Assata: An Autobiography

by Assata Shakur

“Besides, i don’t need a criminal lawyer because this isn’t a criminal case. I need a political lawyer.”

The slavemasters taught us we were ugly, less than human, unintelligent, and many of us believed it.

How could they understand someone becoming a Black revolutionary? They had so little to revolt against.

One day, in all earnestness, he told me he would rather try a case in Mississippi any day than try one in jersey.

Love is contraband in Hell, cause love is an acid that eats away bars.

I remember hating some of those people, but at the same time i wanted to be rich like them. Back then, i thought being rich was the solution to everything.

To me, if someone spit on you, it was worse than hitting you, especially if they spit in your face.

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.

rich have always used racism to maintain power.

It seemed that the whole world was made up of things i couldn’t afford.

When someone asked me what communism was, i opened my mouth to answer, then realized i didn’t have the faintest idea.

I knew i didn’t know what the hell communism was, and yet i’d been dead set against it.

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

I go back outside feeling like i’m from another planet. I feel lonely and serious. Something has been happening to me, a change that has been a long time coming. I want to be real.

Looking out at the ocean, i wonder how many of our people lie buried there, slaves of another era. I’m not quite sure what freedom is, but i know damn well what it ain’t.

He was one of those Black people who think that you are free if you can go in a store and buy expensive things.

“You’ll be all right if you just get yourself organized. You can do almost anything you want as long as you organize yourself to do it.”

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 had grown up believing the slaves hadn’t fought back. I remember feeling ashamed when they talked about slavery in school. The teachers made it seem that Black people had nothing to do with the official “emancipation” from slavery. White people had freed us.

Theory without practice is just as incomplete as practice without theory. The two have to go together. I was determined to do both.

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.

Nobody is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them.

As long as we expect amerika’s schools to educate us, we will remain ignorant.

the idea of a Black nation in Babylon, a nation of Black people smack dab in the middle of the belly of the beast. Imagining Black youth flourishing and being nourished in Black schools, taught by teachers who loved them and who taught them to love themselves.

I love Black people, i don’t care what they are doing, but when Black people are struggling, that’s when they are most beautiful to me.

You simply mention the word “communist” and a lot of these red, white, and blue fools are ready to kill.

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.

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.

For a lot of people in this country, people who live in other places have no faces. And this is the way the u.s. government wants it to be.

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.

To my momma, who couldn’t turn hell into paradise and blamed herself.

Who has never drifted hazily to sleep thinking, “he will take care of it.”

you wanna look like a ghost, well, i’ll make you one.

Revolution. I am tired of watching us lose. They kill our leaders, then they kill us for protesting.

I told him that i thought there were a whole lot of us in the same predicament and that the only way we were going to get out of it was to come together and break the chains.

“You’ve got to be alert to deal with this situation. You’ve got to be disciplined and ready to deal with the enemy at all times.”

I had heard somebody say that revolutionaries get high on revolution and that it was the best high in the world. “I’m gonna check out that high,” i said aloud.

I walked back to where i was staying, wondering what i was going to have to do to become who i needed to become. Revolution is about change, and the first place the change begins is in yourself.

Panthers didn’t try to sound all intellectual, talking about the national bourgeoisie, the military-industrial complex, the reactionary ruling class. They simply called a pig a pig. They didn’t refer to the repressive domestic army or the state repressive apparatus. They called the racist police pigs and racist dogs.

One of the most important things the Party did was to make it really clear who the enemy was: not the white people, but the capitalistic, imperialistic oppressors.

It was strange to be there in a room with those people. It was like sitting down on the pages of a history book.

i had been turned off by the way spokesmen for the Party talked to people, that their attitude had often been arrogant, flippant, and disrespectful.

I felt guilt for being alive and well. Where was my gun? And where was my courage?

If i stay a victim it will kill me, I thought. It was time for me to get my shit together. I wanted to be one of the people who stood up. These were serious times.

“You’ll be good for the Party, and the Party will be good for you. The Party is only as strong as its people.”

Of all the things i had wanted to be when i was a little girl, a revolutionary certainly wasn’t one of them. And now it was the only thing i wanted to do. Everything else was secondary.

I’m not talking about any old Black lawyer, because some of them make a whole lot of money and think like Richard Nixon. I’m talking about those who are concerned with the plight of Black people.

They had taken a bank picture of a woman robbing a bank, printed my name under it as being positively identified, and then placed that picture in newspapers, subway stations, and, i think, even on the sides of buses.

The public had been so saturated with that image that i felt it was crazy to take this trial seriously.

One little girl broke up the whole kourtroom when she asked out loud, “Is that the fascist pig, Mommy?” pointing up at the judge.