Rep. Jamaal Bowman Featured Black Revolutionary Convicted Of Murder On Middle School’s ‘Wall Of Honor’

Bowman’s campaign said he taught the “complicated biographies” of Assata Shakur and Cynthia McKinney alongside those of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.

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.