Assata Shakur

Assata Shakur was born JoAnne Deborah Byron in Flushing, Queens, on July 16, 1947, and died in Havana on September 25, 2025. Her parents divorced in 1950, and she spent part of her childhood with her grandparents in Wilmington, North Carolina, then returned to Queens to live with her mother and stepfather. Money was short, the household argued often, and she ran away several times, staying with strangers and working briefly. She was eventually taken in by her mother's sister, Evelyn Williams, a civil rights worker in Manhattan. Shakur called her aunt the heroine of her childhood. Williams brought her to museums, theaters and galleries and handed her books, and Shakur later said she devoured them. She also recalled teachers who seemed surprised when a Black student answered a question well, and a sugar-coated version of history that left out the oppression of people of color. Her political education grew out of that gap between what she was taught and what she saw.

She became politically active while attending the Borough of Manhattan Community College and the City College of New York. In the 1960s she took part in the Black liberation movement, the student rights movement and the movement against the Vietnam War. She took the name Assata Shakur, briefly joined the Black Panther Party, and later became associated with the Black Liberation Army. She described a process of relearning what had been taken from Black people: that they were beautiful, that they had power if they united, and that she was not just a "Colored girl" but connected to Africa and part of a world majority. She said her life was not beautiful or creative until she began to struggle. By her own account she came to see revolution as a science. Generalities were no longer enough, she wanted a higher level of political sophistication, and she held that the lessons of COINTELPRO could not be forgotten. She also argued that a movement needs a strong sense of collectivity, with people responsible for each other and to each other.

She understood the state's response through the press as much as through the police. A 1978 petition to the United Nations, filed by the National Conference of Black Lawyers, the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression and the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice, described how the FBI and the NYPD circulated accusations that she led the Black Liberation Army and made her a "shoot-to-kill" target. She said she was charged in six cases and acquitted, or had the charges dismissed, in all of them. She also cited the 1976 Church Commission finding that the FBI covertly fed derogatory information to the press. On May 2, 1973, she, Zayd Malik Shakur and Sundiata Acoli were stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike. Trooper Werner Foerster and Zayd Malik Shakur were killed, and Assata Shakur and Acoli were wounded. In 1977 an all-white jury convicted her, and she was sentenced to life plus 33 years. She maintained that she was shot with her hands raised and could not have fired the shots that killed Foerster and wounded Harper. In a July 1973 statement from prison she even apologized to her people for being on the turnpike, a place she called a checkpoint for Black travelers, and she wrote that revolutionaries must never be in too much of a hurry. The courts, the prosecution and the police rejected her account of the shooting, and a biography should say so plainly. She described the trial as one already decided in the news media.

In 1979, fearing for her life in prison, she was freed with help from comrades, among them members of the BLA and the May 19th Communist Organization. She received political asylum in Cuba in 1984 and lived there for the rest of her life. Her Assata: An Autobiography became a widely read account of Black radical formation. Her voice mixed political analysis with creativity, love and humor. She said a revolutionary builds a vision that is more humane, more loving and more fun, and that creativity sustained her and awakened her spiritual struggle. In exile she kept writing and speaking about political prisoners, about Sundiata Acoli, about the connection between media and repression, and about hip hop as a weapon that young people must learn to aim. In her 2013 open letter she asked Black and progressive media to carry her words, and she called Cuba a palenque, a maroon camp. In 2013 the FBI added her to its Most Wanted Terrorists list, making her the first woman listed, and she rejected the label of terrorist, since she had lived under police terror.