JoAnne Chesimard — later known as Assata Shakur — is escorted from Rikers Island in New York City to Middlesex County Jail in New Jersey, where she awaited trial in the killing of State Trooper Werner Foerster. (Frank Hurley/NY Daily News via Getty Images)
Havana, Cuba — Assata Shakur, the revolutionary whose name became a global symbol of Black resistance and U.S. state repression, has died at 78 in Havana, where she lived in exile for more than four decades. Her daughter confirmed the news, saying her mother “took her last earthly breath” surrounded by family.
Shakur’s life defied neat categorization. To U.S. officials, she was a convicted killer, fugitive, and “terrorist.” To many Black activists, she was a political prisoner, a survivor of state violence, and a living witness to the costs of liberation struggle.
Born JoAnne Deborah Byron in Queens in 1947, Shakur spent part of her youth in the Jim Crow South before returning to New York. She came of age during the 1960s uprisings and entered activism through student organizing.
In 1970, she joined the Black Panther Party, though later criticized its internal contradictions. Drawn to a more militant vision, she aligned with the Black Liberation Army (BLA), a clandestine group that carried forward armed resistance against what they saw as an American war on Black life. She renamed herself Assata Olugbala Shakur, Swahili and Yoruba names meaning “she who struggles” and “savior.”
On May 2, 1973, Shakur was stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike with two BLA comrades. A confrontation with state troopers turned deadly: Trooper Werner Foerster and BLA member Zayd Malik Shakur were killed; Assata herself was badly wounded.
In 1977, she was convicted of Foerster’s murder and sentenced to life in prison, despite her insistence that she had not fired a weapon. Supporters pointed to medical evidence her gun arm was paralyzed by a bullet as proof she couldn’t have fired. To them, her trial reflected not only bias, but the wider criminalization of Black radical dissent.
Two years later, in 1979, Shakur escaped from prison with the aid of allies. After years underground, she surfaced in Cuba, where Fidel Castro granted her asylum in 1984.
The U.S. government never stopped pursuing her. In 2013, she became the first woman placed on the FBI’s “Most Wanted Terrorist” list, with a $2 million bounty. Yet Cuba refused to extradite her, framing her as a political exile rather than a criminal.
In Havana, Shakur lived relatively quietly, raising her daughter and writing. Her memoir, Assata: An Autobiography (1987), became a cornerstone of radical literature, recounting her youth, trial, prison years, and flight to freedom.
Her words influenced generations of organizers, from the hip-hop era to Black Lives Matter. Rappers like Public Enemy and Common referenced her in their music. Activists cited her not as a fugitive, but as a guide for understanding state violence, racial injustice, and the resilience required to fight them.
Assata Shakur’s life and death remain polarizing. For many others, especially in the Black liberation tradition she is remembered as a freedom fighter, targeted because she dared to confront America’s racial order.
Her death will reignite old debates: What does justice mean in a nation that has historically denied it to Black people? Who gets labeled “terrorist,” and who is remembered as revolutionary?
Assata Shakur died far from the country of her birth, still branded a fugitive by the U.S. government. Yet for many, her name will live on as a synonym for resistance, survival, and the unfinished struggle for Black liberation.
“Revolution is about change,” she once wrote. “And the first place the change begins is within ourselves.”
BY: BEWITTY Staff
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