Remembering Assata Shakur: A Life of Struggle, Exile, and Legacy

Commentary by Salim Muwakkil, host of the "Salim Muwakkil Show" on WVON 1690 AM, journalist, and community activist.

Events kept me off the air last Saturday, even after I'd composed much of my monologue. Much of it concerned the death of Assata Shakur, something I'd written about in a previous post, but wanted to present to my radio audience. Since they didn't get to hear it, I'll offer it here. For regulars, it may sound familiar, but it's considerably expanded.

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The death of Sis. Assata Olugbula Shakur, a former member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army who’s been living in exile in Cuba for 45 years, has prompted a raft of reminiscences and assessments of her heroic life. Sis. Shakur, whose birth name was Joanne Deborah Chesimard, died last week in the capital city of Havana, due to what they said were “health conditions and advanced age.” She was 78.

Sis. Shakur had been a member of the Black Panther Party and then, the Black Liberation Army and had been convicted of murdering a N.J. State Trooper during a 1973 confrontation on the N.J. Turnpike. She herself was shot during the bullet-fueled confrontation, and she argued that the slain State Trooper was likely killed by friendly fire.

She was subsequently tortured while confined at Yardville Correctional Institution, a male prison, before being transferred to the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women from where she boldly escaped in 1979, with the help of courageous and ingenious comrades. Sis. Chesimard/ Shakur has the distinction of being the first woman to escape from a maximum-security prison in the United States. Some might consider that a dubious distinction, but in Assata’s case, I’d have to settle for legendary. Her escape, which involved climbing over a 30-foot wall and evading armed guards, gained national attention and highlighted the harsh conditions she faced during her imprisonment.

She was on the run, invisibly, for five years before escaping to Cuba in 1984, where she was granted asylum by Fidel Castro. This was Castro’s gesture of allegiance with the revolutionary forces then prominent in the Black struggle in America. Just as he supported the anti-colonial struggles in Africa, Central and South America, the Cuban government saw the armed Black liberation movement, the one pushed by Shakur, as part of a global revolutionary struggle. For movement activists, Cuba's action represented the broader ideological alignment between revolutionary movements in the United States and anti-imperialist governments, highlighting the interconnectedness of global liberation struggles during that era.

Sundiata Acoli, who was also convicted in the murder of the Jersey Trooper (Werner Foerster) was granted parole in 2022 after being imprisoned for three decades. Zayd Malik Shakur, the third passenger in the targeted car, was also killed in the confrontation.

I’m familiar with the story because I actually knew Sis. Shakur. I met her as Joanne Chesimard during a Black Panther gathering at the City College of New York in the summer of 1972. I too was a member of the Party and I was attending as a part of a New Jersey chapter. We connected during a discussion assessing the relative value of cultural nationalism vs. liberatory socialism. Sis. Joanne, which was the name by which I knew her, was a member of the Black Liberation Army, a more combative offshoot of the Black Panther Party, and she was an articulate advocate.

By then, the BLA had earned a reputation for things like ripping-off Black drug dealers and theatrically destroying their stashes. The group argued that drugs, particularly heroin, were narcotizing the Black community into irrelevance, compelling them to take guerilla action against what they called “chemical warfare.”

The BLA was also reputed to be in the business of robbing banks and armored cars for the money they argued was stolen from Black Americans by the legacy of slavery and the scam of capitalism. They intended to reappropriate the liberated loot for use by the people. Sis. Shakur/Chesimard was charged as a defendent in some of those robberies, but those charges were later dropped.

But the topic that fully engaged us that day was the relationship between nationalism and socialism and their mutual necessity. At the time, this was also a topic of sometimes rancourous discussion between the Panthers and “cultural nationalists” about the direction of the Black struggle.

The vanguard of the movement had -- by this time in the early 70s -- bifurcated into two major ideological strains: i.e., “revolutionary nationalism” and “cultural nationalism.” The revolutionaries vilanized capitalism and targeted economic oppression as Black America’s primary bete noir. The cultural nationalists, on the other hand, emphasized the corrosive effects of European culture on the psyches of us African people, and our consequent need to adopt and adapt African ethics and aesthetics.

Disagreements about these varied approaches were particularly intense in northern N.J. -- because Newark was the headquarters of Amiri Baraka's Congress of African Peoples (and its localized version -- the Committee for a Unified New-Ark), and it was a hotbed of cultural nationalism. That’s one of the mains reasons the Panthers never took hold in Newark -- New Jersey’s largest and blackest city. Instead, Jersey City, the state’s second largest, got the honor of a Panther headquarters. Baraka’s cultural and political influence in Newark created a unique dynamic that overshadowed the Panthers’ revolutionary approach.

Although harsh words were occasionally thrown around, this divergence seldom heated beyond rhetoric. However, it did highlight the complex and sometimers contentious interplay between various strands of Black activism in the region. Unfortunately, it assumed a crude geographic dichotomy as well: Newark for the 'nationalists', and Jersey City for the 'revolutionaries'.

But again … the question that engaged me and Assata was: Should we reject Western enculturation and seek a cultural template from our African past as more than a superficial attachment to a distant heritage? Is it, instead, a vital part of understanding our collective identity and fostering solidarity? Or … was it, as the Panthers argued, just some superfluous, spooky “priest craft” that we should abandon for a more relevant concern about economic justice?

This was the kernel of our ideological discussion on that day. In fact, I ran into her at several events that summer and no matter the theme of the gathering, we would become embroiled in our particular discourse. And, it was indeed a potent issue.

Was cultural identification with Africa more important than crafting a liberatory political strategy for Black victims of slavery's legacy? Or … could both strategies be accommodated? Here's that question again ..

Whenever I encountered Sis. Joanne (not yet widely known as Assata), she always impressed me with her historical knowledge, her succinct analyses of political context and her enthusiasm about the struggle. Her arguments steered me away from what we called Baraka's "dashiki dynamics." Ironically, Baraka later abandoned those dynamics himself and adopted a much stricter Marxist line.

But considering Assata; time went on … I graduated from college and became a journalist with the New Jersey Bureau of the Associated Press when I came upon her name again while covering that infamous incident on the Jersey Turnpike where she encountered State Trooper Werner Forrester, was convicted of his murder and imprisoned, where she escaped and fled to Cuba where she found freedom and received her requisite rewards, officially retiring "Joanne Chesimard" for Assata Shakur.

For me, it was a surreal experience, writing articles on an escaped fugitive who also happened to be a friend. It was also clear that Assata couldn’t have fired the bullet that killed the Trooper. Not only was she physically incapacitated by the injuries she incurred but the troopers accosted their vehicle with a volley of so many gunshots, any return fire was highly unlikely. There was considerable speculation that the Trooper was felled by friendly fire and I tried to inject this doubt into my story about the incident, but my editors excised it.

And that’s my Assata story …