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Reviewed by Philip Zozzaro for Readers' Favorite
“The date was May 2, 1973. The Black Liberation Army, in their revolutionary war against America, had added yet another law officer to its list of dead enemy soldiers,” states author J. Anthony Perez in his opening chapter of Outrageous Hero: The Left's Glorification of an American Terrorist. The deadly shooting of New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster resulted in the arrest of wanted criminal Joanne Chesimard (later Assata Shakur). Chesimard had been a charter member of the Black Liberation Army, an offshoot of the Black Panthers. She was an activist who despised white people and began to adopt more revolutionary ideas as she moved to the West Coast. Chesimard believed the Panthers weren’t violent enough, and as a rift developed between the East and West Coast, the BLA emerged. They began a spree of armed robberies and ambushes on law enforcement that grabbed headlines and led to the group being targeted, culminating in the fateful night in New Jersey. Chesimard’s notoriety was only just beginning.
Outrageous Hero is a biography that seeks to clear up misconceptions about a woman who has been lionized by left-wing ideologues in the United States and elsewhere. Author J. Anthony Perez applies his lawyer skills in the dogged pursuit of truth. He does an exemplary job of presenting the life story of Chesimard and how she became prominent in the early 1970s. Perez presents a substantial argument for how Chesimard’s martyrdom has been misplaced in the popular zeitgeist, the official record given short shrift by her defenders. The misguided admiration for the convicted cop killer led to her being granted shelter by the Cuban government and continues in her portrayal in pop culture. Perez’s work brings evidence and logic to debunk Chesimard’s hero status, and his case is convincing.
