Controversy Ignites as CTU Mourns Assata Shakur
Few institutions in America wield as much cultural weight as public teachers’ unions, particularly in progressive bastions like Chicago. This past week, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) ignited a firestorm after posting a memorial on X honoring Assata Shakur—a woman convicted in 1977 for the murder of New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster and an enduring symbol to some on the left of Black resistance and state persecution. Their social media salute, in which Shakur was lauded as a “revolutionary fighter,” immediately drew sharp backlash from law enforcement supporters, conservative media, and even moderate voices within the city.
The Union’s statement quoted Shakur’s words: “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win,” a call that resonates for many progressives but is interpreted by CTU’s critics as wholly insensitive, if not incendiary, considering Shakur’s conviction and subsequent flight from justice. After her highly publicized conviction, Shakur—born JoAnne Chesimard—escaped from prison with the help of armed supporters, lived underground, and eventually sought asylum in Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Her death in exile, confirmed by Cuban authorities this week, closed one chapter of a polarizing legacy but has reignited an old debate over the politics of remembrance and radicalism in public institutions.
Notably, the CTU is no stranger to progressive advocacy—or controversy. Their embrace of Shakur follows a longstanding tradition of unions taking stances aligned with broader social justice movements, a position that can sometimes veer into the uncomfortable territory of hero-worshiping figures with violent pasts. Public reaction has laid bare the nation’s unresolved tensions around crime, punishment, and the boundaries of collective memory in the push for equity and repair.
The Shakur Case: History, Myth, and Social Justice
The facts of the Assata Shakur case are complex, even after half a century. As reported by sources like The New York Times and the FBI, the fatal 1973 traffic stop involved a shootout—Shakur maintains she was shot and then framed, while a New Jersey jury convicted her of first-degree murder. She would later call the jury “racist” and assert she was “ashamed to have even taken part in the trial.” Her escape from prison in 1979—with the aid of members of the Black Liberation Army—added a layer of revolutionary myth to her story. After years living underground, Shakur surfaced in Cuba by the mid-1980s, protected by Fidel Castro’s government, a move that further complicated her symbolism in Cold War politics and the U.S.-Cuba standoff.
Critics point to the facts: Shakur’s conviction was upheld in court, her presence on the FBI’s “Most Wanted Terrorists” list was no accident, and by any mainstream legal definition, a cop killer should not be revered. Law enforcement advocates including organizations representing police and victims’ families have been understandably aghast. Prominent conservative commentators, among them Corey DeAngelis—a senior fellow at the American Culture Project—lambasted the CTU’s memorial as “beyond parody,” and called it “a wake-up call to Chicago teachers who don’t feel like their values are accurately represented by the union.” The union’s public endorsement of Shakur as a “revolutionary fighter” is being used in some circles as evidence that public schools are drifting into radical activism.
Yet, among many Black intellectuals, artists, and activists, Shakur remains a complicated icon—a woman whose prosecution was viewed, especially in the context of the 1970s, through the lens of COINTELPRO, state violence, and the disproportionate targeting of Black radicals. Her step-niece and godson, the late rapper Tupac Shakur, was himself a symbol of a generation wrestling with the fallout of mass incarceration and police brutality. Progressive educators point to the need to center voices that have been marginalized for generations, even if those figures spark difficult conversations.
“The struggle for justice is never clean. Progress always courts controversy. We can teach children to wrestle with both history’s crimes and its hopes—if we have the courage to embrace complexity.”
Navigating the Boundaries of Advocacy in Public Education
Navigating the line between activism and professionalism is particularly fraught for teachers’ unions in a hyper-partisan era. CTU members are overwhelmingly progressive, and the union has a documented legacy of championing causes from anti-ICE protests to corporate boycotts over diversity practices. The pattern continues with this latest memorial—for some, validation that the union stands shoulder-to-shoulder with those fighting against systemic injustice, for others, proof of a radical agenda run amok on the contributors’ dime. Dissenting educators question whether their union dues—drawn from salaries that sometimes barely surpass $100,000—should serve to fund contentious forms of political expression.
There are precedents to the union’s embrace of figures like Shakur. In 2020, George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police officers sparked a tidal wave of protests and a reckoning over who gets to be memorialized in public space. Statues fell; new names were elevated. American history is replete with examples of once-maligned activists later recognized as visionaries—think of the radical rhetoric attributed to Frederick Douglass, or the long period when Martin Luther King Jr. was derided by the establishment as an agitator. Difficult as it may be, social progress often involves amplifying difficult voices and grappling with historical ambiguity.
Yet there is a crucial distinction: Can public educators honor a person convicted of murder without tacitly endorsing violence, or are such tributes always a zero-sum moral statement? For those defending the CTU’s tribute, the answer lies in contextual education and the willingness to let students confront the full, sometimes painful, breadth of American history. They argue that social justice education is empty without examining the forces—racism, poverty, power—that shaped figures like Shakur.
You might ask: who draws the boundaries of acceptable memory? Should public institutions avoid any figure whose legacy is not wholly clean, or risk whitewashing the real struggles faced by people on the front lines of change? There are no easy answers—but that does not absolve the need for urgent, informed debate, grounded in facts and historical truths rather than knee-jerk outrage.
A Difficult Reckoning, An Ongoing Debate
The uproar over the Chicago Teachers Union’s tribute to Assata Shakur reflects the nation’s unease at the intersection of activism, education, and public memory. Liberal and progressive educators must recognize that real change rarely arrives without discomfort. Yet, as Harvard historian Dr. Elizabeth Hinton argues, “We need to engage with the whole truth—broken systems, broken laws, and sometimes, broken heroes.” In doing so, the CTU has forced a conversation on the ethics of radical memory, the cost of public advocacy, and the unfinished business of racial reconciliation.
The question is not whether unions like the CTU should renounce their progressive values in the face of backlash, but whether they can lead in a way that respects both courage and consequence. Only then will public education truly fulfill its promise—to equip the next generation with both the knowledge and the conscience to move society forward.
