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The FBI recently announced it was looking for Black revolutionary Cheri Laverne Dalton aka Nehanda Abiodun, who was charged in connection to a deadly armored-truck robbery in 1981, then fled to Cuba to escape prosecution. The agency is even offering a $100,000 reward for her capture.
Unfortunately for the bureau, Dalton might be slightly out of the agency’s jurisdiction, not because she’s in Cuba, but because she’s somewhere further beyond the FBI’s reach.
Cheri Laverne Dalton aka Nehanda Abiodun has been dead for going on four years now.
That’s right, Dalton reportedly died on January 30, 2019, at the age of 68. Now, I’m not sure what the afterlife’s extradition policies are, but I’m going to go ahead and recommend the feds call in some outside help.
They’re probably wasting time calling local law enforcement agencies in the states and Cuba, but I bet they haven’t even made contact with the Ghost Busters. Have they even tried Bruce Willis and Haley Joel Osment? Whoopi Goldberg has some experience in this kind of case. (RIP Patrick Swayze.) The FBI could be closing this case right now by simply calling in Scooby-Doo and the gang, but they out here playing around.
Seriously though, I’m just tired of all the double standards on the part of the FBI. They could be going after real dead criminals like James Earl Ray, who murdered Martin Luther King Jr., ran to the UK after being convicted, was caught and brought back to the U.S., was sentenced to 99 years in prison, escaped prison in 1977, was recaptured and then escaped again by dying in prison in 1998. Now this man is walking around free in Hell right now, but the feds want to go to Black Radical Wakanda Heaven to find Dalton, who is only accused of driving one of the getaway cars on Oct. 21, 1981, when a Brinks truck was held up in Nanuet, New York (which she denied doing).
Hell, while we’re at it, how about an internal investigation on J. Edgar Hoover—the unabashed racist who terrorized the Black community for decades and made it his mission to quell the civil rights movement? Let’s put that man in the Hades Department of Corrections and Resurrections.
Anyway, for anyone who is unfamiliar with Cheri Laverne Dalton, here’s a little more about her alleged crime as well as her life in Havana via the Washington Post:
By all accounts, she evaded capture for years by crisscrossing the country before making her way to Cuba in 1990, even as the FBI homed in on the robbery’s ringleader, Mutulu Shakur. The stepfather of rapper Tupac Shakur, he was arrested in 1986 and sentenced to 60 years in prison.
Ms. Abiodun was still listed on the FBI’s “Most Wanted” list at the time of her death. For decades, she denied that she was ever involved in the Brinks robbery, which she preferred to call an “expropriation.”
“If your cause is just, if you’re at war, then it’s the booty of war,” she told the Miami New Times in 2000. The police officers who were killed in New York, she added, “were upholding the genocidal and oppressive policies of the United States. They were soldiers who were at war with us. When I say us, I don’t mean just ‘us’ in the African community; I mean people of color and poor people.”
Ms. Abiodun was also charged with helping her friend Assata Shakur, a Black Liberation Army member unrelated to Mutulu, escape from a New Jersey prison in 1979. She had been convicted of murdering a New Jersey state trooper six years earlier. “Whether or not I did help Assata escape, I will say that I am proud of being accused of it,” Ms. Abiodun told Vibe magazine in 2018.
Both women found refuge in Havana, where Ms. Abiodun channeled her political activism into music. Often described as the “godmother of Cuban hip-hop,” she organized a Havana chapter of Black August, a grass-roots organization that promotes hip-hop culture with a political edge, and served as a bridge between musicians in Cuba and the United States.
“How I [fight] might be different, but I don’t have the luxury of changing my mind,” she told Ebony magazine in 2014. “Freedom is freedom, and I’ve been fighting for freedom since I was 10 years old.”
So, yeah, I ain’t snitching—not in this life or the next.
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