By Abayomi Azikiwe
On Thursday September 25, 2025, indications began to appear over social media that Assata Shakur, a longtime activist in the Black Liberation Movement, had died while living in exile in the Republic of Cuba.
Over the last few years, the whereabouts of Assata was not widely known due to the escalation of the news reports which focused on her being granted political asylum in Cuba.
The State of New Jersey and the United States government had placed a substantial bounty to be paid for her capture dead or alive. When she was captured earlier in May 1973, the corporate media in the U.S. had labelled her as a dangerous terrorist out to kill law-enforcement personnel.
Although she was accused in the killing of a New Jersey state patrolman, Assata always maintained that she did not shoot anyone. Assata also conveyed that when arrested she had already been shot twice while her hands were up. Another BLA comrade, Zayid Malik Shakur was killed during the incident. Sundiata Acoli, also a member of the BLA, was captured and spent nearly five decades in prison.
This was by no means an isolated incident. Hundreds of African American activists were hunted down and placed in prison on trumped-up charges. Dozens were killed after being targeted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and various police agencies.
Between 1967-1973, innumerable clashes occurred that led to the deaths of African Americans and law-enforcement personnel. The Justice Department under successive administrations conducted counterintelligence operations against domestic political groupings. These armed battles involving the police, national guard and other law-enforcement agencies stemmed from the efforts to prevent a viable revolutionary movement in the U.S.
During this period in the mid-to-late 1960s and into the 1970s, other organizations were also subjected to campaigns of disruption and liquidation. Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Fred Hampton, Mark Clark, among many others lost their lives as a result of government machinations.
Consequently, it is not surprising in retrospect that a section of the African American people would take up arms as a defensive measure against political repression. Assata explains in detail her transformation from being a student organizer, to joining the BPP and eventually the BLA in her autobiography entitled: “Assata, An Autobiography.”
After the 1970s, there was exponential growth within the prison-industrial complex in the U.S. This expansion of prisons and the further criminalization of the African American people took place during the same decades as the reemergence of imperialist military interventions in Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other geo-political regions in the aftermath of the defeat of U.S. imperialism in Southeast Asia in 1975.
Repression Breed Resistance
The narrative put forward by the New Jersey police, the U.S. Justice Department and the corporate press sought to turn the public away from supporting Assata, the Black Panther Party and the BLA as a whole. Nonetheless, it was the repressive apparatus of the U.S. government which forced African American revolutionaries underground and into an armed posture.
Yet those who met Assata while she was still in the U.S. or during visits to Cuba, described the veteran Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army organizer as a warm and kind individual. There are numerous oral interviews, articles and documentaries which reveal her motivations for joining the Black Liberation struggle during the late 1960s.
While attending the Borough of Manhattan Community College, Assata joined an African American student organization which placed a strong emphasis on African history and cultural heritages. During the late 1960s, these organizations arose at thousands of high schools and higher educational institutions around the U.S.
These African American student organizations put forward the demands for Black Studies and Pan-African Studies programs on predominantly white campuses as well the HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities). The demand for Black Studies prompted other proposals to establish Latin American, Asian, Women’s Studies programs on urban and elite colleges and university campuses. These demands for curriculum reforms were made with the backdrop of urban rebellions and the advent of broader community organizations which would serve as a political rear base for the youth challenging the Eurocentric and capitalist-oriented educational system.
Assata and Sundiata Acoli after 1973, were convicted and placed in prison. Assata was liberated by her BLA comrades and members of the Weather Underground in November 1979. She was granted political asylum in Cuba in 1984.
Black Liberation and International Solidarity
It is not surprising that Assata Shakur would be granted political asylum in revolutionary Cuba under its co-founder and longtime President Fidel Castro Ruz. Since the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in early 1959, legal edicts were issued abolishing racism and discrimination inside the country.
Early on in the revolutionary process, a policy of Pan-African solidarity and internationalism became enshrined in the foreign policy of Cuba. When the Congolese government under Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was overthrown at the aegis of its former Belgian colonial rulers aided by U.S. government, Che Guevara, the Minister of Economic Planning in Cuba denounced the assassination of Lumumba and threw his support behind the revolutionary forces still operating in the former Belgian Congo.
In subsequent years, the Cuban government assisted the newly formed National Liberation Front administration in Algeria to defeat an attempted coup against their revolution. The Cubans would assist the revolutionaries in Guinea-Bissau, Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Ethiopia, Guinea, etc. to achieve and maintain their anti-colonial gains.
This solidarity held firm in relations to the attempts to isolate African American revolutionaries during the 1960s through to the 1980s and beyond. People such as Robert and Mabel Williams took refuge in Cuba when they were forced into exile as a result of racial incidents in Monroe, North Carolina. Others such as Eldridge Cleaver, Huey P. Newton, Nehanda Abiodun, etc. were granted political asylum in Cuba.
During the 2000s, President Castro announced a program to award scholarships to students in the U.S. from nationally oppressed communities to study medicine free of charge in Cuba. The program represented a repudiation of the cancellation and even outlawing of affirmative action admissions policies at universities in the U.S.
The Significance of a Revolutionary Life
The transition of Assata Shakur in this monumental year of 2025 warrants a pause to reflect on the importance of her life and the inter-generational struggles to end racism, colonialism, imperialism and all forms of oppression and exploitation. The Black Panther Party during the late 1960s warned African Americans and all peoples in the U.S. about the potential of a fascist state.
In July 1969, the BPP called for and held a National Revolutionary Conference for a United Front Against Fascism. This days-long event was held in Oakland, California, the birthplace of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in October 1966. The conference was attended by thousands of activists from the Bay Area and around the country.
At this time the full force of the U.S. military and intelligence structures were focused on defeating the revolutionaries fighting for the total liberation of Vietnam along with suppressing the African American people in their genuine aspirations for complete freedom. This dual war domestically and internationally continues today albeit in different forms.
In the U.S., the administration of President Donald Trump has moved with rapid speed in dismantling the gains made by working and oppressed peoples over the last 70 years. The attempted erasure of African American history and that of other oppressed and exploited peoples is occurring right before the eyes of the world.
The genocide in Gaza against the Palestinians serves as a warning about the dangers of imperialist impunity in the 21st century. The expansion of the BRICS Plus Summit (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa and others), along with the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and other alternative plans for global development, is forcing U.S. imperialism into a desperate situation.
These current threats to the development and well-being of the majority of the world’s population will require the building of revolutionary organizations and alliances. Therefore, the work and experiences of Assata Shakur and the period in which she grew out of, will prove quite instructive to the battles facing the people in the 21st century.
A Letter to the Pope from Assata Shakur, Havana Cuba, March 1998
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