Assata: An Autobiography

by Assata Shakur

“Why, I wonder, do I warrant such attention? What do I represent that is such a threat?”

Black militants were assumed to be enemies of the state and were associated with communist challenges to capitalist democracy. The protracted search for Assata, during which she was demonized in ways that are now unimaginable, served further to justify the imprisonment of vast numbers of political activists, many of whom remain locked tip today.

This lifting of her image out of the past for very contemporary purposes serves to justify the consolidation of a vast prison industrial complex, which Assata herself has described as “ ... not only a mechanism to convert public tax money into profits for private corporations [but also] an essential element of modern neoliberal capitalism.”

It is important to remember that Assata Shakur’s decision to join the Black Panthers occurred soon after J. Edgar Hoover ordered the forty-one FBI offices to intensify their efforts “to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and otherwise neutralize” Black nationalist organizations and their leaders. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Nation of Islam, and above all, the Black Panthers were specifically targeted, as were, among many Blacks, Stokely Carmichael, Rap Brown, Elijah Muhammad, Fred Hampton, Mark Clark, and, as we shall see, Assata Shakur, also known as JoAnne Chesimard.

Harper’s testimony as well as that of all the other state’s witnesses was riddled with inconsistencies and discrepancies. On three separate official reports, including his grand jury testimony, Harper said that he saw Assata take a gun from her pocketbook, while in the car, and shoot him. He admitted, on cross-examination during both Sundiata’s trial and Assata’s trial, that he never saw Assata with a gun and did not see her shoot him—that, in fact, he had lied.

Another pig comes in. A Black pig. In uniform. He comes closer and i see that he is not a cop but a hospital security guard. He stands not too far from where i am lying and i can see he is not at all hostile. His face breaks into a kind of reserved smile and, very discreetly, he clenches his fist and gives me the power sign. That man will never know how much better he made me feel at that moment.

When i was in the Black Panther Party, we used to call the police “fascist pigs,” but i had called them fascists not because i believed they were nazis but because of the way they acted in our communities. As many times as i had referred to police as fascists, these shocked me by the truth of my own rhetoric.

My awareness of class differences in the Black community came at an early age. Although my grandmother taught me more about being proud and strong than anyone i know, she had a lot of Booker T. Washington, pull yourself up by the bootstraps, “talented tenth” ideas. She had worked hard and had made a decent living as a pieceworker in a factory, but she had other ideas for me. She was determined that i would become part of Wilmington’s talented tenth—the privileged class—part of the so-called Black bourgeoisie.

My name is Assata Shakur (slave name joanne chesimard), and i am a revolutionary. A Black revolutionary. By that i mean that i have declared war on all forces that have raped our women, castrated our men, and kept our babies empty-bellied. I have declared war on the rich who prosper on our poverty, the politicians who lie to us with smiling faces, and all the mindless, heartless robots who protect them and their property. I am a Black revolutionary, and, as such, i am a victim of all the wrath, hatred, and slander that amerika is capable of. Like all other Black revolutionaries, amerika is trying to lynch me.

They call us murderers, but we do not control or enforce a system of racism and oppression that systematically murders Black and Third World people. Although Black people supposedly comprise about fifteen percent of the total amerikkkan population, at least sixty percent of murder victims are Black. For every pig that is killed in the so-called line of duty, there are at least fifty Black people murdered by the police.

There is, and always will be, until every Black man, woman, and child is free, a Black Liberation Army. The main function of the Black Liberation Army at this time is to create good examples, to struggle for Black freedom, and to

prepare for the future. We must defend ourselves and let no one disrespect us. We must gain our liberation by any means necessary. It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains:

thought a lot about those boys after that night. I hated them, but what i couldn’t understand is why they hated me so much. Everybody was always saying what a dog-eat-dog world it was. There were all kinds of people in the world and most of them seemed unhappy. Everybody seemed to be in their own bag and few seemed to care about anybody else. I had read this play by Sartre. The play ended with the conclusion that hell is other people, and, for a while, i agreed.

The more i watched how boys and girls behaved, the more i read and the more i thought about it, the more convinced i became that this behavior could be traced directly back to the plantation, when slaves were encouraged to take the misery of their lives out on each other instead of on the master. The slavemasters taught us we were ugly, less than human, unintelligent, and many of us believed it. Black people became breeding animals: studs and mares. A Black woman was fair game for anyone at any time: the master or a visiting guest or any redneck who desired her. The slavemaster would order her to have six with this stud, seven with that stud, for the purpose of increasing his stock. She was considered less than a woman. She was a cross between a whore and a workhorse. Black men internalized the white man’s opinion of Black women. And, if you ask me, a lot of us still act like we’re back on the plantation with massa pulling the strings.

Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them. Once you study and really get a good understanding of the way the system in the United States works, then you see, without a doubt, that the civil rights movement never had a chance of succeeding. White people, whether they are from the North or from the South, whether it was in 1960 or 1980, benefit from the oppression of Black people. Those who believe that the president or the vice-president and the congress and the supreme kourt run this country are sadly mistaken. The almighty dollar is king; those who have the most money control the country and, through campaign contributions, buy and sell presidents, congressmen, and judges, the ones who pass the laws and enforce the laws that benefit their benefactors.

war between the races would help nobody and free nobody and should be avoided at all costs. But a one-sided race war with Black people as the targets and white people shooting the guns is worse. We will be criminally negligent, however, if we do not deal with racism and racist violence, and if we do not prepare to defend ourselves against it.

always decide who your enemies are for

All this talk is giving me a headache. Some fraternity brothers invite me to dance. One tells me that i look like a Delta girl. “How does a Delta girl look?”

MY PATIENCE was zero. I didn’t want to wait for something to happen. I was into living and living for now. I was hungry, starving for life, but at the same time i was growing more and more cynical every day. I wanted to go everywhere, do everything, and be everything, all at the same time. I wanted to experience everything, know how everything felt. I had many zigzag conflicting ideas rolling around in my head at the same time. One day i was happy just to be alive and young and moving.

got so i didn’t believe in anything. It seemed that everybody was in some kind of bag, the dope bag, the whiskey brown paper bag, the jesus bag, the love bag, the sex bag, the make-it bag, and none of those bags were doing anybody any good. I was looking for my own bag, but the pickings were slim.

Throughout amerika’s history, people have been imprisoned because of their political beliefs and charged with criminal acts in order to justify that imprisonment.

Marcus Garvey, Stokely Carmichael, Angela Davis, the Rosenbergs, and Lolita Lebron were all charged with crimes because of their political beliefs.

But one percent of the people in this country control seventy percent of the wealth. And it is that one percent, the heads of large corporations, who control the policies of the news media and determine what you and i hear on radio, read in the newspapers, see on television. It is more important for us to think about where the media gets its information. From the police department or from the prosecutor. No major newspaper or television station has ever asked my lawyers or myself one question concerning anything. People are tried and convicted in the newspapers and on television before they ever see a courtroom. A person who is accused of stealing a car becomes an international car theft ring. A man is accused of participating in a drunken brawl and the headlines read “Crazed Maniac Goes Berserk.”

fried up. And you can have an Afro and be a traitor to Black people. But for me, how you dress and how you look have always reflected what you have to say about yourself. When you wear your hair a certain way or when you wear a certain type of clothes, you are making a statement about yourself.

I WAS GRADUALLY becoming more active. I began to control my life. Before going back to college, i knew i didn’t want to be an intellectual, spending my life in books and libraries without knowing what the hell was going on in the streets. Theory without practice is just as incomplete as practice without theory. The two have to go together. I was determined to do both.

There were Black Muslims, Garveyites, Malcolm X’s Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), members of various community and cultural organizations, and a few who were young turks of the NAACP.

NO MOVEMENT CAN SURVIVE unless it is constantly growing and changing with the times. If it isn’t growing, it’s stagnant, and without the support of the people, no movement for liberation can exist, no matter how correct its analysis of the situation is. That’s why political work and organizing are so important. Unless you are addressing the issues people are concerned about and contributing positive direction, they’ll never support you.

IT WASN’T UNTIL years later—after college and more revolutionary activism and marriage—that i began to seriously think about changing my name. The name JoAnne began to irk my nerves. I had changed a lot and moved to a different beat, felt like a different person. It sounded so strange when people called me JoAnne. It really had nothing to do with me. I didn’t feel like no JoAnne, or no Negro, or no amerikan. I felt like an African woman. From the time i picked my hair out in the morning to the time i slipped off to sleep with Mingus in the background, i felt like an African woman and rejoiced in it. My big, abstract black and white inkblot-looking painting was replaced by paintings of Black people and revolutionary posters. My life became an African life, my surroundings took on an African flavor, my spirit took on an African glow. From the paintings on my walls to the big, fat pillows on my floor, from the incense burning in the air to the music dancing through the rooms, my whole life was moving to African rhythms. My mind, heart, and soul had gone back to Africa, but my name was still stranded in Europe somewhere. JoAnne was bad enough, but at least my mother had given it to me. As for Chesimard, well, i could only come to one conclusion. Somebody named Chesimard had been the

I wanted a name that had something to do with struggle, something to do with the liberation of our people. I decided on Assata Olugbala Shakur. Assata means “She who struggles,” Olugbala means “Love for the people,” and i took the name Shakur out of respect for Zayd and Zayd’s family. Shakur means “the thankful.”

I wasn’t against communism, but i can’t say i was for it either. At first, i viewed it suspiciously, as some kind of white man’s concoction, until i read works by African revolutionaries and studied the African liberation movements. Revolutionaries in Africa understood that the question of African liberation was not just a question of race, that even if they managed to get rid of the white colonialists, if they didn’t rid themselves of the capitalistic economic structure, the white colonialists would simply be replaced by Black neocolonialists. There was not a single liberation movement in Africa that was not fighting for socialism. In fact, there was not a single liberation movement in the whole world that was fighting for capitalism. The whole thing boiled down to a simple equation: anything that has any kind of value is made, mined, grown, produced, and processed by working people. So why shouldn’t working people collectively own that wealth?

Capitalism meant that rich businessmen owned the wealth, while socialism meant that the people who made the wealth owned

As long as you’ve got a system with a top and a bottom, Black people are always going to wind up at the bottom, because we’re the easiest to discriminate against. That’s why i couldn’t see fighting within the system. Both the democratic party and the republican party are controlled by millionaires. They are interested in holding on to their power, while i was interested in taking it away. They were interested in supporting fascist dictatorships in South and Central America, while i wanted to see them overthrown. They were interested in supporting racist, fascist regimes in Africa while i was interested in seeing them overthrown. They were interested in defeating the Viet Cong and i was interested in seeing them win their liberation. A poster of the massacre at My Lai, picturing women and children lying clumped together in a heap, their bodies riddled with bullets, hung on my wall as a daily reminder of the brutality in the world.

the Puerto Rican Five—Lolita Lebron, Rafael Miranda, Andres Cordero, Irving Flores, and Oscar Collazo, each of whom had spent more than a quarter of a century behind bars fighting for the independence of Puerto Rico.

I had begun to think of myself as a socialist, but i could not in any way see myself joining any of the socialist groups i came in contact with. I loved to listen to them, learn from them, and argue with them, but there was no way in the world i could see myself becoming a member. For one thing, i could not stand the condescending, paternalistic attitudes of some of the white people in those groups. Some of the older members thought that because they had been in the struggle for socialism for a long time, they knew all the answers to the problems of Black people and all the aspects of the Black Liberation struggle. I couldn’t relate to the idea of the great white father on earth any more than i could relate to the great white father up in the sky. I was willing and ready to learn everything i could from them, but i damn sure was not ready to accept them as leaders of the Black Liberation struggle. A few thought that they had a monopoly on Marx and acted like the only experts in the world on socialism came from Europe. In many instances they downgraded the theoretical and practical contributions of Third World revolutionaries like Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Augustino Neto, and other leaders of liberation movements in the Third World.

Arrogance was one of the key factors that kept the white left so factionalized. I felt that instead of fighting together against a common enemy, they wasted time quarreling with each other about who had the right line. Although i respected the work and political positions of many groups on the left, i felt it was necessary for Black people to come together to organize our own structures and our own revolutionary political party.

Black revolutionaries to come together, analyze our history, our present condition, and to define ourselves and our struggle. Black self-determination is a basic right, and if we do not have the right to determine our destinies, then who does? I believe that to gain our liberation, we must come from the position of power and unity and that a Black revolutionary party, led by Black revolutionary leaders, is essential. I believe in uniting with white revolutionaries to fight against

Huey Newton had written that politics was war without bloodshed and that war was politics with bloodshed.

I am convinced that a systematic program for political education, ranging from the simplest to the highest level, is imperative for any successful organization or movement for Black liberation in this country. The Party had some of the most politically conscious sisters and brothers as members, but in some ways it failed to spread that consciousness to the cadre in general. I also thought it was a real shame the BPP didn’t teach Panthers organizing and mobilizing techniques. Some members were natural geniuses at organizing people, but they were usually the busiest comrades with the most responsibility.

intercommunalism. Huey Newton was not what you would call a good speaker. In fact, he had a kind of high-pitched monotonous voice and his rambling for three hours about the negation of the negation was sheer disaster. People walked out in droves. Instead of criticizing what was happening, most of the Party members defended it. When i said that Huey needed speaking lessons they jumped down my throat. When Huey changed his title from defense minister to the ridiculous-sounding “Supreme Commander” and then to the even more ridiculous “Supreme Servant,” damn near nobody said a word. That was one of the big problems in the Party. Criticism and self-criticism were not encouraged, and the little that was given often was not taken seriously. Constructive criticism and self-criticism are extremely important for any revolutionary organization. Without them, people tend to drown in their mistakes, not learn from them.

They wanted to engage in a do-or-die battle with the power structure in amerika, even though they were weak and ill prepared for such a fight. But the most important factor is that armed struggle, by itself, can never bring about a revolution. Revolutionary war is a people’s war. And no people’s war can be won without the support of the masses of people. Armed struggle can never be successful by itself; it must be part of an overall strategy for winning, and the strategy must be political as well as military.

Rita Brown, a white revolutionary from the George Jackson Brigade, a group based on the West Coast, was among the four or five “niggah lovers.” She was a feminist and a lesbian, and helped me to better understand many issues in the white women’s liberation movement. Unlike Jane Alpert, whom i had met in the federal prison in New York, and whom i couldn’t stand either personally or politically, Rita did not separate the oppression of women from the racism and classism of u.s. society. We agreed that sexism, like racism, was generated by capitalist, imperialist governments, and that women would never be liberated as long as the institutions that controlled our lives existed. I respected Rita because she

really practiced sisterhood, and wasn’t just one of those big mouths who go on and on about men.

Lolita Lebrón was one of the most respected political prisoners in the world. Ever since i had first learned about her courageous struggle for the independence of Puerto Rico, i had read everything i could find that had been written about her. She had spent a quarter of a century behind bars and had refused parole unless her comrades were also freed. After all those years she had remained strong, unbent and unbroken, still dedicated to the independence of Puerto Rico and the liberation of her people. She deserved more respect than anyone could possibly give her, and i could not do enough to demonstrate my respect.

supported Lolita a hundred percent, but there was one thing about which we did not agree. At the time we met, Lolita was somewhat anticommunist and antisocialist. She was extremely religious and, i think, believed that religion and socialism were two opposing forces, that socialists and communists were completely opposed to religion and religious freedom.

Cuba is a country of hope. Their reality is so different. I’m amazed at how much Cubans have accomplished in so short a time since the Revolution. There are new buildings everywhere—schools, apartment houses, clinics, hospitals, and day care centers. They are not like the skyscrapers going up in midtown Manhattan. There are no exclusive condominiums or luxury office buildings. The new buildings are for the people. Medical care, dental care, and hospital visits are free. Schools at all educational levels are free. Rent is no more than about ten percent of salaries. There are no taxes—no income, city, federal, or state taxes. It is so strange to pay the price actually listed on products without any tax added. Movies, plays, concerts, and sports events all cost one or two pesos at the most. Museums are free.

He told me that Fidel, in a speech, had told the people, “We are all Afro-Cubans, from the very lightest to the very darkest.”