Jake Tapper: Any journalists traveling to Cuba feel like looking up Assata Shakur for an interview?

Brett T. | 7:00 AM on March 20, 2016

Did you notice something missing from your life Saturday morning? Maybe it was Melissa Harris-Perry, who walked away from her own show on MSNBC, citing several weeks of election season pre-emptions and a loss of editorial control. Her gig as a professor at Wake Forest University is still on, though, and if you can swing the $2,020 per semester hour tuition, she’s currently offering a class inspired by the #BlackLivesMatter movement.

https://twitter.com/MHarrisPerry/status/710185493368074240

Credit where it’s due: whatever your opinion of contemporary academia, Harris-Perry is the real deal and doesn’t play around when it comes to course design. We do have a question, though; if the course is based on the #BlackLivesMatter movement, why does it purport to examine “the long history of racial justice, non-violent, and anti-racist political movements”? Is there a separate course this fall covering the violent history of #BlackLivesMatter?

Prominent on the reading list the the autobiography of Assata Shakur, the cop-killing fugitive who escaped from prison in 1979 and fled to Cuba in 1984, where she received political asylum. Even though the former Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army member has been in exile since before most #BlackLivesMatter activists were born, she’s experienced a renaissance of sorts.

What’s Behind The Renewed Attacks On African American Freedom Fighter Assata Shakur?

— Famous Naija (@famousnaija) March 19, 2016

Attacks? “Assata Taught Me” hoodies are the must-have fashion accessory at protests. Marquette University painted a mural of Shakur on the wall of its Gender and Sexuality Resource Center. Activists in Harlem holding what they called a “vigil” for the #Charleston9 recited a “prayer” by Shakur, as did a four-year-old addressing a walk-out at UCLA.