The United States government called her one of the world’s most-wanted terrorists. Assata Shakur called herself a 20th-century escaped slave.
Claiming the runaway slave narrative proved a powerful and inspirational metaphor. Drawing on historical memory, Shakur placed herself in the pantheon of Black freedom fighters from Nat Turner to Harriet Tubman who, by any means necessary, took their liberation into their own hands. Shakur was lionized in rap songs and taught in college classes, and her likeness could be found in classrooms and community centers in Black neighborhoods across the nation.
But the lore of Assata Shakur, as lores often do, obscured more complicated truths. Like many of those who ran before her, Shakur claimed her freedom only at a devastating cost: It meant relinquishing the ability to raise her only child; it meant she could never again return home, not to bury her mother, not to see her own grandchildren, not to be buried herself. Read More
Born JoAnne Deborah Byron in 1947 into a family of strivers in Queens, she split her time between her mother’s home in New York and her maternal grandparents’ in Wilmington, N.C. (She changed her birth name in 1971, rejecting it as a slave name.)
Her grandparents in the segregated South imbued Shakur with an unshakable pride and dignity in being Black. In her 1987 autobiography, “Assata,” Shakur describes being forbidden from acting subservient around white people: Hold your head up high, look white people in the eye, “don’t you respect nobody that don’t respect you.”
Coming of age during the throes of the civil rights movement, while witnessing the Northern version of segregation, poverty and police brutality that seemed impervious to it, radicalized her.
She joined the Black Panther Party just as it, and other Black movements, were being decimated by the often illegal tactics of the F.B.I.’s secret spy program, COINTELPRO. Facing constant surveillance as she watched the party’s leadership imprisoned, discredited and assassinated, Shakur came to believe in the necessity of a covert, armed revolution.
She joined the Black Liberation Army, a loosely confederated antiracist and anticapitalist underground guerrilla movement. Its members were accused of bombings, robberies and murdering police officers. By the early ’70s, Shakur had been indicted 10 times, but only one indictment resulted in a conviction. In 1977, an all-white jury found her guilty of murdering a New Jersey state trooper who died in a shootout after a car that Shakur and her colleagues were riding in was stopped by the police. Officers later claimed Shakur fired the first shot. Shakur, who was shot twice, said her hands were in the air and she didn’t shoot anyone.
While Shakur was incarcerated pending her murder trial, she was tried for robbing a bank in the Bronx, along with Kamau Sadiki. The pair were removed from the courtroom after disrupting the proceedings and spent the remainder of the trial locked together in a holding cell, where Shakur fell in love and became pregnant. The woman who had vowed to never bring a child into the world decided that “if a child comes from that union, I’m going to rejoice,” she wrote in her autobiography. “Because our children are our futures, and I believe in the future and in the strength and rightness of our struggle.”
Shakur gave birth to a girl she named Kakuya in a hospital surrounded by police officers. While she maintained her innocence, Shakur was sentenced to life plus 33 years and surrendered Kakuya to her mother.
In 1979, when her daughter was 5, Shakur helped plot her own daring escape from prison, and disappeared. In the years after, every time the doorbell rang, Kakuya’s heart skipped a beat, thinking her mother would be standing there.
But as time passed without a word, Kakuya hardened herself, coming to believe that her mother must be dead. Until one day, five years after what she now calls her mother’s liberation, Kakuya found herself sitting in her aunt’s law office, phone pressed to her ear, talking to her mom. “It was surreal,” Kakuya told me from her Chicago home. “When I heard her voice, I realized I didn’t even remember what she looked like.”
Shakur had been hidden in the United States for several years by a sort of Underground Railroad before being smuggled into Cuba and granted asylum as a political prisoner. She sent for her daughter to come live with her. But when Kakuya got there, she remembers not wanting to hold her mother’s hand, not trusting that she wouldn’t disappear again, not understanding why she had chosen to have a child she knew she could not raise.
“We had to really work through my grief and her grief,” Kakuya said. “There was a part of me that was angry and a part of me that always, you know, wanted to be with my mother.”
Shakur met her daughter’s resistance with a love both fierce and patient. “She reminded me that for us there was never an idea that we were born free,” Kakuya said. “It was very important for me to feel her love and to understand that her struggle was for me and for all children.”
When she turned 15, Kakuya decided to return to her grandmother and her life in America, assuming she would always be able to visit her mom. And for a while, she could. Protected by her asylum status, Shakur lived openly in Cuba. She worked as a translator, jogged daily, read voraciously and continued to write and speak out against oppression.
But in 2005, more than two decades after her escape, the F.B.I. classified Shakur as a domestic terrorist, and in 2013 placed her on its list of most-wanted terrorists, the first woman to earn that designation.
In an open letter, Shakur once posed the question: “Why, I wonder, do I warrant such attention? What do I represent that is such a threat?”
Angela Davis, the activist who was wrongly imprisoned during that same tumultuous period, told me women were the backbone of Black radical movements and “the government probably recognized more than even our own people did the power of Black women.” In relentlessly targeting Shakur, she said, “it’s my opinion that the government was attempting to deter Black women from joining the liberation struggle.”
With a $2 million bounty for her capture, Shakur was forced back into hiding, and Kakuya stopped visiting for fear of revealing her location to the F.B.I. Kakuya never saw her mother again. It haunts her.
“Most of my life has been defined by this history of trying to be with my mother,” she said, “and always holding onto the hope that one day I would be able to be with my mother again.”
Liberation came with unbearable costs. But Shakur, who saw herself as an escaped slave, died free.
Nikole Hannah-Jones is a domestic correspondent for The New York Times Magazine covering racial injustice and civil rights.
