The law never caught up with Joanne Chesimard, aka Assata Shakur. Stanford University’s dean of students, Mona Hicks, quoted a “loving refrain from Assata Shakur” in a campus email at the time of the George Floyd riots:“It is our duty to fight for our freedom. We have nothing to lose but our chains.’”That language wasn’t metaphorical – when Shakur said fight, it was a call to violence. In the 1990s, Professor Ayers worked with a promising young “community organizer” who’d go on to bigger things, a fellow by the name of Barack Obama. This time the country, including government and the universities themselves, will have to react differently: There must be no tolerance for such political violence.