Florida DSA Senate candidate Angie Nixon is defending a portrait of convicted cop killer Assata Shakur on her Jacksonville cafe walls, calling the FBI most-wanted fugitive a civil rights leader while her bookstore loses money.
Democratic Socialists of America member Angie Nixon, running for Florida’s U.S. Senate seat against Republican Sen. Ashley Moody, pushed back after a visitor challenged the faces hanging inside her black-owned bookstore cafe, Cafe Resistance. Breitbart reported that Nixon described the people on her walls as “civil rights leaders” who had been convicted or tried for robbery or killing police officers.
One of those portraits is Assata Shakur, also known as Joanne Deborah Chesimard. The FBI named Chesimard a Most Wanted Terrorist after her conviction for killing a New Jersey state trooper. She was the first woman placed on the Bureau’s list of top terrorists.
Nixon did not retreat from the display. She framed the portraits as history that must be taught without sanitizing, even when the history involves people locked up for violence against police.
At a church campaign appearance, Nixon closed with words she attributed to Shakur and labeled her a “famous freedom fighter.”
She told the crowd:
“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 choice of closing line put a fugitive convicted of murdering a state trooper at the center of a Senate candidate’s public message. Nixon has also said a lot of the people on her walls “were set up” and that many “maintain their innocence,” while adding she did not know about every case.
In her own words about the wall display, she said:
“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 named Assata Shakur and Angela Davis among them and rejected the charge that she was celebrating cop-killers. “It’s history. We don’t know our history,” she said.
Nixon has been open that Cafe Resistance is not a business success. In a recent interview she said the bookstore is not making money and that she puts her own cash into it so the space can stay open.
She described the purpose this way:
“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.”
In 2024 she said she opened the space because “freedoms” were under attack and there were “no places for us to be safely,” and so people could “organize and build power.” The cafe doubles as a political organizing hub while she seeks a Senate seat. That mix of ideology and public office is the same current that produced a House resolution condemning socialism with several Democrats crossing party lines.
Nixon also claimed that during a press conference at the shop “the other day,” a heckler and “tracker” she said Ashley Moody sent came in “talking trash about who I had on my walls.” Moody’s own response is not in the available record; the accusation stands as Nixon’s claim alone.
The FBI’s description of Chesimard is not ambiguous in the material Nixon is answering. On the 40th anniversary of the murder of a New Jersey state trooper, the Bureau named the fugitive convicted of that killing a Most Wanted Terrorist, the first woman on that top list. Nixon’s cafe treats that same figure as a civil-rights portrait and a campaign quote source.
Voters watching a Senate race can weigh those two pictures side by side. One is a federal most-wanted listing tied to the murder of a state trooper. The other is a candidate calling the same person a freedom fighter whose words should close a church campaign event. Similar tensions over institutions and accountability have surfaced in other recent fights, including declassified records on FBI tracking of high-level political figures.
Nixon insists the full, “messy” and “ugly” history must be taught, “not just the whitewashed, sanitized version,” and that “our people were fighting and resisting” even when they ended up locked up. She left open that not every person on the wall was “set up,” saying “Not all, right? Maybe. I don’t know. Possibly.”
That hedge does not change the concrete choice: a DSA Senate candidate keeps the portrait up, funds the room where it hangs, and quotes the fugitive on the trail.
Nixon is not a fringe activist far from power. She is the Democratic candidate opposing Sen. Ashley Moody for a U.S. Senate seat from Florida. Her cafe is in Jacksonville. Her portraits and her Shakur quotation are now part of the public record of that campaign.
Congressional politics already carries enough strain over standards and loyalty, from Senate leaders sidestepping staff scandals to narrow floor votes that expose party fractures. A candidate who frames a convicted cop killer as required history and a freedom fighter adds another test of what voters will accept from people asking for federal power.
Law-and-order voters, police families, and anyone who thinks murder of a trooper is not a teaching mural will hear Nixon’s defense plainly. She says the wall is about learning and power-building. The FBI record says the central portrait belongs to a fugitive terrorist convicted of killing a cop. Both statements are now on the table in a statewide race.
When candidates spend their own money to keep a losing bookstore open as an organizing hall, and then stock its walls with figures the FBI hunted as terrorists, they are telling voters exactly which traditions they want to normalize. Florida gets to answer at the ballot box.