the turnpike by two white state troopers. Moments later, three of them were shot multiple times.

Nancy Solomon: It was 1998 and they were headed to a college basketball tryout. When they were pulled over, their car wasn't put all the way in park. It slid back and bumped the trooper's car. In an interview with News 12 New Jersey, one of the men in the car, Danny Reyes, tells what happened next.

Danny Reyes: I was in the front passenger. He took his baton out and just breaks the window with his baton. At that moment is when I tried to show him that I wasn't trying anything funny. I just showed him my hands and he just cocked his pistol, started firing.

Nancy Solomon: Reyes was shot in the arms, hip, and stomach. He and the other young men sued.

Danny Reyes: There was so much discovery done when it comes to the way that they even trained the troopers in Jersey how to profile minorities. From way back, it was bigger than just two Black troopers. It was a whole system.

Nancy Solomon: The Federal Department of Justice investigated the state police. They sued New Jersey for targeting Black drivers on the turnpike and conducting unconstitutional stops and searches. New Jersey agreed to reforms that would be supervised by a federal monitor, but those revelations never triggered any kind of review or even questioning of what happened in the Assata Shakur case.

Jason Williams: It's that one piece of the conversation, of the discourse, that is always left out.

Nancy Solomon: Jason Williams is a Professor of Criminology in the Justice Studies Department at Montclair State University in New Jersey.

Jason Williams: Again, when it comes to talking about police overreach, brutality, malpractice, and so forth against Black Americans, the conversation has always been met with a sense of suspicion. It bewilders me why that wasn't even part of the discussion way back then.

Nancy Solomon: In fact, Williams points out Black drivers complained for years about being pulled over on the turnpike for no reason long before the shooting in 1973. Assata was living underground because she had been targeted by the police, the FBI's COINTELPRO, the national program that was later found to be unconstitutional.

Jason Williams: When unpacking this, we have to talk about the overreach of the state that was associated with her lived experience, and frankly, her existence. 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.

[music]

Mae Jackson: Oh look, I didn't [unintelligible 00:47:14] getting the cats away.

Nancy Solomon: Mae Jackson lives in Yonkers with her daughter in an old Victorian filled with antiques. She's been a lifelong activist for racial justice. She says it began in 1955 with the murder of Emmett Till.

Mae Jackson: I'm in a classroom, fourth grade. We were not that far from where Emmett Till's body was pulled from the river. His death had such an impact on my generation. He was young enough for us to identify with him. He could have been a playmate.

Nancy Solomon: In the 1960s, she worked for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and later co-founded the Third World Women's Alliance. Mae wasn't a Black Panther, but she knew Assata.

Mae Jackson: I don't have a position on, she did the right thing, she did the wrong thing. She did what any slave would do. If you're not free, you can't make a judgment. I don't make a judgment call. That's how she decided to deal with whatever she was dealing with. I'm there to support her as a Black person, as a Black woman. I didn't have to agree with her tactics.

Nancy Solomon: Mae was dedicated to non-violent organizing, but she understood the need for armed self-defense.

Mae Jackson: You're shooting Black children down in the back. You're breaking into people homes and threatening their family members. You're ruining people's lives. That's why you had a Black Liberation Army. Now you can ask me, was it necessary? Yes, it was, because people get tired of seeing their children gunned down and nothing is done.

[music - Common – A Song for Assata]

Kai Wright: Notes from America is a production of WNYC studios. Follow us wherever you get your podcasts and on Instagram @noteswithkai. Special thanks to Tracie Hunte and Nancy Solomon for bringing us their reporting. David Norville produced our segment with Raoul Peck. Mixing this week by Mike Kuchman. Our team also includes Karen Frillman, Regina de Heer, Rahima Nasa, Jared Paul, Suzanne Gaber, and Lindsay Foster Thomas. André Robert Lee is our Executive Producer, and I am Kai Wright. Happy New Year, everybody.

 

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