The Equity Report #2: Rest in Power, Assata Shakur

by Telisa Nyoka King, M.A.

Assata Shakur’s name reverberates through generations like a sacred chant — Assata taught me. It is more than a slogan; it is a pedagogy, a way of being. To say her name is to remember a tradition of radical Black womanhood that refuses disappearance. Shakur is not merely a political figure or fugitive; she is a living text of Black Studies — an archive of freedom, exile, and endurance. It’s been nearly two months since her passing on September 25, 2025. As The Equity Report has just gained its footing, I missed a timely tribute to the legend, but nonetheless I am here to pay my dues. Her story teaches that liberation is not metaphorical but material, and that the cost of Black freedom in America is measured in exile, blood, and brilliance.

Born Joanne Chesimard in 1947 in Queens, New York, Assata Shakur came of age in the crucible of civil rights and decolonization movements. At Howard University, she encountered a new generation of Black thinkers — radicalized by Malcolm X, inspired by Frantz Fanon, and impatient with liberal reform. Howard was one of the key incubators of what would soon be institutionalized as Black Studies, an academic and political project to study Black life through the lens of liberation rather than pathology (Rojas, 2007).

Shakur’s political awakening emerged not in the classroom alone, but in the streets and community meetings where Black Studies’ earliest practitioners blurred the line between scholar and revolutionary. Like the students at San Francisco State and Cornell who demanded the creation of Ethnic Studies, Shakur embodied that praxis — learning through struggle and theory through lived resistance. She represented the intellectual lineage that refused to separate knowledge from survival.

Shakur’s activism within the Black Liberation Army (BLA) was part of a larger tradition of self-defense, community protection, and resistance to state terror. The BLA was not a “gang” or “terrorist cell,” as the FBI framed it, but an armed response to centuries of structural and police violence against Black people (Bloom & Martin, 2013). For Black women like Shakur, participation in armed struggle was doubly transgressive: it violated both the racial and gendered boundaries imposed by a patriarchal state.

When she was captured and charged in 1973 after a shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike that left a state trooper dead, Shakur became a symbol of state repression. Her trial — fraught with irregularities, racial bias, and sensationalism — exposed how the U.S. criminal legal system punishes not only alleged crimes, but ideologies that threaten its legitimacy (James, 2003). Shakur was convicted of murder in 1977 and sentenced to life in prison, even as international observers decried the proceedings as a political show trial (Katsiaficas, 2015).

But Shakur would not be contained. On November 2, 1979, with the help of members of the Black Liberation Army and other allies, she escaped from the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women in New Jersey. The operation was executed without casualties: three armed individuals took two prison guards hostage, commandeered a van, and freed her. After living underground for several years, Shakur resurfaced in Cuba in 1984, where she was granted political asylum. Her escape remains one of the most daring acts of resistance in modern U.S. history — a living testament to the unyielding pursuit of Black freedom (Shakur, 1987; Kelley, 2002).

Through the lens of Black feminist theory, Shakur’s criminalization reveals how radical Black womanhood is perceived as an existential threat. bell hooks (1981) reminds us that “to be Black and female in a white supremacist capitalist patriarchy is to be continually at risk of annihilation.” Shakur’s story is an illustration of that risk — and of her refusal to be annihilated.

In 1979, Assata Shakur escaped from prison and eventually found political asylum in Cuba, where she has lived since 1984. Her exile turned her into both a myth and a movement. Cuba’s decision to grant her asylum was not just political; it was symbolic of a global anti-imperialist alliance that recognized the U.S. as an empire, not a liberator. Shakur’s life in Cuba connects Black liberation in the United States to broader struggles across the Global South — linking her to anti-colonial thinkers like Amílcar Cabral and the global tradition of Pan-African resistance (Kelley, 2002).

Her autobiography, Assata: An Autobiography (1987), remains a cornerstone of Black Studies curricula. It merges personal narrative, political philosophy, and historical testimony into a text that transcends genre. Within it, Shakur reconstructs the humanity stripped from her by state media, offering a counter-history written from the margins. As Joy James (2003) argues, her writing represents the “pedagogy of survival” — the capacity to transform captivity and exile into a lesson in endurance and freedom.

Assata Shakur’s intellectual legacy endures through classrooms, protests, and cultural movements. Her words echo in abolitionist education and prison studies, influencing scholars like Angela Davis and contemporary movements such as Black Lives Matter (Taylor, 2016). She reminds us that liberation is not an academic pursuit; it is a daily act of defiance against dehumanization.

Up until her death Shakur remained on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list, with a two-million-dollar bounty. This demonstrates how the U.S. state still fears radical Black womanhood. The contradiction is stark: the same nation that erects museums to civil rights martyrs refuses to release its living revolutionaries. To “rest in power” for Shakur is not rest at all; it is a state of eternal vigilance, a life lived in the liminal space between freedom and flight.

Assata Shakur’s story is the story of Black liberation itself — courageous, brilliant, and perpetually hunted. She is the intellectual continuation of Harriet Tubman, the political sister of Angela Davis, and the ideological mother of modern abolition. Her life forces us to ask: what does America fear in a free Black woman?

To rest in power, then, is not to rest in peace. It is to live forever in the imagination of a people who refuse to forget. Assata Shakur’s freedom may be confined to an island, but her words have crossed every border. Her name is not only a memory — it is a movement.

References

Bloom, J., & Martin, W. E. (2013). Black against empire: The history and politics of the Black Panther Party. University of California Press.

hooks, b. (1981). Ain’t I a woman: Black women and feminism. South End Press.

James, J. (2003). Shadowboxing: Representations of Black feminist politics. Palgrave Macmillan.

Katsiaficas, G. (2015). The global imagination of 1968: Revolution and counterrevolution. PM Press.

Kelley, R. D. G. (2002). Freedom dreams: The Black radical imagination. Beacon Press.

Rojas, F. (2007). From Black power to Black studies: How a radical social movement became an academic discipline. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Shakur, A. (1987). Assata: An autobiography. Lawrence Hill Books.

Taylor, K.-Y. (2016). From #BlackLivesMatter to Black liberation. Haymarket Books.