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They called her a domestic terrorist. A killer. A threat. But we remember her differently: as a change agent, a freedom fighter, a voice that unapologetically demanded justice. Here’s the truth they won’t tell you about Assata Shakur.
From the start, she was marked. As a leader in the Black Panther Party and later the Black Liberation Army (BLA), Assata Shakur organized, educated, and nurtured community resistance in a country built on suppression. Her activism threatened the status quo.
And that drew the attention of the FBI and its COINTELPRO program...
The FBI watched her closely. She was surveilled, vilified, and eventually criminalized in an incident that changed her life forever.
In 1973, she and two BLA members were stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike. What followed was gunfire, death, and confusion. One state trooper and one comrade were killed. Her story, that she was shot with her hands in the air and never fired a weapon—a claim supported by medical and forensic testimony, diverged sharply from the prosecution’s narrative.
And so, she was convicted of first-degree murder in 1977 and given a life sentence.
But in 1979, with assistance from comrades disguised as visitors, she escaped Clinton Correctional Facility for Women. After years underground, she surfaced in Cuba in 1984, living in exile with political asylum.
In 2013, the U.S. government designated her as the first woman on the FBI’s “Most Wanted Terrorists” list, placing up to a $2 million reward on her head. Meanwhile, she continued writing, teaching, and resisting. In a powerful 1998 open letter, she penned: “I am a 20th century escaped slave.”
She was. And there’s a powerful lesson in her defiance that we must apply today:
Freedom has never come from compliance with oppression – it has always come from those willing to resist it.
Assata Shakur’s resistance shows us that refusal is not weakness, but the first step toward liberation. As we honor her life, let us carry forward her lesson, that justice depends on what we choose to resist, and what we dare to build together.