Assata is Welcome Here

Editorial Note: This article originally appeared in Protean Magazine on October 7, 2025.

At approximately 1:15pm on September 25, 2025, Assata Olugbala Shakur became an ancestor. The news was bittersweet. Bitter because Assata will never again walk among us, tell another story, or author another poem; bitter because no longer can we point to her as a living example of she who struggled for Black people with courage and dignity, she who remained steadfast in the face of such fierce opposition. But also, sweet. Sweet because although they, the forces of U.S. Empire, hunted her with all their monstrous technology, they were unable to kill her, or put her back in a cage. Sweet because although she is no longer of the physical realm, Assata Shakur remains with us in spirit.

In the 1997 documentary Eyes of the Rainbow, Assata voiced her aspiration to “live up to my ancestors’ expectation of me, because I really believe that I have a duty to all those that have come before me, to all those that lie at the bottom of the ocean, to all those who lost their lives—whether it’s in the cane fields or the cotton fields, or hanging off some tree—to continue this struggle…”[1] Now, having fulfilled her duty to the utmost degree, Assata has joined the pantheon of Black revolutionary warrior women and men. Her name must now be invoked alongside those of Queen Nanny, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, Robert F. Williams, Mable Williams, Winnie Mandela, Malcolm X, Lolita Lebron, Safiya Bukhari, Sekou Odinga, and on, and on. We who remain must now make her proud.

Fortunately, Assata left us with a map, a rich archive of her travails, aspirations, and insights, written in her own words. This means that we are not compelled to remember Assata through the twisted logic of the FBI and establishment media, whose mission is to “make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent,” as Malcolm said. Rather, “we the people who are darker than blue,” will remember her for what she was to us: our Warrior Queen.

Joanne Deborah Byron was born in Brooklyn Women’s Hospital on July 16th, 1947. When she was about three years old, her grandparents—Lula and Frank Hill—brought her with them to Wilmington, North Carolina. They had saved enough money to start a business, an achievement that reflected their herculean efforts to thrive amid the ravages of the Great Depression and racist employment discrimination. The Hills taught their children and grandchildren to “maneuver adroitly along the tiny cracks of opportunity the United States of America reluctantly opened to its Black citizens,” while refusing to “make the sick adjustment of loving America,” in the words of Evelyn Williams, Assata’s aunt and future attorney.[2]

Assata came of age under Jim Crow apartheid. Back in 1857, Supreme Court Chief Justice Robert B. Taney summarized this white supremacist regime as one in which “The Black man has no rights that the white man is bound to respect.” It’s hard to fathom what this world was like for Black women, whose existence was excluded from this perverse equation altogether. Many years later, when Assata was living in exile in Cuba, she would speak about the influence of her grandmother on her political development, citing her as “the first person that gave me the inner strength that I needed to… be able to think about overcoming the tremendous odds that were against me.”[3] But as a child, Wilmington’s Black community protected Joey, as Assata’s family called her at the time. They created for her an environment in which white people played only a minimal role in their lives.[4]

Assata returned to New York City at the age of eight or nine. She was raised by her mother Doris Johnson and her aunt Evelyn Williams, who described her precocious, artistic, principled, and bold niece as a “fatherless miracle.”[5] Assata dropped out of high school at the age of 17, fed up with feeling like something was choking her.[6] She eventually earned her GED, subsequently enrolling in Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC), and later the City College of New York (CCNY). It was during this period that the seeds of political consciousness first planted by her family began to flourish. Her most significant learning experiences occurred beyond the classroom and were facilitated by her peers rather than her professors. Reflecting on the role of education under capitalism years later, she wrote, “Nobody is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. Nobody is going to teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes, if they know that that knowledge will help set you free. Schools in amerika are interested in brainwashing people with amerikanism, giving them a little bit of education, and training them in skills needed to fill the positions the capitalist system requires. As long as we expect amerika’s schools to educate us, we will remain ignorant.”[7]

Assata’s political transformation into a revolutionary began when she got involved with a Black student organization called The Society of the Golden Drums. Through this organization and the political networks attached to it—the Nation of Islam, the Organization of Afro-American Unity, and the Republic of New Africa, among others—Assata immersed herself in deep study of Black history and culture. “The day i found out about Nat Turner,” she wrote in her autobiography, “i was affected so strongly i could barely contain myself.”[8] She became an avid reader, but also resolved to avoid confining herself to classrooms and libraries, where she would be disconnected from her people. “Theory without practice is just as incomplete as practice without theory. The two have to go together. I was determined to do both,” she wrote.[9]

In 1967, Assata received her first taste of state repression. She and one hundred other BMCC students were arrested on charges of trespassing after they barricaded themselves to the entrance of a university building in protest of the university’s subpar Black studies curriculum and its lack of Black faculty.[10] The following year, she and other BMCC students participated in a contentious struggle in which Black and Puerto Rican parents in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville section of Brooklyn were organizing to control how schools in their neighborhoods were governed. It was during this period that she became a citizen of the Republic of New Afrika (RNA), a Black revolutionary formation that sought to create a sovereign Black nation comprised of five southern U.S. states where Black labor had been intensely exploited.[11]

It was during this period that Assata—then still known as Joanne Deborah Byron—entered into a brief marriage with Lois E. Chesimard, subsequently changing her legal name to Joanne Chesimard. Years later, when she was deep in struggle, Assata abandoned these slave names and adopted the appellations for which she is best known. “I didn’t feel like no JoAnne, or no Negro, or no amerikan. I felt like an African woman,” she recalled.[12] In keeping with New Afrikan naming traditions, she selected names with deep significance.[13]

Assata: “she who struggles.” Olugbala: “Love for the people.” Shakur: “the thankful.” Her chosen middle name was also adopted by other members of the Olugbala Tribe of the Black Liberation Army: Anthony Kimu Olugbala White, Woodie Changa Olugbala Green, Frank Olugbala Fields, Zayd Malik Shakur aka Dedane Olugbala, Melvin Rema Olugbala Kearney, Twymon Kakuyan Olugbala Myers. Her chosen surname embraced the political lineage of the Shakur family, populated by dedicated revolutionaries such as Salahdeen Shakur, an associate of Malcolm X; Salahdeen’s sons Lumumba and Zayd, both of whom were key figures in the New York Chapter of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army (BPP/BLA); Afeni Shakur, Lumumba’s wife and another key New York Panther; and Mutulu Shakur, an acupuncturist and member of the Republic of New Afrika (RNA). Assata’s notoriety as a Shakur is second only to her godson, Afeni Shakur’s son— the slain rapper and poet Tupac Amaru Shakur.[14]

Assata Shakur joined the New York Chapter of the Black Panther Party in the fall of 1970, shortly after attending the organization’s Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.[15] That she joined the party when she did speaks volumes about her courage and commitment to the struggle. All over the nation, Panthers were being hunted, harassed, arrested, and killed by the authorities. A year earlier, Fred Hampton and Mark Clark of the Illinois Chapter of the BPP were assassinated by a Chicago Police Department kill squad. Hampton, the chairman of the chapter, had been drugged and was asleep in bed next to his pregnant wife.[16]

On April 2nd, 1969, two members of the Shakur family—Lumumba and Afeni—along with over a dozen other New York Panthers were captured during a coordinated police raid. Although the raid was executed by the Bureau of Special Services and Investigation, a secretive NYPD unit that focused on counter-subversion, it was carried out with support of the FBI. The Panther 21, as they came to be known, were charged with a flurry of fabricated offenses, including plotting to kill police officers and bomb police stations, rail stations, department stores, government offices, and the Bronx Botanical Gardens. “It was well known by everybody in the movement that the New York police had kidnapped the most experienced, able, and intelligent leaders of the New York branch and demanded $100,000 ransom for each one,” Assata wrote.[17]

State repression against the Panthers was designed to crush the movement and dissuade others within the Black community from struggling in unauthorized ways. Assata, however, was undeterred. Between 1970 and 1971, she worked as a dedicated member of the BPP’s aboveground cadre. She collaborated with Panther 21 defendant Joan Bird to set up a medical clinic, facilitated political education classes for college students, worked in the Free Breakfast Program, and supported prisoner defense campaigns. Assata also engaged in ideological and political struggle against sexism within the BPP and the various other formations in which she was associated. Like her comrade Safiya Bukhari, who wrote an important essay called “On the Question of Sexism Within the Black Panther Party,” Assata understood sexism within the organization as a product of how men and women have been socialized within the patriarchal structure of capitalism and white supremacy. She understood that just as the people were organizing and fighting to overthrow capitalism and white supremacy within the broader society, they would also have to organize to overthrow sexism and patriarchy within the broader society, as well as within their own movements.[18]

Decades after the collapse of the BPP, Assata noted that “while it was evident that attempts by African people to overthrow white supremacy and to defeat European world domination would be met with resistance, few of us were prepared for the onslaught of repression that was to come.”[19] What she and those with whom she struggled could not have known at the time was that the BPP—a movement comprised largely of Black youth—was the target of a secret and largely illegal FBI initiative known as the Counterintelligence Program. In the words of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, the primary aim of COINTELPRO, as it was commonly known, was to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” virtually all progressive movements in the United States, especially the BPP.[20]

The FBI (in conjunction with local police agencies, the CIA, and other instruments of state power) pursued this goal by mobilizing an arsenal of counterinsurgency tactics refined over centuries by the American and European empires seeking to crush anti-colonial resistance.[21] The devious tactics of the FBI—disinformation, surveillance, agents provocateurs, etc.—had been secretly destabilizing Black movements since the 1920s, when the Bureau concentrated its ire against Marcus “Mosiah” Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. A half century later, a COINTELPRO memo spoke of the FBI’s redoubled effort to “prevent the rise of the Black Messiah,” likely an oblique reference to Garvey. The nefarious influence of the state hovers ominously over the political assassinations of the 1960s and 1970s: Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Fred Hampton, Mark Clark, Bunchy Carter, John Huggins, and George Jackson, to name a few.

The Panther 21 saga dragged on for more than two years, becoming the longest and most expensive trial in New York state history up to that point. The ordeal coincided with and exacerbated a contentious, FBI-facilitated “split” in which the BPP fractured into two antagonistic factions (erroneously labelled East vs. West). Under the hidden influence of FBI disinformation, these factions devolved into internecine warfare in which Panthers began to kill Panthers. Assata would later reflect evocatively about the similarity between the “East Coast/West Coast” beef that claimed the lives of her comrades and the East Coast/West Coast beef in mainstream Hip-Hop, a beef that claimed the life of her godson Tupac Shakur.[22]

Most people would have responded to these existential threats from without and within by distancing themselves from the movement. Assata, however, deepened her commitment. She went underground and began to participate in a clandestine infrastructure of militant resistance. Through the Black Liberation Army (BLA), Assata and other dedicated revolutionaries engaged in criminalized activities designed to support above-ground movements that were increasingly buckling under the weight of state repression. These activities included: breaking captured activists out of captivity; kidnapping enemies for the purpose of prisoner exchanges; transporting and providing safe harbor for political fugitives via a 20th-century underground railroad; expropriating money from banks and drug dealers to fund the struggle; and engaging in armed confrontation with the armed agents of the state.

Like those who have long struggled to free Palestine from Zionist settler colonialism, members of the Black liberation movement frequently cite international law as providing them with a legal basis for engaging in armed struggle.[23] “One day, in the not too distant future,” Assata wrote in 1987, any Black organization that is not based on bootlicking and tomming will be forced underground. And as fast as this country is moving to the fascist far right, Black revolutionary organizations should start preparing for the inevitability. Fascist governments do not permit revolutionary or progressive opposition groups to exist, no matter how peaceful and nonviolent they are.”[24] As “The Resistance” of today continues to reckon with its impotence in the face of ascendant fascism, those who claim to be the progeny of Assata must reckon with the reality that her advice has not been sufficiently heeded.

Assata’s first stretch underground is necessarily opaque. On April 5th, 1971, the 23-year-old was shot in the stomach during a confrontation at the Statler Hilton Hotel in midtown Manhattan. According to Evelyn Williams, she was wounded while engaging in an armed action to “set up” a known drug pusher. In this regard, the action would have been part of the BLA’s campaign to harass and expropriate funds from those who dealt dope in Black communities. “It is our duty as victims of both police corruption and black profiteering to give no quarter to those who would profit from our wholesale destruction,” wrote Assata’s BPP/BLA comrade Dhoruba bin-Wahad in a 1971 article entitled “Concerning Hard Drugs.”[25]

We know little else about Assata’s time underground beyond what the sensationalized and distorted accounts of the FBI, the police, and their ventriloquists in the elite press reported. Robert Daily, the NYPD’s chief propagandist, dubbed her “the soul of the gang [the BLA], the mother hen who kept them together, kept them moving, kept them shooting.”[26] Authorities suspected or claimed that Assata was involved in a range of alleged BLA actions, including cop killings, a grenade attack on a police car, and several bank expropriations (“robberies”). The FBI augmented its counterintelligence programs with new initiatives designed specifically to crush the BLA. These included NEWKILL, short for “New York Police Killings,” and CHESSROB, short for “Chesimard robberies,” and PRISACTS, short for the “Prison Activists Surveillance Program.”

The same U.S. government that had enslaved Black people for centuries, that subjected us to more than six decades of de jure racial apartheid, and de facto apartheid in the form of mass human caging within prisons and ghetto slums, labeled Assata Shakur and the Black Liberation Army terrorists. Some confused negroes fell for the okey doke, while others knew what was up. “Never let your enemies choose your enemies for you,” Assata warned us.[27]

In 1976, she acted as her own co-council during a trial for burglary. This allowed her to define the BLA on her own terms.

The idea of a Black Liberation Army emerged from conditions in Black Communities: conditions of poverty, indecent housing, massive unemployment, poor medical care, and inferior education. The idea came about because Black people are not free or equal in this country. Because ninety percent of the men and women in this country’s prisons are Black and Third World. Because ten-year-old children are shot down in our streets. Because dope has saturated our communities, preying on the disillusionment and frustration of our children. The concept of the BLA arose because of the political, social, and economic oppression of Black people in this country. And where there is oppression, there will be resistance. The BLA is part of that resistance movement. The Black Liberation Army stands for freedom and justice for all people.[28]

Assata Shakur’s first stint underground concluded on May 2nd, 1973, when she and two of her comrades—Zayd Malik Shakur and Sundiata Acoli—were pulled over on the New Jersey Turnpike by two state troopers. A shootout ensued that claimed the life of Zayd Shakur and Werner Forester, one of the troopers. Assata was shot in both arms as well as her shoulder while James Harper, the other trooper, was also wounded in the shoulder. Assata was taken into custody. Acoli managed to flee the scene, but a massive manhunt resulted in his capture three days later.

The United States government has never admitted to holding political prisoners, and yet it is clear prison authorities recognized incarcerated revolutionaries like Assata Shakur as a political threat. She spent two and a half of her six and a half years in prison in solitary confinement units designated for men—a move designed not only to punish her, but to prevent her from politically contaminating other captives. During her time behind the walls she was physically brutalized, tortured, intimidated, surveilled, and subjected to medical violence and medical neglect. “What I saw in those prisons in the United States was slavery. It was Black people with chains, in cells, it was just poor people… just stepped on and smashed. I’ll never forget what I saw. I’ll never forget what I’ve lived through. I’ll never forget what my people have lived through.”[29]

In late 1973, Assata and her BPP/BLA comrade Kamau Sadiki performed an extraordinary act of revolutionary love, defiance, and optimism. While confined to an anteroom adjacent to the court, a move designed to silence their ongoing protest, they conceived the boldest protest of all: Black life. Before they became sexually intimate, the pair had openly discussed the possibility of pregnancy and whether it was ethical to bring a Black child into a world that was determined to destroy Black people. They decided not to let their enemies control the course of their lives.[30] Assata’s pregnancy did not lessen her abuse at the hands of prison authorities. Her experience of being shackled, malnourished, isolated, and subjected to medical abuse underscores the violence endured by incarcerated women both past and present. It is nothing short of miraculous that on September 11th, 1974, Assata Shakur gave birth to a healthy baby girl: Kakuya Amala Olugbala Shakur.

Supported by a small but dedicated team of attorneys and a political defense campaign, Assata Shakur and her co-defendants were acquitted in three separate trials. However, in March of 1977, despite a number of inconsistencies in the prosecution’s case (not to mention COINTELPRO machinations), an all-white jury convicted her of first-degree murder for the killing of Officer Forester, as well as and other crimes associated with the shootout (Sundiata Acoli had been convicted in 1974).[31]

Sentenced to life plus 65 years, the state’s plan was for Assata to die in a cage. She and her comrades, however, had other designs. On the afternoon of November 2nd, 1979, Assata partook in what RNA activist Chokwe Lumumba called “perhaps one of the greatest military feats in this century, in this decade, in this empire.” On that day an underground formation comprised of elements from the RNA, the BLA, and the Weather Underground liberated Assata from New Jersey’s Clinton Correctional Facility for Women. The action was carried out by a small team that included Sekou Odinga, Mtayari Shabaka Sundiata, Marilyn Buck, Mutulu Shakur, Silvia Baraldini, and Judy Clark, among others. Though heavily armed and prepared for battle, the team accomplished their objective without firing a single shot, contradicting the state narrative that these militants were lunatics who were only out for blood. “Revolutionaries have to be audacious,” the late Odinga told me of the event, years ago.

Underground for the second time in her life, Assata evaded capture in the United States for five years. The fact that elements within the movement and the broader communities that supported the movement provided her with sanctuary for so long, at such great personal risk, and with no expectation of personal gain or recognition, speaks volumes about just how much love people had for her and for the movement she represented. “Run hard sister, run hard,” was the title of an op-ed in The New York Amsterdam News by Reverend Herbert Daughtry.[32]

In 1984, with the help of an underground network, Assata made it to Cuba. “I basically said I’m here, this is what I represent, and I leave it in your hands to decide what the hell you are going to do with me and luckily they were very supportive and gave me the status of a political exile.” The Cubans had heard about her case and were familiar with a 1978 petition she had submitted to the UN about her treatment as a political prisoner.[33]

It is highly significant that Assata lived out the rest of her life—more than 40 years—in relative freedom in Cuba. The island-nation is a living example of a society that successfully freed itself from the yoke of colonial domination and has charted its own path forward despite decades of imperialist intervention and a crushing U.S. embargo. Ever since the culmination of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Cuba has been a beacon of revolutionary possibility, providing material support for communist and national liberation movements in Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the United States. “One of the Largest, Most Resistant and Most Courageous Palenques (Maroon Camps) that has ever existed on the Face of the Planet,” she wrote in a 1998 open letter.[34]

While in Cuba, Assata was able to reunite with her daughter, complete her autobiography, deepen her understanding of socialism, and immerse herself in the study of Cuban history, politics, and culture. She had taken her shahada and converted to Islam while in prison, but while in Cuba she “found another piece of herself,” deepening her relationship to African spiritual practices that were brought to Cuba by enslaved Africans.[35] In a 2004 essay, she wrote that “the liberation of African people cannot be built with a Eurocentric worldview. There is much that can be learned from African and other indigenous cultures that will help us discover the spiritual and moral values that we need to build societies based on cooperation.”[36]

Up to that point, Assata had been moving throughout Cuba with relative openness. However, in 2005, the U.S. Justice Department added Assata Shakur to the Domestic Terrorist Watch List and issued a $1 million bounty on her head. In 2013, under the black misleadership of Attorney General Eric Holder and President Barack Obama, Assata became the first woman added to the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist List, and the bounty on her head was doubled to $2 million.[37] To their immense credit, the Cuban government never capitulated to pressure to turn her over. “They wanted to portray her as a terrorist, something that was an injustice, a brutality, an infamous lie,” stated Fidel Castro in response to the announcement.[38] Nonetheless, between 2005 and 2025, most of the world heard next to nothing from or about Assata. Many of us welcomed this silence, as it meant that she was still free.

But now our warrior queen, our neo-maroon, our escaped slave, has become an egungun: a cherished ancestor.

Meanwhile, the struggle continues on many fronts. The global majority is contending with the unprecedented concentration of wealth in the hands of the few, ascendant fascism, undeclared imperialist wars, full blown genocides, and the intensifying impacts of climate collapse. As we fight against this onslaught, we must not forget our political prisoners. Kamau Sadiki,[39] with whom Assata shares a child, is 69 years old and is currently imprisoned in Georgia, where he is suffering from acute health challenges. Imam Jamil Al-Amin (formerly H. Rap Brown)[40] and Mumia Abu-Jamal,[41] are two more Panther veterans incarcerated as a result of their activism during the 1960s and 1970s. In 2006, Reverend Joy Powell was framed for assault and burglary in retaliation for her activism against police violence. She is currently imprisoned in New York State.[42] T. Hoxha[43] in the U.K. and Casey Goonan[44] in the United States are two recent examples of a new generation of political prisoners that is being produced in response to the rising tide of rebellion against the genocide in Gaza.

The best way that we can honor Assata’s memory is to support liberation struggles and political prisoners. As Assata said,[45] “Every revolution in history has been accomplished by action, although words are necessary. We must create shields that protect us and spears that penetrate our enemies. Black people must learn how to struggle by struggling. We must learn by our mistakes.”

The full list of sources cited in this article can be viewed here .

Orisanmi Burton is a member of AISC.