The late Assata Shakur, born JoAnne Deborah Byron, became the first woman to make the Federal Bureau of Information’s (FBI) Most Wanted Terrorist List in 2013.
The future is female, as they say.
Shakur died in September, prompting an end-of-year tribute to her life by Nikole Hannah-Jones, writing for The New York Times Magazine. Hannah-Jones is best known for developing The 1619 Project, which purported (on the basis of weak evidence) that slavery was the impetus for the American Revolution. The project was, of course, awarded the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. (RELATED: ‘1619 Project’ Documentary Is Laced With Inaccuracies, Historians Say)
“The United States government called her one of the world’s most-wanted terrorists. Assata Shakur called herself a 20th-century escaped slave. Claiming the runaway slave narrative proved a powerful and inspirational metaphor,” Hannah-Jones begins her lament. Hannah-Jones claims Shakur “placed herself in the pantheon of Black freedom fighters from Nat Turner to Harriet Tubman who, by any means necessary, took their liberation into their own hands.”
The fact that some leftists still romanticize Assata Shakur as a “freedom fighter” is just depressing. She escaped prison & stumped for the *Cuban government*—a regime that jailed dissenters & ran concentration camps. The ignorance is stunning. https://t.co/VhpU0AMsR1
— Billy Binion (@billybinion) December 29, 2025
Hannah-Jones notes, somewhat pointedly, that in 1977, “an all-white jury found her guilty of murdering a New Jersey state trooper who died in a shootout after a car that Shakur and her colleagues were riding in was stopped by the police.”
In other circumstances, a unanimous verdict might be taken as strong evidence of the defendant’s guilt. But then, they were white, so we’re to assume an automatic air of suspicion of their impartiality.
As to the circumstances of the shooting, of which Hannah-Jones offers few details: The murdered New Jersey State Trooper was Werner Foerster, born in 1938 in Germany. He was a Vietnam War veteran, and joined the New Jersey State Police in 1970.
Foerster and a fellow trooper, James Harper, reportedly approached a Vermont registered vehicle in the early hours of May 2, 1973.
Harper “asked the driver for his Driver’s License and Registration. Noting a discrepancy in the registration, the driver was asked to step out of his vehicle. The driver was then questioned by Trooper Foerster as Trooper Harper went to question the other occupants,” according to the State Troopers Fraternal Association.
Shots rang out from the vehicle, firing at Harper and Foerster. Harper was injured. Foerster was found dead near his patrol car, having suffered multiple gunshot wounds to the chest. He was 34 years old. He left behind a wife and a 3-year-old son.
A few months ago, Hannah-Jones worried that tributes to Charlie Kirk would mainstream his “extremist views.” Shortly after, she writes a love letter to Assata Shakur, a convicted murderer & extremist in every sense of the word. The jokes write themselves I guess. pic.twitter.com/TJNCu5SoMW
— Billy Binion (@billybinion) December 29, 2025
While Shakur was incarcerated, “pending her murder trial, she was tried for robbing a bank in the Bronx,” Hannah-Jones informs us. We learn, too, that Shakur had been indicted 10 times by the early 70’s. Shakur was first a member of the Black Panther Party, then a member of the Black Liberation Army, a militant black nationalist organization. Hannah-Jones notes that the group was “accused of bombings, robberies and murdering police officers.”
Shakur escaped from prison in 1979. The Federal Bureau of Information (FBI) offered a $1 million reward for information leading to her capture. The New Jersey attorney general offered another $1 million. She was never caught. (RELATED: ‘1619 Project’ Author Defends Looting As A ‘Symbolic Taking’)
“Shakur had been hidden in the United States for several years by a sort of Underground Railroad before being smuggled into Cuba and granted asylum as a political prisoner. She sent for her daughter to come live with her,” says Hannah-Jones.
Maybe this is a fitting historical analogy, giving the extensive mythology and outright fabrications surrounding the underground railroad.
“In an open letter, Shakur once posed the question: ‘Why, I wonder, do I warrant such attention? What do I represent that is such a threat?” Hannah-Jones claims.
Allow me to speculate: the first-degree murder conviction, probably.