As a teenager in the late 1960s, growing conscious of his place as a young Black person in Newark, Lawrence Hamm was acutely aware of Assata Shakur and the Black Panther Party’s rise to popularity.
The 1967 Newark Rebellion had radicalized a generation of young activists like Hamm, during a time he describes as a period of “profound struggle” for Black communities across the nation. During the Civil Rights era, Hamm said the Black power movement took root in New Jersey.
Shakur’s path from the segregated South through the anti-war movement led her to become a leader in Harlem’s Black Panther Party and later the Black Liberation Army. Organizations that would face systematic targeting by the FBI’s counterintelligence program, Hamm told New Jersey Urban News…