Angie Nixon, a Democratic Socialists of America member running against Sen. Ashley Moody (R-FL) for Florida’s U.S. Senate seat, is standing by her decision to display portraits of convicted cop-killer Assata Shakur inside her Jacksonville cafe and bookstore, Cafe Resistance.
Nixon opened the cafe in 2024, saying at the time that “freedoms” were under attack and that there were “no places for us to be safely.” She accused her political opponents of wanting to “ban the teaching of true history, particularly true black history,” and said she wanted a space where people could “organize and build power.”
In a recent interview, Nixon acknowledged the bookstore loses money. “My bookstore ain’t making money. As a matter of fact, sometimes I’m like infusing cash into it,” she said. “But it is a safe space where people are learning their history, where we can convene and we can meet and we can learn and we can power-build.”
Nixon claimed Moody sent someone to confront her at the cafe. “I had a heckler, a tracker, someone that Ashley Moody sent to my shop the other day as I was doing a press conference talking trash about who I had on my walls,” she said.
Asked about who is on those walls, Nixon did not dispute that Shakur is among them. “Who I had on my walls were civil rights leaders that wind up like getting convicted or like tried for like, you know, robbery or killing police officers — just all types of things,” she said, adding, “a lot of them were set up.”
She then hedged on that claim. “Not all, right? Maybe. I don’t know. Possibly. A lot of them maintain their innocence,” she said.
“But it was Assata Shakur. It was Angela Davis. Like it was all these different people in the wall. And then the guy came in and he tried to like just trash and say I’m celebrating cop-killers and I’m like, it’s history. We don’t know our history,” Nixon said.
She argued that uncomfortable history still needs to be taught.
We don’t know our history, and history is — some history is good, it’s bad, it’s messy, it’s ugly, but it needs to be learned, and so we need to teach our history, not just the whitewashed, sanitized version, right? Like we need to teach the versions where our people were fighting and resisting, right? Even if they like wind up getting locked up because of it, like, like that is what needs to be taught.
Shakur, born Joanne Deborah Chesimard, was convicted in the killing of a New Jersey state trooper and later became the first woman named to the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list. She fled to Cuba, where she has lived as a fugitive for decades.
This is not the first time Nixon has invoked Shakur publicly. Campaigning at a church, Nixon closed her remarks by quoting her directly: “I’m gonna open this up for questions, but I’m gonna leave y’all with these words of a famous freedom fighter before we open it up: Assata Shakur. ‘It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love and protect one another. We have nothing to lose but our chains.'”
