Rise in Power to Assata Shakur
Freedom! You askin me about freedom. I’ll be honest with you. I know a whole more about what freedom isn’t than about what it is, ’cause I’ve never been free. I can only share my vision with you of the future, about what freedom is
Before my daughter was born we were struggling to find a name. All of my siblings, and my children have African names, legacy of my Pan-African parents and the politics that shaped me. This was back when the internet existed but was not reliable, so we had to turn to books (yes, in their hard copy!). We bought several African name books but none of the names for girls felt right. We went back and forth for weeks and couldn’t agree. Until one day we were having the conversation in front of one of the bookcases and we realised that the answer had been staring us the entire time. My eye finally fell on the cover with our daughters name in bold capital letters: ASSATA. Ironically, in her autobiography Assata explained the problem we were having perfectly:
‘a lot of the names had things to do with flowers or songs or birds or other things like that. Others meant born on Thursday, faithful, loyal, or even things like tears, or little fools, or one who giggles. The women’s names were nothing like the men’s names, which meant things like strong, warrior, man of iron, brave etc. I wanted a name that had something to do with struggle, something to do with the liberation of our people.’
Assata means ‘she who struggles’, her middle name Olugbala is ‘love for the people’ and both capture her lifelong dedication to Black liberation. The choosing of these names was an act of rebellion, throwing off the slave names handed down through the years and custom. Naming our daughter after her was a parenting decision I will never forget.
Like many, I first came across Assata Shakur when listening to Common’s last great album ‘Like Water for Chocolate’, on the track ‘A Song for Assata’. The first line of the track: ‘there were lights and sirens’, is also the opening of Assata’s autobiography and the song is a masterpiece in storytelling. By the end you have learnt how Assata, along with her comrades Sundiata Acoli and Zayd Shakur, were involved in a shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike with State Trooper, Werner Foerster, in 1973. Both Zayd and the officer were killed and Assata was badly injured, arrested and eventually convicted of murder, despite as Common explained ‘medical evidenced showed she couldn’t have fired the gun’. But in 1979 she was broken out of prison and escaped to Cuba, where she had political asylum until she passed away on September 25th 2025.
As soon as I finished the track I went to buy the autobiography, but this was more complicated than in today’s world where a certain online retailer will deliver it to your house the next day. I might even have had to import my copy, but once it arrived I was blown away. The book is a masterpiece that is a staple of my Black Studies courses. Assata narrates her life story and the brutality of her situation in prison in an eye opening and analytic account of racism. We learn about the movement, her decision to join the Black Liberation Army, who were an underground group dedicated to taking up arms to ensure freedom for our people. Assata was the definition of a guerrilla intellectual, using her position on the frontline to understand the nature of beast and how to tame it.
Assata has remained an icon because she escaped brutality of criminal injustice system and lived out her days in Cuba. In the aftermath of her death I have seen a number of posts and commentary that she ‘died free’. But Assata understood this was not the case. Yes, she was free from the US prison cell but she had to live her life in hiding in Cuba. America never stopped trying to capture her and the so-called first Black president Obama called her an ‘international terrorist’ and doubled the bounty on her head to $2million when he was in office. My book on Black radicalism Back to Black was published by Zed Books the same company that reprinted Assata’s autobiography and one the staff approached me in a whisper to ask if I could sign Assata a copy and they would do their best to get it to her. I have no idea if it ever made it to her. Even the way we found out about her death; the unconfirmed rumour that kept spreading, was shrouded in the secrecy that maintained her life. In truth, Cuba was a different kind of prison for Assata. Safe from the grips of the US state but cut off from her people. We couldn’t truly know her, for her own safety. Assata was the modern day maroon, who escaped the plantation but always had to deal with the threat of White supremacy cut off from those who remained enslaved.
Now that Assata is with the ancestors she can truly be free. While we mourn the loss of a titanic figure in the Black Liberation struggle, we must celebrate her life by continuing her work. We are as far away from freedom today as we were when Assata escaped prison and made it to Cuba. We honour her by fighting in her honour. As Assata told us
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.