Assata Shakur was a former member of the Black Panther Party. She died in her hometown of Havana, Cuba, on September 25, 2023. At the time of her death, the woman was 78 years old with an extensive history of age-related health conditions. Born JoAnne Deborah Byron on July 16, 1947, in Queens, New York, Shakur’s life was marked by her fierce advocacy for racial justice and her complex history with the U.S. legal system.
Raised in Wilmington, North Carolina, Shakur grew up in the violent oppressive environment of Jim Crow. After her junior year of high school, she dropped out and moved back to New York City. There, she juggled low-wage work with her studies as a full-time student at Borough of Manhattan Community College and later, the City College of New York. In the process, she reinforced her commitment to social justice. She got involved with the Golden Drums society, a Black activist collective that was lobbying for the addition of Black studies classes.
In 1967, she married her former student activist colleague Louis Chesimard, though the marriage was over by the couple’s account in divorce by 1970. That same year, at age 19, she entered the ranks of the Black Panther Party. She soon departed, as she was frustrated by the organization’s treatment of Black history and its critics. In 1971 she took on the name Assata Olugbala Shakur—resistance in the African language—to signify her identity as an African woman.
On May 2, 1973, her life was suddenly upended. AREION HUFF After abusing his sick leave, state trooper James Harper stopped her under the pretense of a minor traffic violation. This exchange quickly turned into violence. She has since been arrested on several counts, including robbing banks and the murder of a drug dealer. As a consequence, nearly half of the charges were dismissed or ended in acquittals. In 1977, she was convicted of the killing of state trooper Werner Foerster and sentenced to life.
In a dramatic turn of events that year, members of the Black Liberation Army intervened on her behalf. Importantly, they did so to help her escape from the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women in New Jersey. In 1984, following her dramatic escape, Shakur fled to Cuba, where she has since lived under the national asylum of Fidel Castro’s revolutionary government. Her notoriety as an elusive feline thrust her into fame. In 2013, she was the first woman to take a spot on the FBI’s most-wanted terrorists list.
Shakur would spend decades in Cuba, where she remained a powerful force for racial justice and against political oppression. She continued to wrestle with the beliefs she had held about communism and oppression.
“We’re taught at such an early age to be against communists, yet most of us don’t have the faintest idea what communism is.” – Assata Shakur
Her legacy is complicated, one that still stirs passionate responses from both black and white communities today. On September 25, her daughter Kakuya Shakur announced her mother’s passing, stating, “At approximately 1:15pm on September 25th, my mother, Assata Shakur, took her last earthly breath.”