Assata Shakur’s Autobiography is the Road Map to Freedom We Still Need

Most of the people who live on this planet are still not free. I ask only that you continue to work and pray to end oppression and political repression. It is my heartfelt belief that all the people on this earth deserve justice: social justice, political justice, and economic justice. I believe it is the only way that we will ever achieve peace and prosperity on this earth. 

Below, I’m excited to share a beautiful reflection on Assata’s autobiography by Atarah Israel, a young writer and editorial intern here at In These Times with a knack for sharp prose.

—Sherell Barbee, Print Editor

The sentence you’re reading right now marks 53 days, five half-finished opening lines and countless other unspoken phrases tucked in my brain and nowhere else, as I’ve tried and failed to find the words to review Assata: An Autobiography.

After a number of false starts and flirtations with excerpts of the book, I began reading the Black revolutionary’s life story from start to finish roughly one month before news of her death flooded Instagram and Twitter pages; everyone had an homage to pay, and for good reason. Assata’s life compels honor.

Inundated with all the words about the Black activist I could ever need, why, then, have I still struggled to write this review so much? Assata, through her committed love for her people and for struggle, calls us to act with such honesty toward ourselves, to test our tongues against the burning sting of truth. The possibility of writing too close to the flame, or worse — missing the fire altogether — seemed fatal.

Then, Dr. Joshua Crutchfield, a scholar of twentieth-century Black freedom movements and a professor who teaches the works of Shakur and Angela Davis in his Northwestern classes, gave life to my unspoken words still yet to be typed. He called Assata’s biography what it is — a road map to freedom.

“Grasping some of the ideas of folks like Davis and Shakur are integral for us right now,” Crutchfield said. ​“They produced some critical, intersectional-before-we-called-it-intersectional ideas about freedom. They are not just history, they are also road maps, potentials, possibilities that we can follow today on our journeys to extending the freedoms of Black people and oppressed people writ large.”

What radical figures like Assata offer us is insight into the internal worlds of Black women in the middle- and late-twentieth century, a narrative that often lives in the shadows of their male counterparts. What struck me the most about Assata’s book was her emotive, deeply sensitive writing, as well as how she describes the protective love of other Black women in her life.

“We know a lot about Martin Luther King and there are still books and books being written,” Crutchfield told me. ​“These things are still important, but we don’t have the same type of nuanced and complicated understanding of Black women’s thinking.”

Despite this, Assata Shakur’s revolutionary life remains an iconic one for many, woman or not, Black or otherwise. She was a human being who committed herself to living as fully and honestly as possible. She understood the grotesque beauty of the world, and that that beauty is reflected in all of us. She did not shy away from her imperfections. 

The story of her life reflects the musings of a young Black girl-turned-woman grappling with a racist system stacked against her. She runs away from home at 13 and is at one point nurtured by the motherly goodwill of the quick-witted and sharply dressed Miss Shirley, a trans woman. The young Assata eventually is shepherded home by her Aunt Evelyn and grows to critically engage with the environment around her — she recites poetry with her friend Bonnie over the phone, and roams art museums and the streets of New York like they’re both exhibits the same.

In her writing, she isn’t afraid to expose the most vulnerable moments in her life, those times when she realized she unwittingly took the definitions given to her by society as a given, and that those definitions led to an embarrassing dead end. Reflecting on a period in her young adulthood in which she was frustrated and disillusioned, she writes, ​“Life was like a bus: you could either be a passenger and go along for the ride, or you could be the driver. I didn’t have the foggiest idea where i wanted to go, but i knew that i wanted to drive.”

A deep desire for freedom is her anchor. Her sovereign conviction toward Black liberation guides her to the Black Panther Party in adulthood. She chronicles her surveillance from the U.S. government—I would look out my window and there, in the middle of Harlem, in front of my house, would be two white men sitting and reading the newspaper—and the tribulations of her court trials. She writes about becoming pregnant while incarcerated, a harrowing journey where she was denied milk and the doctor of her choice. She faced physical abuse and psychological torture throughout. Yet, her words still retain a warrior-like strength that can only be described in terms of love.

Whenever i tired of the verbal abuse of my captors, i would drown them out by reading the poetry out loud. ​“Invictus” and ​“If We Must Die” were the poems i usually read. I read them over and over, until i was sure the guards had heard every word. The poems were my message to them.
—Assata: An Autobiography

As each chapter oscillates between childhood remembrance and her court hearings in adulthood, we eventually come to know a woman deeply reverent to the complicated, contradictory beauty of life. As many people who wanted her dead, she also had the love of a community that understood the power of her journey. She had the support of poets like Audre Lorde, June Jordan and Sonia Sanchez, who recited their work in protest of her detainment. Her aunt and lawyer, Evelyn, is an abiding pillar throughout her life, as are her mother, daughter and comrades like Simba, another Black revolutionary woman who she reunites with in prison.

Common wisdom says that you should never meet your heroes. I will never get to meet Assata, but when reading her book it felt like I already had. That’s not to suggest some supernatural, transcendent connection. It’s simply a testament to her writing and her keen understanding of the times she lived in — times that have at once stayed the same even today, yet have also catapulted us into a new, unprecedented sphere.