On 25 September, Assata Shakur, a former member of the Black Liberation Army, died aged 78 in Havana, Cuba, according to Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Cuban officials cited the reason for her death as old age and health conditions. Shakur, a longstranding symbol of resistance and Black liberation, spent several decades exiled in Cuba after she was convicted of killing a New Jersey state trooper in 1977 and escaped from prison.
“At approximately 1:15pm on September 25th, my mother, Assata Shakur, took her last earthly breath,” her daughter Kakuya Shakur wrote on Facebook. “Words cannot describe the depth of loss that I’m feeling at this time.”
Born JoAnne Deborah Byron on 16 July 1947, in Queens, New York, she was later raised in Wilmington, North Carolina during a time of racial segregation. She dropped out of high school and moved back to New York to work a low-wage job. Her life changed in 1964 when a conversation with African students about communism and Vietnam challenged her views. “We’re taught at such an early age to be against communists, yet most of us don’t have the faintest idea what communism is,” Shakur wrote in her 1987 memoir, Assata: An Autobiography. “Only a fool lets somebody else tell him who his enemy is.”
In the 1960s, she attended Borough of Manhattan Community College and then the City College of New York and became involved with Black activist group Golden Drums society, where she advocated for Black studies courses. She married fellow student activist Louis Chesimard in 1967 and divorced in 1970, the same year that she joined the Black Panther Party.
“One of the most important things the Party did was to make it really clear who the enemy was,” Shakur wrote in her memoir, “not the white people, but the capitalistic, imperialistic oppressors.”
In 1971, she changed her name to Assata Olugbala Shakur to better reflect her identity as an African woman – Assata meaning “she who struggles,” in Swahili, Olugbala meaning “love for the people,” in Yoruba, and Shakur meaning “the thankful,” in Arabic.
Shakur quit the Black Panther Party not long after she joined, citing her dissatisfaction with their lack of knowledge of Black history and the discouragement of criticism toward the party. She later joined the Black Liberation Army (BLA), a Marxist-Leninist Black nationalist group that fought for Black freedom through an armed front. From 1971 to 1973, she was charged with multiple crimes along with other members, including bank robberies, and the murder of a drug dealer, all of which were acquitted or dismissed.
On 2 May 1973, a state trooper, James Harper, pulled over a car she was in for a failed rear light, with another trooper, Werner Foerster, in a second patrol car. Following a gunfire exchange, the Black Liberation Army member Zayd Malik Shakur and Foerster died. Shakur was convicted of murdering Foerster in 1977 and sentenced to life in prison. Two years later, BLA members disguised as visitors helped her break out of Clinton Correctional Facility for Women in New Jersey. She later appeared in Cuba, where Fidel Castro’s government granted her asylum.
In 2013, Shakur was the first woman to land on the FBI’s most-wanted terrorists list. While opponents vilified Shakur, her life and memoir inspired racial justice movements for decades.