Results tagged “assatashakur”

Yesterday, WNBC announced that senior correspondent Ralph Penza passed away at age 74 yesterday morning. WNBC said, "Ralph was a consummate professional with that rare ability to touch the viewer. A longtime friend, he was a true gentleman who embodied integrity and whose company will be sorely missed. Our thoughts are with his family at this time."

It's a new semester at City College and it'll be a new round of fighting over a campus center's "Guillermo Morales/Assata Shakur" sign. The Daily News reports that City Councilman Charles Barron re-placed the controversial sign for the City College NY community center and vows to re-place it if it's taken down again:

"We are here to say to the City University that we have a right to self-determination, that we have a right to free speech, that we have a right to freedom of expression," Barron said. "We are saying that you can't determine who our heroines and heroes are going to be."

Morales and Shakur, both CCNY alums one-time students, are both living abroad after escaping custody/prison and are wanted by the authorities. Morales was a bomb maker (one bomb at the Fraunces Tavern killed four) for the Armed Forces of National Liberation and Shakur was convicted of killing a NJ State trooper in 1973; much has been made about whether Shakur actually fired a gun.

A day after the Daily News reported that City College had allowed a campus center to be named after two controversial figures on its cover, complete with scorching editorial criticizing the school, City College's chancellor Matthew Goldstein had the sign taken down. The center was called the Guillermo Morales/Assata Shakur Community Center. Guillermo Morales was a radical for Puerto Rico's independence and made bombs, including one that killed four people at Fraunces Tavern in 1975. His fingers blown off while making a bomb, but he escaped from Bellevue to Mexico and now lives in Cuba. Shakur, born Joanne Chesimard, was a member of the Black Liberation Army. In 1973, she killed NJ State trooper Wayne Foerster, she escaped from prison in 1979, headed to Cuba and now goes by Assata Shakur. There is still a $1 million reward for her capture.

A Brad Downey sculpture in Greenpoint, by Tod Seelie, who has pix of a couple of more at his site.