DSA Senate candidate Angie Nixon defended a portrait of Assata Shakur in her Jacksonville Cafe Resistance, calling the FBI-wanted cop killer a civil rights leader.
Angie Nixon, a Democratic Socialists of America member seeking Florida’s U.S. Senate seat against Republican Sen. Ashley Moody, has drawn fresh scrutiny for the portraits hanging inside her Jacksonville cafe and bookstore. In a recent interview, she framed those images as lessons in history rather than celebrations of crime.
Breitbart reported that Nixon pushed back after a visitor challenged the wall displays during a press conference at the shop she calls Cafe Resistance. She named Assata Shakur and Angela Davis among the faces on the wall and insisted the public needs the unvarnished version of the past.
Shakur, whose legal name is Joanne Deborah Chesimard, appears in FBI materials as a fugitive convicted of killing a New Jersey state trooper. On the 40th anniversary of that killing, the bureau named her a Most Wanted Terrorist, the first woman ever placed on that list.
Nixon offered a different label. She described the people on her walls as civil rights figures who ran into the justice system, then suggested many were framed.
"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 before claiming that "a lot of them were set up."
"Not all, right? Maybe. I don’t know. Possibly. A lot of them maintain their innocence," Nixon added. She later said the visitor accused her of celebrating cop-killers and that she answered by calling it history.
"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 opened the black-owned bookstore and cafe in Jacksonville as a deliberate political project. In 2024 she said freedoms were under attack and that safe gathering places had disappeared.
"And so I wanted to open the space so everyone can feel welcome, and so where we can organize and build power," she said. "And so I’m just super honored and excited to be in this fight with you all, and just, you know, whatever you need to say to gather to build power to do the work. Please just know that this place is available for you all."
She has been blunt about the books. The store is not profitable. She sometimes pours her own money into it so the space can keep functioning as a meeting ground.
"I opened up a black-owned bookstore," she said. "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."
That blend of money-losing activism and open DSA affiliation fits a wider pattern. Democrats’ socialist problem has already given Republicans a clear midterm line of attack in other races.
Nixon also claimed the visitor who objected to the portraits was not a random critic. She said Sen. Moody sent a “heckler” or “tracker” to the shop while she was holding the press conference. Moody’s office has not been quoted responding to that charge in the available material, leaving the accusation as Nixon’s alone.
The portrait dispute is not the only time Nixon has elevated Shakur. While campaigning inside a church, she closed her remarks by reading the same lines she calls the words of a “famous freedom fighter.”
"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, then recited: "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."
She framed the broader history lesson in the same interview that addressed the cafe walls. Good, bad, messy, and ugly chapters all belong in the curriculum, she argued, especially the ones that show resistance even when it ends in prison.
"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."
Voters watching Florida’s Senate contest now have a concrete example of what that teaching looks like on the wall of a candidate-owned shop. DSA activists eyeing larger stages have made no secret of their long-term ambitions; Nixon’s cafe simply puts the ideology on local display.
The race itself sits inside a party still wrestling with how much socialist branding it can carry. Polling on DSA sympathy inside the Democratic coalition has already shown how far the leftward pull has traveled in some surveys.
Nixon’s defense rests on two claims: that the portraits are history, and that many of the people pictured were set up. The FBI record on Shakur is not ambiguous in the material provided. She is listed as a fugitive convicted of killing a New Jersey state trooper and was elevated to the Most Wanted Terrorist roster as the first woman so named.
Calling that record a civil-rights résumé is a choice. So is hanging the portrait in a shop that doubles as a campaign-adjacent organizing hub while the owner runs for the U.S. Senate. Battleground Democrats distancing themselves from the party’s left flank have already shown they understand the political cost of those associations.
Moody, the incumbent Republican, now faces an opponent who openly funds a money-losing “safe space,” displays Assata Shakur as a teacher of history, and quotes her as a freedom fighter from a church platform. The portraits and the quotes are not side issues. They are the candidate’s own chosen symbols.
Florida voters can decide whether a Senate hopeful who keeps a convicted cop killer on the wall is offering history or a warning label. Law-and-order voters already know which side of that line they stand on.
