THE STORY OF ASSATA SHAKUR

Assata Shakur, born in 1947, is a revolutionary who escaped a high-security US prison while eight months pregnant, gave birth in Harlem under the protection of the Black Liberation Army and fled to Cuba as an asylum seeker, where she lives to this day.

This sister is a member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army, an underground revolutionary group that fought to defend Black people’s human rights in the United States. The FBI targeted Shakur through its Counterintelligence Program (or COINTELPRO).

In 1973, she was convicted of killing a state trooper in a shootout and set to serve a life sentence.

Under former President Barack Obama’s administration, the FBI placed Shakur on its most-wanted list in 2013, with a $1-million bounty for her capture. But, apart from her famous 1979 jailbreak, she’s known for supporting socialism.

In this clip from a 2016 interview on @houseofkonsciousness, Professor James Small (@prof_jamessmall), a comrade of Zayd Shakur (Assata’s husband), narrates her story.

Fun fact: Zayd Shakur was rapper Tupac Shakur’s uncle.

Assata Shakur remains an inspiration to activists, artists and scholars.