Assata: An Autobiography

by Assata Shakur

Her words remind us, as Walter Benjamin once observed, that it is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.

People struggling for self-determination are a phenomenon of the twentieth century. These struggles are frequently understood and supported by people of goodwill in the United States—when the struggles take place in South Africa, El Salvador, the Philippines, or Palestinian refugee camps.

As a lawyer, teacher, and student of history, I know that while Assata’s story may be unique in its energy, creativity, and passion for life and principle, it is typical of the ways the United States has responded historically to individuals that the government sees as political threats to domestic tranquility.

The FBI’s systematic surveillance of and attacks on Black groups and individuals were orchestrated by its counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO), which was directed specifically against what the FBI termed “Black nationalist hate groups.” COINTELPRO’s first targets were Martin Luther King and thousands of less prominent civil rights activists. Elsewhere,*

In addition, the findings of the Domestic Intelligence Subcommittee, headed by Senator Walter Mondale, which were published by the U.S. Government Printing Office in 1976, provided incontrovertible documentation of this government-sponsored conspiracy against the civil and human rights of all sorts of political activists and, most particularly, Black people.

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.

In the history of New Jersey, no woman pretrial detainee or prisoner has ever been treated as she was, continuously confined in a men’s prison, under twenty-four-hour surveillance of her most intimate functions, without intellectual sustenance, adequate medical attention, and exercise, and without the company of other women for all the years she was in their custody. We filed one civil rights lawsuit after another complaining of the barbarous treatment selectively meted out to her, with limited success. As you read her story, imagine the effect these conditions must have had on this proud and sensitive woman.

Once again, the manipulation of facts by the media became a substitute for reality—none of the acquittals

or dismissals was publicized.

was the racism in Middlesex County, fueled by biased, inflammatory publicity in the local press before and throughout the trial, fanned by the documented government lawlessness, that made it possible for the white jury to convict Assata on the uncorroborated, contradictory, and generally incredible testimony of trooper Harper, the only other witness to the events on the turnpike. 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.

Every day there were three shifts of police. When they changed shifts, the two troopers would salute the sergeant. Some saluted an army salute, but others saluted like the nazis did in Germany. They held their hands in front of them and clicked their heels. I couldn’t believe it. One day one of them came in and gave me a speech about how he fought in World War II on the wrong side. He went on and on and there was no question that he believed everything he said. He talked about how messed up the world is. How decent people couldn’t walk the streets. He said that if Hitler had won, the world wouldn’t be in the mess it is in today, that niggers like me, no-good niggers, wouldn’t be going around shooting new jersey state troopers.

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. I later learned that the state troopers in new jersey was started by a German, that their uniforms were patterned after some type of German uniform (very similar to the uniforms South African police wear), that they are notorious for stopping Black, Hispanic, and long-haired people on the turnpike and beating, harassing, and arresting them.

One night one of the nurses came in and gave me three books. I hadn’t even thought about reading. The books were a godsend. They had been carefully selected. One was a book of Black poetry, one was a book called Black Women in White Amerika, and the third was a novel, Siddhartha, by Hermann Hesse. Whenever i tired of the verbal abuse of my captors, i would drown them out by reading the poetry out loud. “Invictus” and “If We Must Die” were the poems i usually read. I read them over and over, until i was sure the guards had heard every word. The poems were my message to them.

When i read the book about Black women, i felt the spirits of those sisters feeding me, making me stronger. Black women have been struggling and helping each other to survive the blows of life since the beginning of time. And when i read Siddhartha, a peace came over me. I felt a unity with all things living. The world, in spite of oppression, is a beautiful place. I would say “Om” softly to myself, letting my lips vibrate. I felt the birds, the sun, and the trees.

STORY You died. I cried. And kept on getting up. A little slower And a lot more deadly.

All of my family tried to instill in me a sense of personal dignity, but my grandmother and my grandfather were really fanatic about it. Over and over they would tell me, “You’re as good as anyone else. Don’t let anybody tell you that they’re better than you.” My grandparents strictly forbade me to say “yes ma’am” and “yes sir” or to look down at my shoes or to make subservient gestures when talking to white people. “You look them in the eye when you talk to them,” i was told. “And speak up like you’ve got some sense.” I was told to speak in a loud, clear voice and to hold my head up high, or risk having my grandparents knock it off my shoulders.

I didn’t care what kind of house my friends had or whether or not they lived in alleys. All that mattered was whether i liked them. I was convinced then, and i’m still convinced, that in some things kids have a lot more sense than adults.

I didn’t know until i was grown that Aunt Lou had a son. His name was Uncle Willie and he died before i was born. Uncle Willie was something of a legend around Wilmington during the twenties, thirties, and forties. Whenever he came to town, they say, Aunt Lou would plead and moan and worry until he was in safer territory up North. They say that he would tear down the “colored” and “white only” signs and break the Jim Crow laws at whim. He would go around demanding his rights and denouncing the oppression of Black people, and it is logical that no one who loved him felt the least bit comfortable until he was long gone. They called him “Wild Willie” or “that crazy Indian” (he was supposedly Black and Cherokee), but people called him that because of his nature.

But it was a lesson i never forgot. Anybody, no matter who they were, could come right off the boat and get more rights and respect than amerikan-born Blacks.

We had been completely brainwashed and we didn’t even know it. We accepted white value systems and white standards of beauty and, at times, we accepted the white man’s view of ourselves. We had never been exposed to any other point of view or any other standard of beauty.

To varying degrees we accepted these statements as true. And, to varying degrees, we each made them true within ourselves because we believed them.

When George Washington was fighting for freedom in the Revolutionary War, he was fighting for the freedom of “whites only.” Rich whites, at that. After the so-called Revolution, you couldn’t vote unless you were a white man and you owned a plot of land. The Revolutionary War was led by some rich white boys who got tired of paying heavy taxes to the king. It didn’t have anything at all to do with freedom, justice, and equality for all.

Little did i know that Lincoln was an archracist who had openly expressed his disdain for Black people. He was of the opinion that Black people should be forcibly deported to Africa or anywhere else. We had been taught that the Civil War was fought to free the slaves, and it was not until i was in college that i learned that the Civil War was fought for economic reasons. The fact that “official” slavery was abolished was only incidental. Northern industrialists were fighting to control the economy. Before the Civil War, the northern industrial economy was largely dependent on southern

cotton. The slave economy of the South was a threat to northern capitalism. What if the slaveholders of the South decided to set up factories and process the cotton themselves? Northern capitalists could not possibly compete with slave labor, and their capitalist economy would be destroyed. To ensure that this didn’t happen, the North went to war.

I made the tape of “To My People” on July 4, 1973, and it was broadcast on many radio stations. Here is what I said:

Black revolutionaries do not drop from the moon. We are created by our conditions. Shaped by our oppression.

In prisons, it is not at all uncommon to find a prisoner hanged or burned to death in his cell. No matter how suspicious the circumstances, these deaths are always ruled “suicides.” They are usually Black inmates, considered to be a “threat to the orderly running

of the prison.” They are usually among the most politically aware and socially conscious inmates in the prison.

Any Black person in amerika, if they are honest with themselves, have got to come to the conclusion that they don’t know what it feels like to be free. We aren’t free politically, economically, or socially. We have very little power over what happens in our lives. In fact, a Black person in amerika isn’t even free to walk down the street. Walk down the wrong street, in the wrong neighborhood at night, and you know what happens.

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Prisons are a profitable business. They are a way of legally perpetuating slavery. In every state, more and more prisons are being built and even more are on the drawing board. Who are they for? They certainly aren’t planning to put white people in them. Prisons are part of this government’s genocidal war against Black and Third World people.

They were actually afraid. White people’s fear of Black people with guns will never cease to amaze me. Probably it’s because they think about what they would do were they in our place. Especially the police, who have done so much dirt to Black people—their guilty conscience tells them to be afraid.

I really didn’t expect too much, but it seemed like such an obvious trick, such an obvious ploy, to ensure that we didn’t receive a fair trial by a jury of our peers that i thought maybe something could be done about it. I was naive in those days. I knew in theory, but i had not seen enough to accept the fact that there was absolutely no justice whatsoever for Black people in amerika. I still had some hope left. But they had taken something that was supposed to help us and turned it against us. They had used the law to abuse the law.

“One of the worst cases is that of ASSATA SHAKUR, who spent over twenty months in solitary confinement in two separate men’s prisons subject to conditions totally unbefitting any prisoner. Many more months were spent in solitary confinement in mixed or all-women’s prisons. Presently, after protracted litigation, she is confined at Clinton Correctional Facility for Women in maximum security. She has never on any occasion been punished for any infraction of prison rules which might in any way justify such cruel or unusual treatment.”

A lot of the Black men that i met in the Village were hung up on white women. Some of them would come right out and tell you, “Man, i can’t dig no spade chick. Gimme an ofay every day.” “When i asked them why, they said white women are sweeter, Black women are evil; white women are more understanding, Black women are more demanding. One of the things that really infuriated me was when they called Black women sapphire. “You know how you nigga women are, sapphire, evil.” A lot of these guys would have trampled over my face just to get to a white woman.

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.

They feel sorry for the so-called underprivileged just as long as they can maintain their own privileges.

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.

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.

always decide who your enemies are for yourself, and never let your enemies choose your enemies for you.

Everything is a lie in amerika, and the thing that keeps it going is that so many people believe the lie.

I have decided to act as co-counsel, and to make this opening statement, not because i have any illusions about my legal abilities, but, rather, because there are things that i must say

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.

I have read the Declaration of Independence, and i have great admiration for this statement: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”