On September 25, Black activists were cloaked in sadness by the news that Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army leader Assata Shakur had died in Havana, Cuba. Shakur was considered a living legend due to her contributions to the Black liberation movement and her fugitive status after escaping the confines of an American prison.
On May 2, 1973, at approximately 12:45 a.m., a trio of Black Liberation Army members — Assata Shakur, Sundiata Acoli, and Zayd Malik Shakur — were stopped by State Trooper James Harper as they traveled along the New Jersey Turnpike in East Brunswick for a broken taillight. Werner Foerster arrived to back up his fellow officer. A shootout ensued, and Trooper Foerster was shot twice in the head with his own gun, Zayd Shakur was killed, while Assata Shakur and Trooper Harper were wounded.
Assata’s notoriety soared in the wake of a shooting on the New Jersey Turnpike that resulted in the death of State Trooper Werner Foerster and Black Liberation Army member Zayd Shakur. Neither opponents nor supporters doubted that Assata had taken a position that fellow Black Panther Party leader Huey P. Newton held during his trial for the death of Oakland Police Department officer John Frey and the wounding of officer Herbert Heanes. Similar to Newton, Assata Shakur became an iconic figure of the Black Liberation Movement. Assata, much like Huey P. Newton, became a representation of Black anger at an American system built atop racial inequality.
Although the death of Assata Shakur shook Black activists, I fear that in our rush to celebrate Assata Shakur’s legacy, we may forget that she was neither the only survivor of the shooting on the New Jersey Turnpike nor the only Black Liberation Army member to stand trial for the killing of Werner Foerster. I am troubled by the failure of the Prairie View A&M University community to recognize its connection to a case that made international news. I am left with no choice but to conclude that my Panther peers are unaware that the Black Liberation Army member known as Sundiata Acoli (Clark Edward Squire) is a PVAMU alum.
Prior to graduating from Prairie View A&M University with a degree in Mathematics, Acoli had graduated from high school at the age of 15. After matriculating from PVAMU, the brilliant young man worked for NASA as a computer analyst at Edwards Air Force Base. Having found his calling as an activist determined to uplift Black America, Sundiata worked as a Civil Rights Activist in New York City and even participated in Freedom Summer, a movement to secure the vote for disenfranchised Blacks throughout Jim Crow’s favorite home, Mississippi. However, political developments over the next several years would lead Acoli to abandon the pursuit of integrating with a nation that noted social critic James Baldwin characterized as a burning house.
The major turning point in Acoli’s activism occurred when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968. Similar to his activist peers, Sundiata Acoli divorced himself from the idealism of integration and the belief that non-violent civil disobedience would eventually deliver racial equality. America had repeatedly proven that it preferred political violence over reasonable discussion.
Much like his Black Nationalist peers, Sundiata Acoli joined the Black Panther Party (Harlem Branch) as the group’s Minister of Finance. Within a year of Dr. King’s assassination, Acoli was arrested on April 2, 1969, along with Afeni Shakur, the mother of Tupac Amaru Shakur, and other Black Panthers. This group of revolutionaries is remembered by history as the Panther 21. The most expensive and lengthiest conspiracy trial in the Empire State’s existence resulted in the acquittal of all Defendants.
Two years after his acquittal in the Panther 21 case, Sundiata Acoli was traveling on the New Jersey Turnpike with Assata and Zayd Shakur one fateful night. As a result of this night’s activities, a jury would convict Sundiata Acoli of first-degree murder (1974) and sentence him to life in prison without the possibility of parole until at least 25 years had been served. Acoli was denied parole eight times before the New Jersey Supreme Court granted his request for release on May 10, 2022. The PVAMU alumnus spent over 49 years in prison for his supposed role in the New Jersey Turnpike shooting.
I pray that our community remembers the contributions of Sundiata Acoli, a true Panther in more ways than one.
James Thomas Jones III, Ph.D., M.A., M.A., M.A.
Dr. James Thomas Jones is an associate professor of African American history at Prairie View A&M University.
Academic course instruction is not affected by the passage of SB 17. The law specifically states that its limitations may not be construed to apply scholarly research or a creative work by an institution of higher education’s students, faculty, or other research personnel or the dissemination of that research or work. This page reference is to the specific research interest of a professor, Dr. James Jones III.