An ESPN site targeting female sports fans on Thursday removed a poem paying homage to a convicted cop killer calling it an “editorial oversight.”
DaMaris Hill’s poem “Revolution” had led the April 25 ESPNW.com feature “Five Poets on the New Feminism,” which was produced “in honor of National Poetry month…to reflect on resistance, redefining feminism and movement,” according to a site description.
But Hill’s poem opened with the dedication for Assata Shakur, the one-time Black Liberation Army member who has been hiding out in Cuba to avoid finishing a prison term for the murder of New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster.
The poem debacle comes on the heels of ESPN’s massive layoffs of approximately 100 television, radio and Internet personalities.
Shakur, aka Joanne Chesimard, the godmother of the late rapper Tupac Shakur, is suspected in a series of early 1970s incidents linked to black revolutionary groups in New York City, including a bank robbery, grenade attack and the ambushing of police officers in Queens and Brooklyn. She was convicted of fatally shooting a New Jersey trooper in the head in 1973, but escaped prison and, in the early 1980s, fled to Cuba, where she was granted political asylum.
She is on the list of the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists.
