Assata Shakur, left, and New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster, right
At least 60 faculty and staff members at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, have signed a petition demanding that the Catholic college keep a mural of a cop killer and an FBI designated terrorist on a wall in the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center.
Assata Shakur is the aunt of deceased rapper Tupac Shakur, who was the victim of a 1996 drive-by shooting
Assata Shakur, formerly known as Joanne Chesimard, is a former Black Panther and member of the Black Liberation Army. Shakur is also the aunt of deceased rapper Tupac Amaru Shakur, who was shot multiple times in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas, Nevada, in 1996.
She escaped a U.S. prison and fled to Cuba after shooting and killing New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster execution style with his own gun during a traffic stop in 1973. As Foerster lay on the ground wounded, she picked up his gun and shot him twice in the head.
Shakur was found guilty of first-degree murder, assault and battery of a police officer, assault with a dangerous weapon, assault with intent to kill, illegal possession of a weapon and armed robbery. She was sentenced to life in prison, but on Nov. 2, 1979, she escaped from the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women in New Jersey with the help of three armed men with the Black Liberation Army who drove her away in a stolen prison van.
Assata Shakur was convicted in 1977 and sentenced to life imprisonment before she escaped to Cuba
Shakur has been on the run from U.S. authorities for more than 35 years and is said to be living in Cuba, where she was given political asylum. Cuba has refused to even discuss extraditing her. In 2013, Shakur became the only woman on the FBI’s Top Ten Most Wanted Terrorists List. The FBI is offering a $1 million reward for information leading to her arrest.
Marquette University’s Gender and Sexuality Resource Center put up a mural to honor the fugitive in May. It states:
“No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. Nobody is going to teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes if they know that that knowledge will help set you free.” Assata Shakur
“Before going back to college, I knew I didn’t want to be an intellectual, spending my life in books and libraries without knowing what the hell is going on in the streets. Theory without practice is just as incomplete as practice without theory. The two have to go together.” Assata Shakur
When the mural went up, Marquette political science professor John McAdams posted the following May 16 response on the Marquette Warrior blog:
“Marquette’s Gender and Sexuality Resource Center was set up as a sop to the campus gay lobby in the wake of Marquette’s refusal to hire aggressively lesbian Arts & Sciences dean candidate Jodi O’Brien. Not surprisingly, it has consistently pursued a leftist secular agenda including, for example, the Femsex Seminar, which was so raunchy and so opposed to Marquette’s supposed ‘Catholic mission’ that the Administration ordered that sponsorship be withdrawn.
“But now we have yet another case of extreme leftist agenda of the organization.”
McAdams posted the following entry from the center’s Facebook page, which has since been removed:
When news of the mural went public in May, university officials called for its removal and it was taken down by May 17. Shortly thereafter, Gender and Sexuality Resource Center Director Susannah Bartlow was apparently fired from the university. Meanwhile, professor McAdams, who criticized the mural in his blog post, was suspended by the university and says he’s facing termination.
Assata Shakur
“Our university’s senior leadership just became aware of a mural that was created and displayed in a remote area of campus,” Marquette officials said in a May 17 statement. “This is extremely disappointing as the mural does not reflect the Guiding Values of Marquette University. It is being removed immediately. We are reviewing the circumstances surrounding the mural and will take appropriate action.”
But now the Catholic university’s 60 faculty and staff members have signed the following letter to the University Leadership Council protesting removal of the mural:
The recent events on campus in response to the mural of Assata Shakur and the subsequent firing of the GSRC director, Susannah Bartlow, demand a response. As faculty, we would hope that a university administration would respond with a critical and careful concern for our students, our faculty, and our staff. In short, the administration should act with discernment following a process of examen and reflection. The university’s response has been the exact opposite. As a faculty, we submit that the following were not weighed in considering the process for engaging the mural, erasing the mural, and terminating Dr. Bartlow. The incident has raised critical questions that the university ought to have considered before any decisions were made.
First and foremost, there was no consideration of the intellectual or scholarly traditions in which Shakur is invoked and engaged. While she is certainly a controversial figure, by adopting the narrative of pure vilification, the university has applied a problematic standard. The opportunity to sponsor a discussion about the appropriateness or inappropriateness of the mural’s subject was completely lost. Any context about race, policing, and the present moment and historical legacy surrounding these issues were ignored, including any reflection on Marquette’s own place within the social justice landscape. Did the administration consider the chilling impact of the erasure of the image within the context of present conversations about police brutality and black life? To disappear the mural with no engagement or conversation was to deny the role of such symbols in the social critique of police and to selectively erase some difficult histories while leaving others untouched. For a university to adopt a position informed solely by police is problematic in that they are but one stakeholder in our community. Students, staff and faculty are the other stakeholders on this campus, and their perspective and knowledge ought to have been weighed.
Second, the racial politics of the erasure of the mural were not considered with care. A group of black women students asks for a space to self-educate and explore. They paint a mural of a controversial black female figure. The figure is erased. Were the students consulted? Were they offered an opportunity to engage? To defend their choice? Were they offered opportunities for education and coursework? Was any of the care for their whole persons extended on the part of the university? Or was their initial request, that for space to invest in the representations of black women on campus, simply denied and stripped away? Where is the care for our students, their desire to engage in serious and difficult conversations? Does the university note that the involvement of Professor McAdams in drawing attention to the mural after its painting on March 24, 2015, means that a white male professor’s voice has taken prominence over the voices of many black female students, and the staff who took their project seriously and sought to give them space for conversation? What is the university planning to do to make those students whole? There is also the issue of whether similar standards are applied to other figures with problematic legacies, and how the term “terrorist” is itself not a neutral moniker, but one that is deeply racialized and politicized. For example, while Nelson Mandela is honored as a freedom fighter, he and the ANC were literally branded terrorists by the apartheid state in South Africa. Mandela remained on the U.S.’s lists of terrorist until 2008. Conversely, Thomas Jefferson is largely celebrated at the University of Virginia and at many universities across the country as a founding father and celebrated figure in our democratic history. Simultaneously, a robust and well-documented understanding of his legacy of slave ownership and sexual exploitation is well known in scholarly and popular discourse. As universities, which problematic legacies do we quietly accept, and which do we hold accountable? Is their [sic] racial and gender parity in how these standards are applied? Are we condoning some forms of violence while rejecting others?
Finally, was the process by which Dr. Bartlow was terminated appropriate and proportional? Was the board of the GSRC asked to weigh in? As the GSRC’s charter dictates that all decisions impacting the operations and future of the center must be vetted through the board, how was the board included in the decision-making process? Is immediate termination an appropriate course of action given the sequence of events, and was Dr. Bartlow’s contribution to enriching the research and teaching practices on campus outweighed by the perception of transgression in this case? Was her expertise in bringing best practices around LGBTQ advocacy, sexual assault prevention and advocacy, allyship, and student support outweighed by this event? Does the administration consider how difficult it will be to replace Dr. Bartlow and that this hasty decision undermines the momentum of the GSRC, and compromises the students, staff and faculty who depend on the center’s resources and role at the university to enrich our work? Has the university considered the impact on future enrollments of our student body, or future faculty hires? How will this decision impact the quality of student, staff and faculty life in the future?
Given the failures of the administration to act in a manner befitting a scholarly Jesuit institution, we ask the university respond to these queries, put in place processes to secure the future of the GSRC, to support students of color, and to embrace difficult conversations. Chiefly, it is clear that as the original recommendations for chartering the GSRC indicated, the GSRC must be directed by a tenured faculty member. In addition, programs such as Africana Studies and Women and Gender Studies must be adequately resourced, and care for our students, particularly students of color, must be exercised in the university’s practices, and not simply its words.
Sincerely,
Stephen L. Franzoi, Psychology
Concerned individuals may contact the Marquette University Leadership Council and/or the office of the president by calling (414) 288-7223 or faxing (414) 288-3161.