Creative Commons
Assata Shakur
Assata Shakur, a former member of the Black Liberation Army, was convicted in 1977 for the murder of a state trooper during a shootout in New Jersey.
In 1979, she escaped from prison and made her way to Cuba, where she was granted political asylum and continues to live today. More than forty years after her conviction, Shakur, now seventy-four, remains on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list.
Shakur was in a vehicle with a couple of other Black Liberation Army members when troopers pulled them over for a “routine motor vehicle stop” on the New Jersey Turnpike in 1973. Shakur and the others in the vehicle then engaged in a shootout with the officers. But during Shakur’s trial, she denied ever holding or firing a weapon at police, since she was shot by police with her hands up, leading to immediate paralysis of her right hand.
In Assata Taught Me: State Violence, Racial Capitalism, and the Movement for Black Lives, Donna Murch reflects on Shakur’s years of work in civil rights activism. This includes organizing protests and education programs and coordinating free breakfast programs and clinics. She has served as an inspiration for today’s Black Lives Matter movement, Black Youth Project 100 (BYP 100), Dream Defenders, and other organizations working toward racial and economic justice, immigrant rights, and anti-capitalism.
Murch, an associate professor of history at Rutgers University, compares Shakur to other Black women, including Ella Baker, Audre Lorde, and Barbara Smith, who created the queer, feminist, anti-capitalist framework that gives shape to today’s Movement for Black Lives. The author does an excellent job of showing the reader how the visions and ideas of past Black women leaders have transformed into the action of Black youth today. She includes this quote from Shakur: “Dreams and reality are opposites if not synthesized by action.”
Assata Taught Me spans Shakur’s work with the Black Liberation Army in the
1970s to the Movement for Black Lives in the wake of the police killings of Michael Brown, Jamar Clark, Breonna Taylor, and, most recently, George Floyd. Along the way, Murch takes the reader through notable developments in history, from the War on Drugs, to the election of Bill Clinton, to the Ferguson uprising.
And she does all of this while addressing the various ways that racial capitalism has transformed and created harm over time, including the loss of voting rights due to criminal disenfranchisement laws, disproportionate incarceration, and economic disparity.
A common—and important—theme throughout Assata Taught Me is the impact of youth organizing. Murch notes that the Black Youth Project 100, created by radical organizing circles at the University of Chicago and University of Illinois with youth at the forefront, has a healing and safety council to address conflict within the organization. This way, heteropatriarchy, transphobia, and misogyny are not treated as outside issues, but rather as problems that persist within the organization itself.
Murch also nods to the Ferguson uprising and the role that young people played in the unrest following the murder of Michael Brown, saying “To watch young people literally face down tanks and protest twenty-one hours a day in the quest for justice for one of their peers has shown us that fighting back is possible.”
Assata Taught Me drives home the point that we must achieve freedom for everybody in order to truly achieve freedom for any of us. It ends with a quote of Shakur’s that will linger long after readers have put the book down: “Any community seriously concerned with its own freedom has to be concerned about other peoples’ freedom as well.”