DSA Senate hopeful Angie Nixon is defending wall portraits of convicted cop killer Assata Shakur at her Jacksonville cafe, calling the FBI Most Wanted fugitive a freedom fighter while running against Sen. Ashley Moody.
Angie Nixon, a Democrat and Democratic Socialists of America member seeking Florida’s U.S. Senate seat, owns Cafe Resistance, a black-owned bookstore cafe in Jacksonville. She has kept portraits of Assata Shakur, also known as Joanne Deborah Chesimard, and Angela Davis on the walls and is standing by them.
Nixon framed the displays as history lessons rather than celebration. She said the people pictured were civil rights figures who later faced convictions tied to robbery or the killing of police officers, and she suggested many were set up.
Breitbart reported her recent comments defending the portraits after a visitor challenged them during a press conference at the shop.
“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,” Nixon said. “a lot of them were set up.”
"Not all, right? Maybe. I don’t know. Possibly. A lot of them maintain their innocence,"
She went further: “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 accused Sen. Ashley Moody, her Republican opponent, of sending the heckler. “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 claimed. Moody’s side has not been quoted responding in the available reporting.
Shakur is not an abstract historical figure. The FBI named Joanne Chesimard a Most Wanted Terrorist, the first woman ever placed on that list, on the 40th anniversary of the killing of a New Jersey state trooper. She was described as a fugitive convicted of that killing.
Nixon still presents her as a model. While campaigning at a church, she closed with Shakur’s words and called her a “famous freedom fighter.”
"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."
That is the line she chose to leave with voters.
Nixon has been open that the bookstore does not pay its own way. In a recent interview she said she pours her own money into it to keep the doors open.
"I opened up a black-owned bookstore. My bookstore ain’t making money. As a matter of fact, sometimes I’m like infusing cash into it. 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,"
She has described the space in similar terms since at least 2024. “And so I wanted to open the space so everyone can feel welcome, and so where we can organize and build power,” she said then. She also said “freedoms” were under attack and there were “no places for us to be safely.”
Nixon ties the portraits to her larger claim that opponents want to “ban the teaching of true history, particularly true black history.” She argues history includes the “messy” and “ugly” parts and that people who “wind up getting locked up” for resistance still belong on the wall.
“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.”
The portraits remain. The FBI designation remains. And a DSA candidate for U.S. Senate is still quoting a convicted cop killer to Florida church audiences while keeping that killer’s image on the wall of the shop she subsidizes.
Voters can decide whether that is history education or a clear signal about whose side she takes when police officers are the ones who die.
