Assata: An Autobiography

By the mid-1960s, many in the civil rights movement felt that the nonviolent civil disobedience embodied by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was insufficient to respond to the entrenched, pervasive racial inequality in the United States. The gains made by the civil rights movement engendered a white backlash that included an increase in police violence and other white supremacist violence against Black people. A series of uprisings in Northern cities—characterized as riots in the press—occurred as Black communities recognized that redlining and other discriminatory policies had locked them out of American prosperity.

The Black power movement arose within this context. While it was always a diverse movement comprising many often-conflicting viewpoints, it was predicated on the belief that Black communities must build self-sufficiency and must be prepared to defend themselves against white supremacist violence, using violence in response when necessary. Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party (BPP) in 1966, and this organization became movement’s primary base of power. Assata Shakur first joined the BPP in Oakland, CA, shortly after graduating from the City College of New York. Though she was often at odds with BPP leadership, the Party was a key influence on her evolving political ideology, and she in turn had a profound influence on the direction of the Party.

The Black power movement reached its height in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the same era when it was subject to the most intense surveillance and repression by police and the federal government. The FBI’s Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) targeted the BPP with deceptive and often illegal tactics of domestic espionage, planting false stories in the press and sending fake letters to sew interpersonal discord among BPP leaders. As the Party splintered, and as it became clear that government repression would increase, several prominent BPP members—Assata Shakur among them—broke away to form an underground resistance organization called the Black Liberation Army (BLA).

Like the BPP, the BLA worked to empower Black communities, building free libraries, free breakfast programs, and other forms of mutual aid. They also engaged in illegal activities that they saw as acts of armed resistance against white supremacy—including bank robberies and killings of police officers. Shakur contends in the book that, as a “Black revolutionary woman” (50), she became a target of law enforcement and was falsely accused of numerous crimes.

On May 2, 1973, Shakur was traveling on the New Jersey Turnpike with fellow BLA members Zayd Malik Shakur and Sundiata Acoli when they were stopped by State Troopers James Harper and Werner Foerster for driving with a broken taillight. In the ensuing shootout, Trooper Foerster and Zayd Shakur were killed, while Trooper Harper and Assata Shakur were wounded. Assata Shakur was charged with murder in the death of Trooper Foerster. She was held in abusive conditions, often in solitary confinement, until her conviction in 1977, four years after the initial arrest. After her conviction, she was given a life sentence and sent to New Jersey’s Clinton Correctional Facility for Women, a maximum-security prison. Two years later, members of the BLA facilitated her escape from prison—an incident in which no one was injured. She has been living in Cuba ever since.