Assata Shakur (born Joanne Deborah Byron, 1947) is a Black liberation activist and former member of the Black Liberation Army. Targeted by COINTELPRO and subjected to repeated arrests, Shakur was convicted in 1977 for the killing of a New Jersey state trooper — a conviction contested by supporters who documented prosecutorial misconduct and coerced testimony. She escaped from prison in 1979 and received political asylum in Cuba, where she has lived since 1984. The FBI placed her on its Most Wanted Terrorists list in 2013.
Core ideas
- Fugitivity as political practice: Shakur’s life in exile is itself an argument — that the legal system of the United States offers no venue for justice for Black radicals, and that flight from that system is a legitimate form of political resistance. Her fugitivity connects to broader traditions of marronage and refusal of state authority.
- Autobiography as political testimony: Assata: An Autobiography (1987) interweaves personal narrative with structural analysis of American racism, policing, and political repression. The book functions simultaneously as memoir, political education, and a record of the state’s war against Black radical organizing. It does not separate personal experience from political condition.
- Critique of state violence against Black communities: Shakur’s account documents the routine violence of policing, the fabrication of criminal charges against political dissidents, and the use of the legal system as a weapon of counterinsurgency. Her case illustrates how COINTELPRO operated not only through surveillance and infiltration but through the criminal justice system itself.
Notable works
- Assata: An Autobiography (1987)
Related
- COINTELPRO — the FBI program that targeted her and the Black Liberation Army
- Angela Davis — fellow target of state repression and abolitionist thinker
- Ruth Wilson Gilmore — theorist of the carceral state Shakur’s case exemplifies