Biography
Sundiata Acoli, born Clark Squire in Decatur, Texas in 1937, is a former NASA mathematician, member of the Harlem chapter of the Black Panther Party, and Black Liberation Army soldier. He was one of the original Panther 21 defendants — twenty-one New York Panthers acquitted in May 1971 of conspiring to bomb New York police stations. After the Panther 21 acquittal he went underground with the BLA. On May 2, 1973 he was a passenger in the car driven by Assata Shakur on the New Jersey Turnpike when state troopers pulled them over; in the ensuing shootout New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster was killed and BLA member Zayd Malik Shakur was killed. He was convicted of Trooper Foersters murder in 1974 and sentenced to life plus 30 years in New Jersey state prison.
He was repeatedly denied parole over the next four decades despite multiple clean disciplinary records and intervention by national civil-rights organizations. The Jericho Movement, of which he was a co-founder in 1998, made him one of its central campaigns. On May 11, 2022 the New Jersey Supreme Court ordered him paroled, ruling that the parole board had abused its discretion in continuing to deny release. He was released on May 26, 2022, age 85, after 49 years of imprisonment.
