Assata: An Autobiography

by Assata Shakur

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.

I could just imagine going home and telling my grandmother that i got in a fight because some dude in Europe got killed.

Little did i know that Lincoln was an archracist who had openly expressed his disdain for Black people.

The slave economy of the South was a threat to northern capitalism.

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.

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

We must gain our liberation by any means necessary.

We have nothing to lose but our chains:

When Black people seriously organize and take up arms to fight for our liberation, there will be a lot of white people who will drop dead from no other reason than their own guilt and fear.

“I am about life,” i said to myself. “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,

Love is contraband in Hell, cause love is an acid that eats away bars. But you, me, and tomorrow hold hands and make vows that struggle will multiply. The hacksaw has two blades. The shotgun has two barrels. We are pregnant with freedom. We are a conspiracy.

As far as i’m concerned, “liberal” is the most meaningless word in the dictionary. History has shown me that as long as some white middle-class people can live high on the hog, take vacations to Europe, send their children to private schools, and reap the benefits of their white skin privileges, then they are “liberals.” But when times get hard and money gets tight, they pull off that liberal mask and you think you’re talking to Adolf Hitler. They feel sorry for the so-called underprivileged

amen

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.

fuck respectability politics.

The almighty dollar is king; those who have the most money control the country

capitalism is the root to all evil.

It’s got to be one of the most basic principles of living: always decide who your enemies are for yourself, and never let your enemies choose your enemies for you.

The struggle i’ve been going through and the struggle i’ve been seeing is too hard to lie about and i don’t even want to try. I want to help free the ghetto, not run away from it, leaving my people behind. I don’t want to style and profile in front of nobody. I want somebody i can relate to and talk about serious shit with.

i want to be apart of community, apart of the formation

They think they killed you. But i saw you yesterday. All them youngbloods musta gave you a transfusion. All that strong blood. All that rich blood. All that angry blood flowing through your veins toward tomorrow.

My paramount objective in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it and if i could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.

The battle was between a plantation slave economy and an industrial manufacturing economy.

Nobody is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. Nobody is going to teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes, if they know that that knowledge will help set you free.

they don’t want us to be free.

the revolutionary struggle of Black people had to be against racism, capitalism, imperialism, and sexism and for real freedom under a socialist government.

!!!!!!!!

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.