Assata: An Autobiography

by Assata Shakur

I am not going to die, and even if i do die, i’m not going to die nobody’s hypocrite.

No suspicious-looking white people are reported.

One day one of them came in and gave me a speech about how he fought in World War II on the wrong side.

As many times as i had referred to police as fascists, these shocked me by the truth of my own rhetoric.

I was in communion with all the forces on the earth that truly love people, in communion with all the revolutionary forces on the earth.

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

After learning this, i saw my ancestors in a new light.

It was amazing the number of people who said they were too Black already.

Anybody, no matter who they were, could come right off the boat and get more rights and respect than amerikan-born Blacks.

But Black children encountered support and understanding and encouragement instead of the hostile indifference they often met in the “integrated” schools.

But behind our fights, self-hatred was clearly visible.

The list could go on and on. To varying degrees we accepted these statements as true. And, to varying degrees, we each made them true within ourselves because we believed them.

I didn’t know what a fool they had made out of me until i grew up and started to read real history.

The usual way that people are taught to think in amerika is that each subject is in a little compartment and has no relation to any other subject. For the most part, we receive fragments of unrelated knowledge, and our education follows no logical format or pattern. It is exactly this kind of education that produces people who don’t have the ability to think for themselves and who are easily manipulated.

I was supposed to be a child version of a goodwill ambassador, out to prove that Black people were not stupid or dirty or smelly or uncultured.

I saved my culture, my music, my dancing, the richness of Black speech for the times when i was with my own people.

I was a puppet and i didn’t even know who was pulling the strings.

“Well, you haven’t done anything for me to respect you for. I give people respect only when they earn it.

My name is Assata Shakur (slave name joanne chesimard), and i am a revolutionary.

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.

The rulers of this country have always considered their property more important than our lives.

They call us thieves and bandits. They say we steal. But it was not we who stole millions of Black people from the continent of Africa. We were robbed of our language, of our Gods, of our culture, of our human dignity, of our labor, and of our lives.

Revolutionaries must never be in too much of a hurry or make careless decisions. He who runs when the sun is sleeping will stumble many times.

Black revolutionaries do not drop from the moon. We are created by our conditions. Shaped by our oppression. We are being manufactured in droves in the ghetto streets, places like attica, san quentin, bedford hills, leavenworth, and sing sing. They are turning out thousands of us.

We have nothing to lose but our chains:

“I don’t remember joining your army,” i said. “When i join your army, then you can order me around.”

“You’ll be in jail wherever you go,”

The police patrol our communities just like the guards patrol here. I don’t have the faintest idea how it feels to be free.”

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.

“They’re saying they’re Black, they’re guilty.”

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.

I felt so ugly and dirty and depraved. I was shaken to the bone. For weeks, maybe months, afterward, i was haunted by what happened that day, by the snakes that had crawled out of my mouth.

There was nothing i could do but change myself. Not for him, but for me. And i did change. After that i never said “Black” and “ugly” in the same sentence and never thought it.

i always tried hard after that to stand on my own two feet, to stand by what i felt and thought and not just be a robot. I didn’t always succeed, but i always tried like hell.

They were catching hell every day on their jobs, in society, and they took their frustrations out on each other.

It’s hard as hell to be loving and caring when you can’t pay the bills and you don’t know where the next dollar is coming from.

“That’s right, i steal and my kids steal, too. They tryin’ to take my house from me. Tryin’ to take everythin’ i got. I got to survive by the best way i know how.

“Everybody in jail isn’t a criminal,”

I was quickly to find out that the overwhelming majority of guards in the female jail at Rikers are Black. But when they opened their mouths and expressed their opinions, you wondered.

I don’t care what jail i’ve been in, they all stink. They have a smell unlike any smell on earth. Like blood and sweat and feet and open sores and, if misery has a smell, like misery.

“Bad as them papers said you was, I just knew you had to look bad. And here you are, just a little ole thing.”

“Dirty dog, slimy pig, you’re not a judge. You’re just another prosecutor.”

it had always been difficult for me to accept the idea of an all-powerful, all-seeing, all-knowing god.

“We can’t guarantee our children a future in a world like this. Struggling is the only guarantee our children will ever have for a future.

“I’m a revolutionary,” i had said. “I don’t have time to sit at home and make no babies.”

“I’m gonna live as hard as i can and as full as i can until i die. And i’m not letting these parasites, these oppressors, these greedy racist swine make me kill my children in my mind, before they are even born. I’m going to live and i’m going to love Kamau, and, if a child comes from that union, i’m going to rejoice. Because our children are our futures and i believe in the future and in the strength and rightness of our struggle.”

Every day they brought us into the kourtroom. And, every day, as soon as the jury came in, we began to tell them what was happening, that we were being forced to trial without being given time to prepare a defense. And every day, the judge ordered us removed from the kourtroom and cited us for contempt. It was comical.

He told me that “once upon a time” he had been a prosecutor. That was the end of the conversation. I would rather have had an alligator for a lawyer.