By Carolina Nery for Rupture Magazine

Assata Shakur’s life is not simply biography, it is testimony to a nation’s contradictions. Born JoAnne Deborah Byron in 1947 in Queens, she came of age in the firestorm of U.S. racial apartheid, where survival demanded, resistance. Her name, later chosen, Assata Olugbala Shakur, translates to “she who struggles, who brings happiness,” a fitting declaration of intent.

Assata’s path led her to the Black Panther Party, a movement that dared to imagine freedom not as a distant dream but as community programs, political education, and self-defense. Later, she aligned with the Black Liberation Army, confronting a system where violence was already daily reality for Black people.

The state’s response was swift and merciless. The 1973 New Jersey Turnpike shootout left a trooper and comrade Zayd Malik Shakur dead, and Assata gravely wounded. What followed was not impartial justice but a campaign of criminalization. Across multiple trials, most charges dissolved — yet the state secured her conviction in 1977, a verdict steeped in racialized fear and political vendetta.

From prison, she refused to surrender. In 1979, she escaped, later receiving asylum in Cuba, a country that offered the protection the United States denied. From there she authored Assata: An Autobiography (1988), a book that continues to ignite political consciousness across generations.

To speak of Assata today is to confront the machinery that sought to erase her. She has been called fugitive, terrorist, criminal. But in the language of liberation, she remains something else entirely: a symbol of resilience, of dignity, of the unfinished struggle for Black freedom. Her words, “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win”, echo far beyond exile.

In remembering Assata Shakur, we are reminded that history is never neutral. It is a battleground, and her life marks a line drawn against forgetting.

Assata Shakur’s death in Havana marks the end of a physical journey, but not the silencing of her voice. Exiled yet unbroken, she carried the torch of liberation across decades, teaching that struggle is both inheritance and responsibility. To honor her is not only to remember her battles, but to continue them, in the streets, in our communities, and in our collective imagination of freedom. Assata belongs to the long lineage of those who refused erasure. Even in death, she remains a living pulse in the struggle for Black liberation.