During Rep. Jamaal Bowman’s tenure as a middle school principal, a “Wall of Honor” he curated honoring historical Black and Latino figures included a notorious antisemite and two Black militants convicted of murder and armed robbery, respectively.
Bowman discussed the educational tool in a video, uploaded to YouTube in 2014, that depicts the addition of rapper Chuck D to the wall at Cornerstone Academy for Social Action Middle School, or CASA. The goal of the project was to provide the Bronx school’s overwhelmingly Black and Latino student body with a version of history in which they could see themselves.
“Each and every member of the Wall of Honor has played a major role in moving our society from a bigoted, oppressive existence toward a world of freedom, justice and equality,” Bowman said in the video, reading the written description of the “Wall of Honor.”
In addition to hip-hop icons like Chuck D, CASA’s “Wall of Honor” featured an array of Black, Latino, and Asian politicians, activists and artists featured in curriculums around the country: Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Sonia Sotomayor, Mahatma Gandhi, Langston Hughes.
But the wall also included former U.S. Rep Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.), an antisemite and conspiracy theorist; the late Black militant Mutulu Shakur, who served a lengthy prison sentence for armed robbery; and Assata Shakur, a Black militant convicted of murdering a New Jersey state trooper, who broke out of prison and now lives in Cuba.
The “Wall of Honor” is likely to become an issue in Bowman’s contentious race for reelection on June 25. He faces a robust primary challenge from Westchester County Executive George Latimer, who has the backing of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and its deep-pocketed donors. The race in the safely Democratic district is seen as a bellwether for progressive standing within the Democratic coalition, following gains they’ve made in the House of Representatives over the past six years.
In a statement to 360aproko, Bowman’s campaign did not convey any regret about the decision, instead likening McKinney’s, Assata Shakur’s and Mutulu Shakur’s flaws to those of less controversial Black leaders like King and Malcolm X. Bowman has also distanced himself from McKinney’s antisemitic views in the past.
“It is completely baseless, and a rhetorical tool of the far-right, to insinuate educating students on major figures of Black American history is serving to promote hateful or divisive rhetoric or actions.”
– Sarah Iddrissu, Bowman campaign spokesperson
“It is correct that many leaders in the Black liberation movement, from Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X to the names listed in this story, have complicated biographies,” campaign spokesperson Sarah Iddrissu said. “It is completely baseless, and a rhetorical tool of the far-right, to insinuate educating students on major figures of Black American history is serving to promote hateful or divisive rhetoric or actions.”
“In the very video this story is based on, Bowman praises peace and nonviolence,” Iddrissu added. “That is also what he has worked to advance in Congress, including by writing and passing a Congressional resolution condemning a violent antisemitic and anti-Black conspiracy theory. Suppressing the education of Black history only serves to enable violence against Black people.”
Bowman’s judgment as a middle-school principal still doesn’t sit well with some Black Democrats.
“This is an example of teaching the wrong lessons to children and just a deep misunderstanding of history,” said Tyrone Stevens, a New York City-based Democratic strategist, who previously worked for SEIU 32BJ and Scott Stringer’s 2021 mayoral campaign.
“Cynthia McKinney is essentially ‘MAGA’ in a different form,” he added. “It’s a bizarre choice.”
Basil Smikle, a former executive director of the New York State Democratic Party, said he would not have included those three “problematic” people on a wall honoring great people of color.
But, he added, “I would be curious about what kind of conversation he had with the students about their background,” since discussions about historical figures’ “contributions” and “controversies” are constructive in schools.
Although Bowman does not name every one of the people on the “Wall of Honor” in the 2014 video, he finds the time to mention the three controversial figures in the order that he sees them on the wall — checking them off as if their inclusion is unremarkable. In his narration, McKinney comes after neurosurgeon Ben Carson. Mutulu Shakur follows scientist Benjamin Banneker. And Assata Shakur — not a blood relation of Mutulu — is wedged between Booker T. Washington and Barack Obama.
Bowman’s appreciation of Assata Shakur goes deeper than the “Wall of Honor.” In a video uploaded to YouTube in 2013 that touts a career development day at CASA, Bowman speaks about the program with Shakur’s 1988 memoir, “Assata: An Autobiography,” prominently placed on the table in front of him.
The New York City Department of Education does not have a policy about which people are featured on school walls, according to an agency spokesperson. The spokesperson also added that McKinney and Mutulu Shakur are no longer on CASA’s “Wall of Honor,” but Assata Shakur still is.
Bowman indeed touts the importance of nonviolence when singling out Gandhi for praise in the video.
“He’s the one that paved the way for Dr. King and all about peaceful revolution and changing the world through peace,” Bowman said. “He had no weapons, and it changed India forever.”
But Bowman’s comments about Gandhi’s reliance on nonviolence make his decision to hold up Assata and Mutulu Shakur as paragons of “freedom, justice, and equality” that much more puzzling.
Although they were not relatives, Assata and Mutulu Shakur were close friends and collaborators, with Assata serving as a godmother to Mutulu’s stepson, Tupac, the late hip-hop star also featured on Bowman’s “Wall of Honor.”
The Shakurs were fellow members of the Black Liberation Army, or BLA — a violent and radical offshoot of the Black Panther Party. The BLA, which financed its activities through armed robberies, had a deliberate policy of murdering police officers to bring about an ill-defined vision of justice for Black Americans. For example, the group claimed credit for the 1971 ambush murder of a pair of New York City cops — one white and one Black — by shooting them in the back.
In 1977, Assata Shakur was convicted of first-degree murder and other charges associated with the 1973 shooting death of a New Jersey state trooper and the wounding of another trooper during a traffic stop on the New Jersey Turnpike. In 1979, she broke out of prison, eventually escaping to Cuba where she received asylum, and developed something of a cult following in select leftist and Black circles.
In 1988, Mutulu Shakur was convicted for his role in Assata Shakur’s prison break, as well as in two armed robberies that jointly resulted in the deaths of two cops and two security guards.
Assata Shakur insists that she is innocent of the charges in the New Jersey state trooper case, claiming that she was shot at by cops while she had her hands in the air, and faced an unfair trial (her jury was indeed all white). In a 1987 interview with Newsday, she briefly denied ever shooting a cop, but did admit to participating in robberies that she described as “expropriations.”
Assata Shakur’s extreme views are not in doubt, however. In her autobiography, Assata Shakur, the daughter of a schoolteacher, at once boasts of her granular knowledge of art history, and fantasizes about how armed Black people instill fear in white people.
“When Black people seriously organize and take up arms to fight for our liberation, there will be a lot of white people who drop dead for no other reason than their own guilt and fear,” she writes.
Bowman has likewise left no doubt that he disagrees with McKinney’s most vile, antisemitic statements. When McKinney tweeted a meme about Zionists perpetrating 9/11 in June 2021, Bowman replied that her message was “antisemitic,” “hateful,” “misguided and ignorant,” and asked Twitter to remove her post.
But McKinney’s extreme views were already well known by the time Bowman was nonchalantly highlighting her inclusion on the “Wall of Honor.”
In April 2002, then-Georgia Rep. McKinney suggested that the George W. Bush administration may have deliberately allowed the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks to occur.
McKinney, an outspoken Israel critic, lost the Democratic primary to a challenger backed by pro-Israel donors in 2002. When asked who he blamed for McKinney’s difficult race, McKinney’s father, then-state Rep. Billy McKinney, told a TV interviewer: “Jews have bought everybody. Jews, J-E-W-S.”
McKinney won her seat back in 2004, but her final term in Congress was marked by controversy. While entering the U.S. Capitol complex in 2006, McKinney scuffled with a U.S. Capitol Police officer who had asked for her identification since she was not wearing her congressional lapel pin. She allegedly struck the officer, prompting then-House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to remark, “I don’t see any conceivable reason why anyone would strike a Capitol police officer.” McKinney apologized that “this misunderstanding happened at all.”
Rep. Hank Johnson, who has since established himself as a dogged, albeit less polarizing, advocate for Palestinian rights, ousted her in the Democratic primary later that year.
After leaving Congress, McKinney left the Democratic Party, and drifted in a more extreme direction. Following a stint as the Green Party’s presidential nominee in 2008, the former congresswoman attended a March 2009 conference about the plight of Gaza that was convened by former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, who, by that time, had a long history of antisemitic statements. “Jewish stinginess and financial wizardry gained them the commercial control of Europe and provoked an anti-Semitism which waxed and waned in Europe through the ages,” Mohamad wrote in his 1970 book.
McKinney’s participation in the event caught the attention of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a liberal anti-hate group. The group noted that McKinney praised Mohamad on the Green Party website as “one of my heroes.”
She was also photographed at the conference posing with British antisemite David Pidcock, and Michèle Renouf, a leading British Holocaust denier. After the event, McKinney described Pidcock, whose 1992 book lists “Luciferian Zionists” as one of several shadowy groups controlling the global economy, as “my London friend.”
Bowman’s challenger Latimer, who is white, is likely to face his own set of thorny, race-related controversies.
In a March 2021 Facebook post, Latimer compared the calls for then-New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to resign for sexual misconduct to the railroading endured by Emmett Till, a Black teenager lynched in 1954 on allegations of flirting with a white woman. He subsequently edited the post after noting that the comparison was “offensive to some.”
