While she is often heralded for her anti-racist activism, Assata is also a fierce feminist and communist. A teacher, healer, freedom fighter, and aunt to hip hop legend Tupac Shakur, Assata has organized against the prison-industrial complex, police brutality, discriminatory education, poverty, addiction, and hunger in Black and Brown neighborhoods. Īlthough she has been living in Cuba for the past 35 years, Assata’s life work continues to be of the highest relevance and importance for political struggle today. In 1974, she escaped from the maximum security wing of New Jersey’s Clinton Correctional Facility for Women and fled to Cuba under political asylum. The gunfire left Zayd Malik Shakur and a New Jersey state trooper dead, and Assata, shot twice with her hands up, became a political prisoner detained under brutal conditions.
In 1973, Assata Shakur, member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army (BLA), and fellow BLA activist Zayd Malik Shakur were attacked and shot by law enforcement under COINTELPRO, the FBI program that targeted leftist and minority activist groups including Black radicals, socialists, and Puerto Ricans. Note: This article refers to Assata Shakur by her first name, rather than her last, in ordinance with other articles written about Assata. Image by D’ARC B’ODY RA’DI’O’ACTIVE via Youtube / CC BY 2.0
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