Angie Nixon, a Democratic Socialists of America member running for Florida’s U.S. Senate seat against Republican Sen. Ashley Moody, is defending her decision to display portraits of Assata Shakur and other figures she calls “civil rights leaders” inside her Jacksonville business, Cafe Resistance.
Shakur, born Joanne Deborah Chesimard, was convicted in the killing of a New Jersey state trooper and once appeared on the FBI’s “Most Wanted Terrorists” list, the first woman named to it.
Nixon opened Cafe Resistance, a bookstore and cafe, in 2024. At the time, she said she started the business because “freedoms” were under attack and there were “no places for us to be safely.” She also said opponents wanted to “ban the teaching of true history, particularly true black history.”
“And so I wanted to open the space so everyone can feel welcome, and so where we can organize and build power,” she said in 2024. “And so I’m just super honored and excited to be in this fight with you all.”
In a recent interview, Nixon acknowledged the bookstore is not profitable. “My bookstore ain’t making money. As a matter of fact, sometimes I’m like infusing cash into it,” she said, adding that she sees it as “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 said she believes Moody sent someone to confront her at the shop during a press conference about the portraits on her walls. “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.
She described the people pictured as “civil rights leaders” who “wind up like getting convicted or like tried for like, you know, robbery or killing police officers.” She said some may have been “set up,” adding, “Not all, right? Maybe. I don’t know. Possibly. A lot of them maintain their innocence.”
Among those on display, she said, were Shakur and Angela Davis. She said a visitor accused her of “celebrating cop-killers,” which she disputed. “It’s history. We don’t know our history,” she said.
“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?”
Nixon has invoked Shakur elsewhere on the campaign trail, including during a church appearance where she closed her remarks by quoting her. “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,” she said. “‘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.'”
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