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Assata Shakur (Previously Joanne Chesimard) Made a Daring Escape from Prison in 1979, She—Like Our Fugitive Slave Ancestors—Became Legendary in the Black Community

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Assata Shakur (Previously Joanne Chesimard) Made a Daring Escape from Prison in 1979, She—Like Our Fugitive Slave Ancestors—Became Legendary in the Black Community ,. :-V •:;..'/, BY CHERYLL Y. GREENE • - . WORD FROM A SISTERIN When revolutionary political activist Assata Shakur (previously JoAnne Chesimard) made a daring escape from prison in 1979, she—like our fugitive slave ancestors—became legendary in the Black community. Here she speaks about her life in Cuba today • Assata Shal£ur has been relentlessly called out of her name by government and law-enforcement agencies and the media. Branded "bank robber," "kidnapper," "murderer" and "soul of the Black Liberation Army" — an amorphous group the authorities claimed murdered police officers and pulled off bank robberies during the 1970V — Shakur,- now 40, calls herself a revolutionary fighter in thF ongoing struggle of Black people for political, social and economic justice. The chasm ' between those two perspectives reverberates with the historical antagonism between African America and America's ruling powers. As with Harriet Tubman and our myriad other fugitive slave ancestors, Assata Shakur is seen as someone to be protected or to be hunted, depending upon on which side of the Black community you're standing. To tell her side of it, Shakur has written the just published •' .--.. ' : i| Assata: An Autobiography (Lawrence Hill & Co.). (See excerpt on next page.) i ' v ;: ••' I Shakur's story reveals a rather typical girlhood and young womanhood in Black communities of North Carolina and New York City, where she was a sensitive, ' . .intense person trying to come to grips with being Black and female in a racist and sexist society. The turbulent political and social atmosphere of the sixties heightened her consciousness and propelled JoAnne Deborah Byron through a brief marriage — Chesimard was her married name — and on to become Assata Olugbala Shakur, which means "she who struggles," "love for the people and g "the thankful." ; By becoming intensely active first in student groups and eventually in the % Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army, Shakur (covn\rino\r r,;>i u 60 FSSI:NCE • FEBRUARY 1988 A SISTER N E X L E joined the thousands of Black nationalists ESSENCE: Why did you come tn Cuba in (and some others) the FBI was targeting particular? From for intimidation, defamation and destruc- SHAKUR: Well, 1 had to leave the United A_s _s a t a J__A n tion through its covert counterintelligence States, as you know, and J was looking Autobiography program (COINTELPRO), instituted in for a place where I could live, where 1 1967 and carried out with the collusion could grow, and a place where I could be My mother brings my daughter to see me at the clinton correctional facility for women in of local, state and federal law enforcement. reunited with my daughter. I had read an new jersey, where i have been sent from ald- (Martin Luther King, Jr., was one of its awful lot about the Cuban revolution, about erson. I arn delirious. She looks so tall. I run first targets.) Fidel [Castro], about the whole process. up to kiss her. She barely responds. She is Between 1971 and 1973, Shakur—by All my life I had been exposed to an distant and standoffish. Pangs of guilt and sorrow then a fugitive—was charged with serious onslaught of anticommunist propaganda, fill my chest. I can see that my child is suffering. It is stupid to ask what is wrong. She is four crimes (armed robbery, kidnapping, at- and I wanted to see for myself what a years old, and except for these pitiful little tempted murder), vilified by the media socialist society was like. And, happily, I visits—although my mother has brought her and slapped on the FBI's most wanted was able to do that. to see me every week, wherever i am, with list; a dead-or-alive order was issued for 1 was shocked at the progress I was able the exception of the time i was in alderson .- she has never been with her mother. I can feel her apprehension. When she and two others to see; in 25 years the Cubans have really something welling up in my baby. I look at my were stopped on a pretense by New Jersey accomplished a lot. It makes you ask a lot mother, my face a question mark. My mother state troopers in May 1973, a Shootout of questions—for example, how a person is suffering too. I try to play. I make my arms followed. A trooper was killed and another in a small underdeveloped country like into an elephant's trunk stalking around the slightly wounded. Shakur was seriously Cuba can go to the hospital and not have visiting room jungle. It does not work. My daughter refuses to play baby elephant, or tiger, wounded, and years later it looked to some to pay one cent, can go get braces and not or anything. She looks at me like i am the as if COINTELPRO had done its dirty have to pay a cent. buffoon i must look like. I try the choo-choo work. Shakur wa? incarcerated under ESSENCE: Hfi.v easy or difficult did you find train routine and the la, la, la song, but she is not amused. I try talking to her, but she is shockingly inhuman conditions from 1973 the adjustment tn this dijjtrent at in/re and puffed up and sullen. to 1979, and she continued to fear for her smiety.-1 I go over and try to hug her. In a hot second life. SHAKUR: Politically it was real easy she is all over me. All i can feel are these little The charges that led to Shakur's fugitive Politically it was just wonderful to find four-year-old fists banging away at me. Every existence before the shootout were dropped myself in a place where 1 agreed with the bit of her force is in those punches, they really hurt. I let her hit me until she is tired. "It's nil for lack of evidence, were dismissed or government. We have the same kind of right," i tell her. "Let it all out." She is standing resulted in acquittal, but she was convicted priorities in terms of struggling against in front of me, her face contorted with nngT, of the trooper murder—on flimsy evidence, apartheid, against imperialism. I feel in looking spent. She backs away and leans against it is contended—and sentenced to life im- the life here a r" commitment to bettering the wall. "It's okay," i tell her. "Mommy un- prisonment in 1977. Two events made her the lives of ,jple in Cuba and also derstands." "You're not my mother," she screams, the tears rolling down her face, "You're name legendary in the Black community throughout the world. And the fact that not my mother and i hate you." I feel like crying during those years: She dared to get preg- 1 saw Cubans who were willing to go to too. I know she is confused about who i am. nant in 1974 during a New York bank- Angola to risk their lives to fight against She calls me Mommy Assata and she calls my robbery trial (with Kamau, her co-defend- the racism of the South African regime mother Mommy. I try to pick her up. She knocks my hand ant), and she dared to escape from a New made me love Cuba and made me love away. "You can get out of here, if you want Jersey state prison in 1979, vanishing vir- Cubans—if for no other reason. But there to," she screams. "You just don't want to." tually without a trace. Until the fall of were so many things that touched me-— "No, i can't," i say, weakly. "Yes, you can," she last year, when a New York newspaper so in that sense it was a really easy kind accuses. "You just don't want to." I look helplessly at my mother. Her face is broke the story of her whereabouts, her of adjustment for me. choked with pain. "Tell her to try to open the fate was generally unknown. "While As- Personally, it was a little more difficult. bars," she says in a whisper. sata's story may be unique in its energy, I had to learn Spanish, which was a strug- "I can't open the door," i tell rny daughter. creativity and passion for life and principle," gle. I had to adjust to living in an under- "I can't get through the bars. You try and open writes her attorney in introducing her au- developed country. And that means thar the bars." My daughter goes over to the barred door tobiography, "it is typical of the ways the you have to get another consciousness. You that leads to the visiting room. She pulls and United States has responded historically have to raise your consciousness about she pushes. She yanks and she hits and she to individuals whom the government sees simple things: You live in the States, you kicks the bars until she falls on the floor, a heap as political threats to domestic tranquility." take water for granted; then you go to a of exhaustion. I go over and pick her up. I hol'f and rock and kiss her. There is a look of ics Third World country, and you realize that Today Assata Shakur, granted political ignation on her face that i can't stand. We- asylum by the Cuban government, is alive people in many places don't have water. spend the rest of the visit talking and playing and well and living in Havana with her It makes you so much more conscious of quietly on the floor.
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