Twilight of a Generation?

We are now witnessing the twilight of the 1960s and ’70s cohort of Black radicals. Indeed, Assata Shakur’s death may mark the close of what was in many respects a wholly unique generation of political activists. The radicalization of Assata and her peers began with a moral obligation to end racism and stop the Vietnam War and morphed into a broader transnational outlook distinctive of the era. Will their ideas be entombed with them?

For them, the US fight for civil rights was intimately linked with anti-colonial and anti-imperialist armed struggles then underway in Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Asia. Cuba was admired as singularly active in championing the Black liberation movement in the United States, offering education, military training, and asylum. As Assata later explained, “I considered myself a revolutionary Black nationalist because our struggle was not only against racism but also against capitalism and imperialism. It was clear to me that Black people in the United States were part of a world struggle.”

In this context of international revolutionary resistance, armed self-defense in the United States seemed necessary to ward off brutality and annihilation by racist forces — be they vigilantes or the state. They understood theirs as a tradition that extended back to anti-slavery efforts, where firearms were used to resist slave patrols and to support self-emancipation. Historical figures like Harriet Tubman, who carried a pistol when leading escapes on the Underground Railroad, were embraced, especially by the armed “citizen patrols” of the Black Panther Party (BPP).

Living to Tell the Tale

Assata Shakur, born in the Jamaica neighborhood of the New York borough of Queens, spent much of her childhood in North Carolina. In her twenties, she returned to New York to attend college, and in 1970, she became involved with the BPP. Historian Peniel E. Joseph characterizes her as “part of the Pan-African revolutionary sentiment in the wake of Malcolm X’s death.”

Assata originally attracted national attention for her heavily sensationalized sham trial in 1977. Then she cannon-balled to true fame for her truly sensational prison escape in 1979, in which no one was injured. This was followed by several years in hiding before she found a safe haven in Cuba. From there, she published her 1987 autobiography, Assata, a megawatt performance.

Henceforth, she was a symbol of a Black woman who put her body on the line for her ideals. As political philosopher Joy James noted, she challenged state power at its most vicious, and she was also one of the few who had lived to tell the tale. She developed the aura of an outlaw — and being the godmother of rap legend Tupac Shakur helped a bit too.

Three decades later, as historian Donna Murch observed, Assata was established as a bridge figure for new social causes. When the Black Lives Matter movement exploded in response to the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012, Assata became perhaps its most visible icon. She remained so through the 2020 mass protests in response to the police murder of George Floyd. Although Assata herself did not speak out on the protests — perhaps out of legal and security concerns — her words were featured in chants and posters as a symbol of resistance against state violence and police repression.

A Singular Woman

Assata Olugbala Shakur was born JoAnne Deborah Byron and was later known by a married name, JoAnne Chesimard. Assata means “she who struggles,” Shakur signifies “the thankful one,” and her middle name, Olugbala, denotes “for the people.” She selected these names in 1971 from African and Arabic languages to reflect her political activism and commitment to a Third World heritage.

During the five decades in exile before her death, Assata gave few interviews, but she never disavowed her support for revolutionary principles. In the long roll call of revolutionaries misleadingly labeled cop killers and terrorists, Assata from a distance seemed to cut the familiar archetypal figure of the “Panther Woman.” Yet she was singular as a fingerprint, following a script of her own.

I met her in Cuba, as did many visitors to the island, in June of 1992. She entertained me and others for an afternoon of relaxation at her small house following a lecture given at the University of Havana. Anyone expecting a guns-blazing political rant would have been disappointed by her soft and high-pitched voice. Assata may have been every inch a revolutionary, but in person, although passionately attached to the socialist project, she was serene and quietly charismatic.

Sometimes it is difficult to square idealized portraits of radical heroines and heroes with the person they were decades earlier. Lives on the Left, like all others, are riddled with messy inconsistencies; explaining political behavior is not the same as justifying it. Whatever Assata’s precise part in the organization, the Black Liberation Army (BLA) as a group did not follow the BPP in focusing on social service activities and preaching only self-defense in the manner of Fred Hampton.

The BLA was devoted to a kind of war-fighter culture, carrying out armed robberies to fund its activities, attacking police, and organizing jailbreaks. Operating as small, decentralized cells of urban guerrillas, the BLA emphasized internal security to prevent infiltration by law enforcement. To obtain accurate facts about all this is to dive into the murkiest of waters, given the misinformation campaign by COINTELPRO and others. It’s certainly possible that some members, even Assata, crossed a line that should be honored by those with the moral compass of socialism.

BLA strategic practice has not been beyond criticism from the Left. African American studies professors Manning Marable and Komozi Woodard contended in Black American Politics (1985) and A Nation Within a Nation (1999), respectively, that the BLA’s focus on armed underground actions isolated them from the Black working-class base and broader communities. They stressed that sustainable liberation movements require mass political organization, not small groups waging secret armed campaigns.

Underground militarism tended to narrow the scope of struggle, providing the state with justification for harsh repression while cutting militants off from the people they claimed to represent. The BLA was assessed as a symptom of state repression and political fragmentation, not a viable vehicle for long-term Black liberation.

What we recall and admire in Assata’s legacy, however, is her defiant spirit and militancy in the face of oppression.

Stepping Into a Time Capsule?

To revisit the political era of the BPP and BLA now seems like stepping into a time capsule, quarrying the archeological site of a nearly vanished culture. On one level, Assata was an ordinary person, albeit with a mind that was sharp and combative, spurred by conscience and history to extraordinary action. But there will always be inner obscurities, parts that do not match. Acknowledging flaws and inconsistencies can only make a life story more believable and relatable.

Assata remained true to her vision, but nothing can stop history from blindsiding any one of us. That is why we must do all that we can to alert those who seem set on retracing false steps even as they are convinced that they are moving forward. We may be in a new historical situation of anti-capitalist politics, but it would be rash to discount the bodies of thought and practical experience of Assata’s generation. Likewise, it would be irresponsible to fail to critique their mistaken perceptions — including, in the case of the older Black left, a self-isolating guerrilla warfare strategy and perhaps an overemphasis on racial irreducibility.

Reading Assata convinces me that race reductionism was never the sole framework for this older Black left. On the other hand, it is true that there is no way forward for Marxists without class solidarity across races. We are now in a moment of growing state repression, purges, and intimidation; of unhinged rants by top government officials against “radical left lunatics” and “left-wing terrorists”; and the rounding up of immigrants who are shackled and crammed into detention centers under appalling conditions. What Assata has taught me is that, in the new millennium, we must still center struggles against racism, sexism, and police violence while also pursuing a course of winning the majority to unity on a class basis around common demands.

In Assata’s life, there was a churn and swirl that few of us could weather. Yet she somehow remained a long-distance runner on the road to a post-capitalist world and international socialism. What we honor above all are her inspiring acts of self-creation, driven by a force of will that enabled her to escape the brutality of incarceration and breathe the air of liberation. Black lives do matter, and Assata Shakur’s was unquestionably singular.