Assata Shakur told us to win

The FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List is a curious institution. Casual observers only familiar with its most infamous celebrities – Osama Bin Laden, Ted Bundy, James ‘Whitey’ Bulger, et al – may be surprised, should they take a glance at the list on any average day, to find that many of the fugitives on its roster appear unremarkable. Their crimes, though sometimes grim, often seem tawdry and small. 

Reportedly, the FBI’s official position is that the list is “designed to publicize particularly dangerous fugitives who might not otherwise merit national attention”. Yet it is hard to avoid the impression that numerous outlaws’ graduation to the status of Most Wanted reflects not the severity of their crimes, but the frustration and failure the authorities have experienced in trying to apprehend them. These are the people who have embarrassed the cops with their stubborn refusal to be captured, and the list is, as much as anything, a catalogue of that humiliation.

As a rule, the United States does not care for being humiliated. Now, with the passing of Assata Shakur, that humiliation is complete, and can never be undone.

Shakur – who passed away one month ago on 25 September at the age of 78, reportedly of conditions relating to “advanced age” – humiliated the United States in every way she knew how. She exposed its iniquities, defied its so-called justice system, and made fools of its law enforcement apparatus, the central purpose of which is to inflict terrible punishment upon any who fail to show it the deference and supplication it demands.

Born JoAnne Deborah Byron in 1947 in Queens, New York, but raised for a time in the still-segregated environment of North Carolina with her grandparents, Shakur dropped out of high school and eventually returned to Gotham, where she attended Borough of Manhattan Community College and encountered the many civil rights, Black nationalist and Marxist groups which would instrumental in her political education. 

It was also here that the independence of thought that would define her became apparent. Recalling one encounter with a college socialist clique, Shakur later wrote: “I think they got insulted when I asked them how a group of flabby white boys who couldn’t fight their way out of a paper bag had the nerve to think they could tell the Vietnamese people how to run their show.”

Shakur’s ongoing radicalisation would lead her to the Black Panther Party, and eventually to the armed Marxist-Leninist militant group the Black Liberation Army. As a member of the BLA, Shakur was accused of committing crimes including bank robbery, assault, kidnap, murder and attempted murder, but as her fellow activist Angela Davis would later note: “Although she faced 10 separate legal proceedings, and had already been pronounced guilty by the media, all except one of these trials – the case resulting from her capture – concluded in acquittal, hung jury, or dismissal.” 

Nevertheless, under what Davis described as “highly questionable circumstances”, Shakur was finally convicted in 1977 by an all-white jury of being an accomplice to the murder of New Jersey state trooper Werner Foerster. Her subsequent imprisonment would last until 1979, when a group of BLA members audaciously aided her escape from prison. By 1984, Shakur made it to Cuba, where she was granted political asylum by the Cuban government, and where she would stay for the rest of her life. 

In 2013, on the 40th anniversary of the altercation on the New Jersey turnpike which ended with the death of trooper Foerster, Shakur was elevated to the Ten Most Wanted Terrorist List – the first woman ever to receive that dubious honour. In a post-9/11 world, where dark imagination ruled and no apocalyptic terrorist atrocity was considered beyond the realm of possibility, it might seem strange in retrospect that the US government continued to expend so much effort on an elderly woman now living peacefully in another country. The only way Shakur could still realistically be considered a threat was through her words and thought – though perhaps, for the United States, that was enough.

Amidst the first wave of the Black Lives Matter movement, the motivations behind this sudden recategorisation were deduced with characteristic insight by Angela Davis (a figure not unfamiliar with these matters, some of whose books feature her own FBI Most Wanted poster as her official author photograph). Writing in the Guardian in November of 2014, Davis contended: “To retroactively implicate Assata Shakur in a putative contemporary terrorist conspiracy is also to bring those who have inherited her legacy, and who identify with continued struggles against racism and capitalism, under the canopy of ‘terrorist violence’.”  

Even as they shamelessly exploited Shakur in an attempt to crush the liberation movements which followed her example, one can still detect that same burning humiliation within her enemies and their furious drive to correct it. If they did not get her back – if they did not demonstrate with brutal and unquestionable finality that no one escapes, no matter where they may go or how much sympathy they enjoy – it would mean that she had won. It would mean that there were people and places her enemies, with all their power, could not reach – proof, in her own words, that “the cowboys and the bandits didn’t own the world”. This, they could never stomach.

And so, even as Shakur resided in Cuba, she simultaneously continued to live rent-free in the minds of those who exist to defend she systems of oppression she sought to overthrow. Writing in the National Review in March of 2017, Michelle Malkin – at the time, still clinging to the last vestiges of ‘respectable’ conservatism before fully pivoting to the far-right grift – argued that it was time for Shakur to “pay her dues” and that newly elected President Donald Trump was “just the man to force this militant and unrepentant escapee to face justice”. Tough luck, Michelle.

A few months later, Bari Weiss – having not yet self-cancelled her way out of the New York Times and still lamely posing as some species of Trump-critical contrarian – highlighted with outrage that the recent Women’s March had wished Shakur a happy birthday. “Since when did criticizing a domestic terrorist become a signal issue of the far right?” fumed Weiss. “Last I checked, that position was a matter of basic decency and patriotism.” In the interim, we have seen where Weiss’ “decency and patriotism” have taken her. 

Following the assassination of Charlie Kirk and Luigi Mangione’s alleged killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last year, there has been much performative hand-wringing over the spectre of political violence; fear of being perceived as sympathetic to such violence or its motivations in any way has led many in the public sphere to debase themselves through grovelling mea culpas and sweaty tributes to the suddenly curtailed life of a white supremacist carnival barker. It has not, to put it mildly, been edifying. 

Shakur lived free of this kind of cowardice, empowered by the understanding that the most prevalent and pervasive political violence in any society undergirded by capitalism, imperialism, racism and patriarchy is carried out by the state – a reality affirmed by the thuggish stormtroopers of ICE, the presence of troops on American streets, or the mere sight of a police uniform and all that it implies. Any and all who take issue with the revolutionary violence embraced by Shakur and her comrades must grapple with that. 

I write this tribute from Scotland; I am not one of the millions still afflicted by the United States that so persecuted Shakur, and would not presume to speak for her or them. But just as Shakur could not be contained by America’s borders, her legacy encompassed and inspired the world she endeavoured to change. “Imperialism is an international system of exploitation,” she wrote, “and we, as revolutionaries, need to be internationalists to defeat it.”

From all around that world, in the hours since news of her death broke, the quotation of Shakur’s I have seen most circulated reads simply: 

“It is our duty to fight for our freedom.

“It is our duty to win.”

The victory Shakur spoke and dreamt of was larger, of course – a victory she did not live to see, and remains unrealised. That she and so many others had to make do in the meantime with smaller victories along the way should not lull us into complacency or allow us to forget the obligation of which she spoke. 

Yet Assata Shakur did not expire in a prison cell; she died free and unchained. In taking her final breath, Assata Shakur won. Her enemies can never take that from her. 

For all those who continue to support her struggle, it is a victory we can all share in.