Summary:
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Assata Shakur, Black liberation activist, dies in Havana at 78, confirmed by daughter Kakuya Shakur on Facebook.
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Shakur, once known as Joanne Chesimard, convicted of murder in 1973, escaped prison, and received asylum in Cuba.
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Debate continues over her legacy, with supporters praising her anti-racist organizing and detractors condemning her militant actions.
Assata Shakur, the Black liberation activist convicted in 1973 and later escaped prison and received asylum in Cuba, has died in Havana at 78. Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced her death and cited health complications tied to age. Her daughter, Kakuya Shakur, confirmed it in a Facebook post.
Born JoAnne Deborah Byron and later known legally as Joanne Chesimard, Shakur moved through the Black freedom movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. She spent a brief period with the Black Panther Party, then aligned with the underground Black Liberation Army. Supporters saw a committed anti-racist organizer. Critics saw an armed militant.
Everything changed on May 2, 1973. A traffic stop on the New Jersey Turnpike turned into a gunfight. Foerster was killed, Trooper James Harper was wounded, and BLA member Zayd Malik Shakur died at the scene. In 1977, a jury convicted Assata Shakur of murder and related charges, and a judge handed down a life sentence. She and her supporters long argued she did not fire the fatal shots, pointing to medical testimony that her arm was immobilized by gunfire. The debate never faded.
Her prison term was short. In November 1979, armed associates posed as visitors, took hostages, and broke her out of the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women. She resurfaced in Cuba in 1984. Fidel Castro’s government framed her as a political exile and granted asylum, placing her case inside Cuba’s broader narrative of supporting revolutionary movements abroad.
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U.S. officials took the opposite view. In 2013 the FBI added Shakur, listed as Joanne Chesimard, to the Most Wanted Terrorists list, the first woman on it, and authorities offered a combined $2 million reward. New Jersey leaders pressed for her return for decades. After news of her death, Gov. Phil Murphy and State Police Superintendent Col. Patrick Callahan said they would oppose any attempt to repatriate her remains and repeated that she died without facing full accountability.
Her 1987 memoir, Assata: An Autobiography, became required reading for generations of activists and was quoted widely during Black Lives Matter protests. She was long described as a godmother or step-aunt to rapper Tupac Shakur, a link that kept her story present in hip-hop and youth culture. Admirers cite her writing about solidarity and survival. Detractors argue that tributes risk glorifying a person convicted of killing a police officer. Both truths lived side by side for decades.
