Assata Shakur, the Black revolutionary and godmother to Tupac Shakur, has died, Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs reported last Friday, September 26. A cause of death was not specified beyond “health conditions and advanced age.” Shakur’s daughter, Kakuya Shakur, confirmed the news in a Facebook post. “At approximately 1:15 PM on September 25th, my mother, Assata Shakur, took her last earthly breath,” she wrote. “Words cannot describe the depth of loss that I am feeling at this time.” Shakur was 78.
Born JoAnne Deborah Byron in 1947 to an accountant father and schoolteacher mother, Shakur spent her childhood between Queens, New York, and her grandparents’ home in North Carolina, then still under Jim Crow laws. She dropped out of high school at 17, but took night classes and eventually attended the City College of New York, where she met and married a fellow student activist named Louis Chesimard. Their marriage only lasted a year, according to The New York Times, but Shakur kept Chesimard’s surname.
While at City College, Shakur became a member of the Golden Drums society, a Black activist organization, and, subsequently, the Black Panther Party. However, she disliked the Black Panthers’ macho posturing and, in 1971, joined the Black Liberation Army (BLA), a Marxist-Leninist offshoot of the group. That same year, Shakur dropped what she would later call her slave name and became Assata Olugbala Shakur. According to her 1988 autobiography, “Assata” means “she who struggles,” “Olugbala” means “Love for the people,” and Shakur means “the thankful.”
Between 1971 and 1973, Shakur was indicted 10 times on charges including murder, aggravated assault, and armed robbery, but only one of those cases led to her being sentenced. On May 2, 1973, Shakur and two other BLA members—Sundiata Acoli and James Costan—were pulled over by New Jersey state troopers due to a broken taillight. In an ensuing gunfight, officer Werner Foerster and Costan were both killed, and another officer was wounded.
Shakur held that she didn’t shoot anyone during the confrontation and had her arms in the air when she herself was shot. Medical examiners corroborated this version of events upon her arrest. However, she was deemed equally responsible in Foerster’s death under New Jersey law. Shakur was found guilty of first-degree murder and assault and sentenced to life in prison plus 33 years in 1977.
Two years later, members of the BLA led a jailbreak on what was then the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women. They commandeered a prison van and were able to free Shakur, taking two guards hostage in the process. Shakur then disappeared before resurfacing in Cuba in 1984, having been granted political asylum by then-President Fidel Castro. She became the first woman added to the FBI’s “Most Wanted Terrorists” list, and died with a $2 million bounty on her head. As recently as 2017, U.S. President Donald J. Trump demanded her return to the country.
