CCNY Students Sue over Shakur Sign
The Associated Press has recently reported that City College students and alumni, including architecture student Rodolfo Leyton, have filed a lawsuit against the City University of New York in the US District Court of New York. The lawsuit, according to the AP, claims that the students’ first amendment rights were violated by the University when the CUNY Chancellor Mathew Goldstein ordered that the sign over a student center bearing the name of Guillermo Morales and Asatta Shakur be immediately removed. The attorneys in the case, Ronald B. McGuire and Kamau Franklin are asking that a temporary injunction be ordered against the university prohibiting it from prosecuting or punishing students for any attempts to replace the sign and allowing the students to continue operating the community center.
The conflict between students and the administration over the sign began in early December when the newspaper the New York Post ran a front page article with the headline “Disgrace!” in which the paper claimed that the Guillermo Morales/Assata Shakur Student Center in the North Academic Center was named after a “convicted cop killer who left behind a lifetime of pain for the family of New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster,” and that the student center’s name was “a punch to the gut that has furious police groups demanding the publicly funded institution strip away the Black Liberation Army militant’s name.” Shortly after the publication of the article, the Chancellor of the City University of New York, Matthew Goldstein wrote a letter to the President of City College, Gregory H. Williams, demanding that the sign be removed. According to Chancellor Goldstein the University by-laws state that only the Board of Trustees has the right to name university centers and institutes and that the sign over the student center was a violation of those by-laws.
Although the student center had been named after Morales and Shakur for over seventeen years, the sign over the student center was removed on December 14th. The sign was later released to the student center’s director Rodolfo Leyton by the Office of Public Safety.
The Morales/ Assata Shakur Student Center at City College was founded by City College students in 1990, during a series of organized protests against tuition increases at the University. It was during those protests that students took over the room. After the protests, students decided to use the room to form a community center to create greater ties between the college and the surrounding community. Since then the center has served as a home base for various student groups and organizations including SLAM: the Student Liberation Action Movement, which was founded in 1996 to combat further tuition increases.
Both Assata Shakur and Guillermo Morales are former City College students and for many students at the college they represent the spirit of revolutionary struggle that defines the organizations that use the center. In a press release issued December 12th, Harlem SLAM stated that: “We consider Assata Shakur to be one of the people who were wrongfully and purposefully framed for her activities. And we consider her a hero and role model for standing up for our people and putting her life on the line.”
Although Assata Shakur, then a member of the Black Panther Party, was found guilty for the murder of New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster in 1973, her supporters insist that she is innocent. Assata Shakur escaped from the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women in New Jersey in 1979 and fled to Cuba where she has resided ever since.
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