OP-ED: Assata! Why she was more than a freedom fighter

Sign up for our FREE acclaimed newsletters!

The news mainstream media just doesn’t cover. Racial justice journalism since 1909.

Sign up

Of course the loss of my comrade, friend, and sistah, Assata Shakur, is a very emotional occasion for all who loved and respected her. However, I won’t be reduced to one-liner reflections of her passing. This is because it sheds light on this historical moment in which Black people and all African peoples find themselves.

There is a very deep and significant reason why Assata found refuge and protection in Cuba, and how she was able to live her life in relative freedom rather than languish in a racist American gulag. 

It was Cuba that always supported the radical and militant Black struggle against the self-proclaimed democratic republic of the United States. Once a Latin American colony seized from imperialist Spain and ruled by American stooges, Cuba was a brothel for American gangsters and its people, the majority of whom were of African ancestry, led by Fidel Castro, overthrew this despotic American arrangement. 

But unlike Haiti, the Cuban Revolution was never reversed by U.S. military intervention, and so the U.S. put in place an economic embargo of Cuba which remains to this day.

All during the decades of the 50s, 60s, 70s through today Cuba has supported African struggles for freedom, independence and development. Cuba gave refuge to those of us forced into exile by the machinations of the FBI/CIA/COINTELPRO campaigns. Kwame Ture, Eldridge Cleaver, and dozens of persecuted Black activists have passed through Cuba fleeing racist American government repression.  

Assata’s passing in Cuba therefore was a living testimony to this history. It should cause everyone opposed to the current racist pogroms carried out against Latin American migrants by ICE and the federal government to recognize that U.S. immigration policy to make America white again has everything to do with white America’s socio-cultural DNA as a European settler state. White supremacist domination at home and abroad has everything to do with Black people in the U.S. – the default scapegoats and victims of American jingoistic white skin privilege and political rule of the rich.

Assata was our freedom fighter. A soldier in the Black Liberation Army, a member of the original Black Panther Party when it defended the existential integrity of the Black community. She was a stalwart in our resistance to state-sanctioned murder of Black people by the white militias in blue costumes. She’s our 20th century Sojourner Truth. Our anti-Imperialist Harriet Tubman in a protracted war imposed on African people since 1619. 

We need not get it twisted and compare mourning the demise of a racist punks like Charlie Kirk with honoring the spirit of Assata Shakur or Martin Luther King. Black People have been at war with the white supremacist state since the 15th Century and Assata was a generational soldier in this ongoing war against the very notion of Black freedom, and humanity. 

So don’t ask whether Assata was “guilty” or “innocent” of shooting an armed agent of a state that reviles our very existence as a people.  Assata was guilty of being a freedom fighter, but she was Innocent of collaborating with enemies of Black freedom dreams. 

Long live the Spirit of Assata Shakur!

Dhoruba Bin-Wahad is an author, activist, educator and former leader of New York’s Black Panther Party chapter. He co-founded the Black Liberation Army with Assata Shakur and several others. With Shakur and Mumia Abu-Jamal, he authored Still Black, Still Strong in 1993.