Assata: An Autobiography

by Assata Shakur

The only great people i have met have been modest and humble. You can’t claim that you love people when you don’t respect them, and you can’t call for political unity unless you practice it in your relationships.

Huey Newton had written that politics was war without bloodshed and that war was politics with bloodshed. To a lot of Panthers, however, struggle consisted of only two aspects: picking up the gun and serving the people.

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 only time white amerika is in favor of Black people having guns is when we are using them to do amerika’s dirty work.

I owe a great deal to those who have helped me, loved me, taught me, and pulled my coat when i was moving in the wrong direction.

Maybe it’s ironic, i don’t know, but the one thing i do know is that the Black liberation movement has done more for me than i will ever be able to do for it.

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.

One of the basic laws of people’s struggle was to retreat when the enemy is strong and to attack when the enemy is weak.

The beautiful revolutionary creativity i had loved so much was gone. And replaced by dogmatic stagnation.

The FBI’s COINTEL program consisted of turning members of organizations against each other, pitting one Black organization against another.

Maybe we are all running and hiding. Maybe we are all running from something, all living a clandestine existence.

But we were to find out quickly that courage and dedication were not enough. To win any struggle for liberation, you have to have the way as well as the will, an overall ideology and strategy that stem from a scientific analysis of history and present conditions.

But the most important factor is that armed struggle, by itself, can never bring about a revolution. Revolutionary war is a people’s war.

The only alternative left was to fight for them, and we are going to have to fight like any other people who have fought for liberation.

As long as they didn’t impede our long-range plans, guerrilla units should be able to carry out a few well-planned, well-timed armed actions that were well coordinated with aboveground political objectives. Not any old kind of actions, but actions that Black people would clearly understand and support and actions that were well publicized in the Black community.

When the government finds it convenient to follow its own laws and administrative procedures, it does. And when it finds that these same laws are inconvenient for their own purposes, it simply ignores them.

The types of experts we needed almost always are police or are working for police agencies. Because my case involved the murder of a police officer, none of them would touch the case.

Appleby’s strategy was to completely intimidate the lawyers, to harass them, threaten them until they became fearful of mounting any significant opposition to the legal lynching that was supposed to be my trial.

The implication of the hearing was clear. Any attempt the lawyers made to defend me would be met with the judge’s hostility.

An all-white jury was selected, based on the advice of Kunstler and the Jury Project, who decided that even though the jurors seated in the panel were horrible, the others were worse.

I should have known better and not lent dignity or credence to that sham. In the long run, the people are our only appeal. The only ones who can free us are ourselves.

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.

I made it clear to them that i hated them as much as they hated me, and that if anybody’s mother had to cry it would be theirs, not Ms. Johnson.

Similar to the situation that existed at the federal prison in New York, some women could not afford to buy cigarettes without forgoing necessities, while others had money, contacts, wore fur coats, and lived as if they were in a different prison.

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.

It apparently had never occurred to those fools that Lolita was more revolutionary than they could ever be, and that her religion had helped her to remain strong and committed all those years.

I decided to study liberation theology so that i could have an intelligent conversation with her.

Every day out in the street now, i remind myself that Black people in amerika are oppressed. It’s necessary that I do that. People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.

I was cold. I strained to touch my softness. I was afraid that prison had made me ugly.

As far as i was concerned, building a sense of national consciousness was one of the most important tasks that lay ahead of us. I couldn’t see how we could seriously struggle without having a strong sense of collectivity, without being responsible for each other and to each other.

Any community seriously concerned with its own freedom has to be concerned about other peoples’ freedom as well. The victory of oppressed people anywhere in the world is a victory for Black people. Each time one of imperialism’s tentacles is cut off we are closer to liberation.

Imperialism is an international system of exploitation, and we, as revolutionaries, need to be internationalists to defeat it.

The first thing that hit me were the open doors. Everywhere you go doors are open wide. You see people inside their homes talking, working, or watching television. I was amazed to find that you could actually walk down the streets at night alone.

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.

I hated to tell people i was from the u.s. I would have preferred to say i was New Afrikan, except that hardly anyone would have understood what that meant.

He told me that Cubans took their African heritage for granted. That for hundreds of years Cubans had danced to African rhythms, performed traditional rituals, and worshipped Gods like Shango and Ogun. 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.”

As long as he supports the Revolution, I don’t care what he thinks. I care more about what he does. If he really supports the Revolution, then he’s gonna change. And, even if he never changes, his kids are going to change. And his grandchildren will change even more. That’s what I care about.”

To them, “mulatto” was just a color, like red, green, or blue. But, to me, it represented a historical relationship.

Although, in some ways, Cubans and I approached the problem from different angles, i felt we shared the same goal: the abolition of racism all over the world. I respected the Cuban government, not only for adopting nonracist principles, but for struggling to put those principles into practice.

How much we had all gone through. Our fight had started on a slave ship years before we were born.