Assata Shakur. Photo: Weaponized Information.
By Prince Kapone – Sep 26, 2025
A 21-Gun Salute to a Revolutionary Who Died Free and Unbroken
Assata in the Crosshairs
They called her a fugitive, a terrorist, a threat to the republic. The newspapers splashed her face across their pages like a wanted poster, as if she were a bandit who had robbed America of its innocence. But the truth is simpler and sharper: Assata Shakur robbed America only of its lies. She stood in a long line of Black women who refused to bow, and for that, the state unleashed its entire arsenal—police raids, kangaroo courts, prison cells, and finally, the machinery of demonization.
Her autobiography is not the tale of an individual against the odds. It is the voice of a people under siege. When Assata writes of police stop-and-frisks, of sudden violence erupting out of nowhere, of the suffocating net of surveillance, she is not writing “personal memoir.” She is indicting a system built on the permanent occupation of Black life. To read her is to hear the echo of every ancestor chained in a slave ship, every comrade gunned down on a city street, every child taught that freedom means learning to survive without dignity.
There is no neutral way to read this book. You either stand with Assata or you stand with the empire that tried to destroy her. Liberal commentators prefer to reduce her to a “controversial figure,” as if the controversy were a matter of bad choices rather than a war imposed on her people for centuries. Western Marxists file her away as “identity politics,” as if the bullets that tore through Panthers’ apartments were just metaphors. Assata’s life leaves no room for that kind of cowardice. She writes with the clarity of someone who knows that survival itself is political, and that to fight back is not a crime—it is the only path to breathe freely.
This review takes its side openly. We are not here to admire her prose or weigh her story against the standards of the academy. We are here to sharpen her words into weapons again, to place them back into the hands of the oppressed who will carry forward the struggle. If empire thought exile could bury her voice, it was wrong. Assata speaks still, through the pages of her autobiography, through the movements that keep her name alive, through the comrades who refuse to let her be forgotten. To begin with Assata is to begin already at war.
Becoming Assata
Assata was not born with a raised fist. She was born into the quiet terror of American apartheid, where the small things carried the sharpest lessons. The way teachers ignored Black children unless it was to punish them. The way shopkeepers followed her through the aisles like she was already a thief. The way police could appear from nowhere, hands already on their guns, smirks on their faces as if her very existence was a crime. Childhood, for Assata, was an apprenticeship in understanding America’s true constitution: one written not in parchment, but in the whip, the chain, and the badge.
She tells us about the South—its heat, its hospitality, and its casual cruelty. White people who smiled while spitting venom. A whole system where Black children were taught to look down at the ground, not because they were shy, but because to look a white person in the eye was to risk violence. She also tells us about the North, supposedly “better,” where the racism was not less, just better dressed. There, segregation hid behind housing codes and school zoning, and poverty was explained away as personal failure. In both worlds she learned the same truth: America had a thousand masks, but all of them wore the same face.
The process of becoming Assata was slow, uneven, jagged. There were moments of joy—family gatherings, music, the small rebellions of childhood that showed her spirit could not be caged. There were moments of despair—watching friends beaten down, doors slammed shut, futures stolen before they began. What marked her most was the refusal to normalize it. Where others swallowed the lies, Assata gagged on them. She refused to pretend that everything was fine. And in that refusal, the seed of revolution was planted.
Her autobiography does not romanticize this period. There is no straight line from childhood to militancy. There are confusions, contradictions, missteps. But that is the point: becoming a revolutionary is not about purity; it is about struggle. Assata shows us that consciousness is forged in the clash between what the world tells you to accept and what your dignity refuses to allow. By the time she was a young woman, she could no longer be fooled by the slogans of democracy. She knew, deep in her bones, that to live free in America would mean tearing America apart.
Into the Fire of Struggle
By the time Assata reached her late teens, neutrality was impossible. The country was burning—Harlem, Watts, Newark—and every uprising made the choice clear: either stand with the people in the streets or stand with the cops who gunned them down. She chose the side of her people, stepping into a movement already under siege.
She first moved through student activism, testing the waters of protest, sit-ins, and petitions. But these small acts taught her quickly what reform could not hide: the police state did not tolerate even modest dissent, and the universities were factories for obedience. The polite appeals of liberal politics felt like a cruel joke against the backdrop of poverty, racism, and war. She needed something sharper, something real. That search led her to the Black Panther Party.
The Panthers were not just slogans and leather jackets. They were breakfast programs feeding children who would otherwise go hungry. They were health clinics where doctors treated the poor for free. They were armed patrols making the police think twice before brutalizing the community. To Assata, this was not “extremism.” It was survival. And survival was revolutionary.
But joining the Panthers meant stepping directly into the crosshairs of the state. FBI surveillance, informants, police raids, assassinations—the Party was treated like an enemy army. Newspapers painted them as criminals, judges rubber-stamped the charges, and prisons swallowed them whole. Assata saw friends killed, comrades dragged into courtrooms on trumped-up charges, chapters torn apart by infiltration. The lesson was brutal and unforgettable: the United States had declared war on Black liberation.
In that crucible, some Panthers decided the struggle could not remain above ground. If the state would not allow open organizing, then clandestine resistance became the only road forward. Assata was among those who took that step, carrying the fight into the underground as part of the Black Liberation Army. It was not a romantic choice; it was the logic of survival, the continuation of the same struggle under harsher conditions. She had entered the fire, and there would be no turning back.
War with the State
Assata’s very presence became intolerable to the U.S. government. By the early 1970s she was no longer just another young Black woman in the struggle—she had become a name, a face, a symbol. And symbols are dangerous. The state knew it could not allow her to stand unbroken, so it unleashed its arsenal: constant raids, false charges, and trials designed to drain the movement of energy and resources. To be Assata Shakur was to live with a target permanently fixed on your back.
She was dragged into courtrooms again and again, accused of everything from bank robberies to kidnappings. In case after case, juries either acquitted her or the charges collapsed under their own absurdity. But the point was never justice—the point was to keep her caged, to smear her name, to drain her spirit. She wrote of being shackled in court, of prosecutors painting her as a monster, of judges who barely pretended to be impartial. Her trials were not legal proceedings; they were theater, designed to send a message that the price of resistance would be humiliation, exhaustion, and years stolen behind bars.
The war reached its breaking point on the New Jersey Turnpike in 1973, when Assata, along with comrades Zayd Malik Shakur and Sundiata Acoli, was pulled over by state troopers. What followed was chaos and bloodshed—Zayd and a trooper dead, Sundiata captured, Assata shot twice and left bleeding on the highway. This incident became the cornerstone of the government’s campaign against her. She was branded a “cop killer,” paraded as the embodiment of Black militancy gone “too far.” The headlines screamed her guilt long before the trial began, while the state used her wounds as evidence of her savagery instead of proof of her survival.
Inside prison, the war continued. She was denied medical care for her bullet wounds, stripped, chained, and isolated in conditions meant to break her. Guards treated her not as a prisoner but as prey. Even pregnant, she was shackled and abused. The cruelty was not incidental—it was policy. She was meant to be made an example, proof that anyone who defied the empire would be destroyed not just physically but mentally, spiritually, completely. Yet Assata’s words cut through the bars: she refused despair, refused silence, refused to give the state the victory of her submission.
War with the state meant more than raids and trials. It meant watching comrades murdered in their beds. It meant mothers burying their children while the newspapers mocked them as thugs. It meant the slow death of the Panthers under relentless attack. For Assata, survival itself became resistance. To remain alive, to remain unbroken, was already a form of defiance. And though the state sought to erase her, every act of repression only confirmed the truth she had already learned: America was not a democracy under stress. It was a colonial empire fighting to keep its captives in chains.
Captivity and Survival
Prison was supposed to be the end of Assata Shakur. The state threw her into cells designed to crush, isolate, and erase. They kept her shackled even when she was pregnant, denied her medical care after she’d been shot, and locked her for months in solitary confinement. Guards treated her body as property to be violated and her mind as territory to be conquered. The plan was simple: break her spirit, parade her as proof that no one could defy America and survive.
But Assata refused to play that role. Instead of dying slowly in their cages, she turned captivity into another school of struggle. She read voraciously, studied history, wrote poetry, and built bonds with other women locked away—most of them poor, most of them Black or Brown, many of them abandoned. She saw how the prison system was not about “rehabilitation” but about warehousing the unwanted, the disposable populations produced by capitalism and racism. The prison, she realized, was the domestic extension of the colonial battlefield: the same empire that bombed Vietnam, invaded Africa, and looted Latin America was waging war against its own captives inside the U.S.
Assata’s words from prison expose the reality of America’s so-called justice system better than a thousand academic studies. She describes the humiliation of strip searches, the sadism of guards, the endless manipulation of rules designed to remind prisoners that they had no rights worth respecting. Yet she also describes laughter in the yard, solidarity between women who had nothing but each other, and the quiet dignity of refusing to bow even when every weapon of the state was aimed at them. In the belly of the beast, she found community, and in that community, she found strength.
Her captivity taught her that resistance is not only waged with guns and slogans but also with survival itself. To hold onto one’s humanity under conditions meant to erase it is an act of revolution. Every poem she wrote, every comrade she encouraged, every day she lived without giving up was another blow against the empire. Assata did not wait for liberation to come from the outside. She made liberation possible by refusing to let her captors define who she was.
The state thought it had silenced her by locking her away. Instead, it created a voice that could not be ignored. From inside prison walls, Assata Shakur became larger than the prison itself: a living witness to the cruelty of America and a symbol of the stubborn will to fight for life, freedom, and dignity no matter the odds. Her captivity was meant to end the struggle. Instead, it became proof that the struggle could not be ended.
Liberation and Exile
The state had done everything it could to bury Assata alive, but the story did not end in their cages. In 1979, comrades on the outside carried out one of the most daring prison breaks in modern U.S. history. They stormed the fortress, disarmed the guards, and snatched her from the jaws of the empire. For the ruling class, it was a humiliation. For the movement, it was a miracle. For Assata, it was proof that revolutionary solidarity was more than a slogan—it was lifeline, courage, and commitment in action.
She did not escape into anonymity. The state’s dragnet followed her everywhere, plastering “Most Wanted” posters with her face, labeling her a terrorist, placing a bounty on her head. Yet she found her way to Cuba, where the revolutionary government granted her asylum. There, for the first time in years, she could breathe without bars, without the constant threat of a guard’s boot on her neck. Cuba became not just refuge but continuation of struggle. In the streets of Havana she saw what it looked like when a people seized their destiny—free health care, schools for every child, solidarity extended to freedom fighters from every corner of the globe.
Exile was no retirement. Assata remained a soldier, carrying her story to the world, teaching younger generations that revolution is not a romantic gesture but a matter of survival. She wrote her autobiography in Cuba not to clear her name—America would never allow that—but to tell the truth that its courts and newspapers had buried. Every line carries the weight of someone who has seen comrades killed, survived bullets, endured cages, and still speaks of freedom without hesitation.
Her life in exile also revealed something deeper: that the struggle for Black liberation inside the United States is inseparable from the global fight against imperialism. The same empire that tried to destroy her was bombing Angola, blockading Cuba, and strangling the peoples of the Global South. To live freely in Cuba was to live as part of that worldwide front. Assata became a bridge between the Black liberation struggle and the global anti-imperialist movement, a reminder that no revolution survives in isolation.
The United States still calls her a fugitive, still posts her face on wanted lists, still dangles blood money for her capture. But the truth is that Assata is beyond their reach. She lives in the memory of every revolutionary who dares to pick up her story, in every movement that insists on survival with dignity, in every act of defiance against empire. Her liberation was not just her own. It was, and remains, part of ours.
Assata Shakur, Black Liberation Struggles and the Cuban Revolution
Against Western Marxism
Assata’s life is a direct rebuke to the hollow theorizing of Western Marxism. While she bled on a New Jersey highway, they were debating whether race was a “secondary contradiction.” While she sat chained in a hospital bed under armed guard, they wrote treatises about “false consciousness.” While she and her comrades buried Panthers shot in their beds, they cautioned against “adventurism.” For them, revolution was an abstraction to be argued in journals and lecture halls. For Assata, it was a matter of survival—life and death, bullets and bars, betrayal and solidarity.
This is why the Western Left has never known what to do with her. They could celebrate Marx, Lenin, even Guevara—so long as they remained comfortably distant, easily quoted, safely embalmed. But Assata? A living Black woman who refused pacification, who chose clandestine resistance, who escaped their cages and lived to tell it? She was too real, too immediate, too dangerous. So they either ignored her or reduced her to caricature: the “radical feminist,” the “angry Black militant,” the “tragic victim.” Anything but what she actually was—a revolutionary.
Her autobiography cuts through their evasions. She does not speak the language of academic Marxism. She speaks the language of the street, of the prison yard, of the underground safe house. She names the system for what it is: a colonial empire that feeds on Black lives. She names the solution for what it must be: resistance by any means necessary. Her politics are not footnotes; they are the hard lessons learned from funerals, from trials rigged against her, from comrades forced into exile or the grave.
In this, she exposes the cowardice of Western Marxism. It is not simply that it “fails to account for race.” It is that it refuses to confront empire as empire. It substitutes moral outrage for concrete struggle, theory for sacrifice, analysis for action. Assata had no such luxury. She reminds us that in the United States, the colonial contradiction is not an afterthought—it is the ground itself. Any Marxism that ignores this is not revolutionary but reactionary, a shield for the empire it pretends to oppose.
To read Assata, then, is to choose sides. Either we take her words seriously—as living instructions for struggle—or we let them be neutralized into “cultural history” by academics who fear the very fire that forged her. Assata’s life demands more. It demands that we abandon the cowardice of Western Marxism and embrace a revolutionary praxis rooted in the colonized, the imprisoned, the hunted. Anything less is betrayal.
Assata in the Age of Trump 2.0
Trump’s return to power signals not the birth of something new, but the sharpening of what Assata lived through: a government that survives by criminalizing the oppressed, militarizing daily life, and dressing up repression as law and order. The prisons have only multiplied since the days she was shackled inside them. Police budgets swell while schools crumble. Migrants are caged at the border the same way Panthers were caged in county jails. Surveillance has moved from FBI wiretaps to smartphones in every pocket. This is technofascism—the political mask capitalism wears when its crisis grows too deep to manage by softer means.
Assata’s life reads like prophecy in this moment. She taught us that the state will brand liberation as “terrorism,” that courts will put revolutionaries on trial long before juries sit down, that media will plaster wanted posters on every screen to make the hunted seem less than human. Everything she endured—the bullets, the lies, the cages—was not excess but blueprint. Trump 2.0 simply extends the blueprint to the whole society: what was once done to Panthers is now normalized as policing of entire communities.
And yet, Assata also shows us the cracks. She survived the raids, the courts, the prisons, because solidarity ran deeper than fear. Comrades carried her out of cages when the state thought her buried. Cuba gave her shelter when America demanded her head. Her story reminds us that empire is never all-powerful—it depends on our submission. When we refuse, when we organize, when we keep faith with one another, its grip weakens.
In the age of Trump 2.0, remembering Assata is more than nostalgia. It is strategy. She lived through a police state in Black skin and came out unbroken. She showed how to name the enemy clearly, how to endure captivity without surrender, how to make exile another front of struggle. Her autobiography is not a monument—it is a weapon. Against technofascism, against Trump’s theater of cruelty, against capitalism’s endless crisis, Assata’s life arms us with what we need most: clarity, courage, and the certainty that survival itself is resistance.
Assata Lives
Cuba announced today that Assata Shakur passed away last night. For half a century she stood as a living wound in the side of the empire, a woman they could never break, a name they could never erase. Now her body rests, but her life cannot be buried. Her autobiography remains a testament, a map, and a weapon. She showed us how a Black girl raised under apartheid America could grow into a revolutionary, how she could survive police bullets, prison chains, and exile, and still write with the clarity of love and rage.
This is not a eulogy—it is a salute. A 21-gun salute fired in words, carried in memory, sharpened into practice. Assata is not gone; she is multiplied. She lives in the chants of protestors who still shout her name. She lives in the young organizers who refuse to bow to police or prisons. She lives in every comrade who keeps faith with the oppressed, who understands that freedom will never be granted from above.
Assata taught us that survival is resistance, that solidarity is stronger than cages, that clarity is stronger than propaganda. She warned us that America would always dress up repression in the clothes of democracy. She reminded us that the colonial contradiction is not an academic debate but a daily reality. She insisted that to be free we must be disciplined, fearless, rooted in the people. And she proved it—not with slogans, but with her life.
The United States spent decades hunting her, labeling her a terrorist, dangling millions for her capture. Yet she died free, under the Cuban sun, unrepentant and undefeated. That alone is victory. That alone is proof that the empire’s reach is not infinite. That alone is enough to make the rulers tremble.
Assata Shakur’s story ends as it began: with a call to fight. Her words still ring: “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.” Today, we do not mourn as the world would have us mourn. We pick up her banner. We carry her forward. Assata lives.
