By Sarah Viren
May 25, 2021
… J. Kehaulani Kauanui had just woken up. She was reading a story on her phone in bed, a confession written by a woman named Jessica Krug, when, quite suddenly, it yanked her into the past.
“To an escalating degree over my adult life, I have eschewed my lived experience as a white Jewish child in suburban Kansas City,” wrote Krug, a history professor who had for years identified and published as a Black and Latina scholar. “I have thought about ending these lies many times over many years,” she continued, “but my cowardice was always more powerful than my ethics.”
Shakur, whose real name is Joanne Deborah Chesimard, is a convicted cop killer who fled the United States in 1979 after a prison break. She is also the first woman to make it onto the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist list, on which she remains today.
The Instagram post also features a photo of Shakur’s book cover, which promotes a foreword by Marxist activist Angela Davis, who has also appeared on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List.
Davis came to prominence in the 1960s as a leader of the Communist Party U.S.A., and is best known for being the second black woman to make the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List for her role in a courtroom shootout that resulted in the death of Judge Harold Haley.
about shirley chisholm and her run for president in 1972. i was struggling between whether i would choose another woman, black woman, or just pick another topic. there was this huge collage board at her funeral - all these pictures of her with various people, etc. in the corner there was a picture of angela davis, not with shirley chisholm. she was one of the people i had been thinking about. i rocked an angela davis t- shirt in my day. and it occurred to me that was a sign and i needed to investigate more. when i looked into the story i had no idea the story was so good, that it was a political crime drama with a love story in the middle of it. where did you go first to try to find out? i went back and read her book, looked at the notes i d written. her book gave me some sense. i started to talk to other people and when i started to read the history books around the events it became clear that there are so many question that have remained unanswered. where is she today