Long Live Assata Shakur, 1947-2025
On September 26, 2025, Black revolutionary Assata Shakur transitioned after leading a long and virtuous life of internationalist resistance. Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network salutes Assata’s living legacy and recognizes her lifelong struggle against global oppression as a practice to inspire countless generations to come.
Assata Shakur was the target of racist, counter-insurgent incarceration from 1973 to 1979 because of her work with the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army. For years from within prison walls, she fought false accusations while bearing the brunt of settler-colonial prison and police violence. After being shot twice by New Jersey State Police, Assata testified to being choked, beat, dragged, kicked, pulled by her hair, and cuffed by her ankles so tight that the handcuffs were inside her flesh. She received inadequate medical care and was imprisoned in a men’s prison because of how “threatening” she was deemed to be by the state.
Writing of her own experience, Assata noted that political persecution and incarceration is “part and parcel of the [US] government’s policy of eliminating political opponents by charging them with crimes and arresting them with no regard to the factual basis of such charges.”
In 1979, a unit of the Black Liberation Army liberated Assata from prison and in 1984 she travelled to Cuba where she lived in exile until her recent passing. Living in exile in Cuba under the protection of the socialist Cuban government only further expanded Assata’s analysis of anti-imperialism and the interconnectedness of global struggles for liberation. Assata was a true internationalist in every sense of the word, describing Cuba as “One of the Largest, Most Resistant and Most Courageous Palenques (Maroon Camps) That has ever existed on the Face of this Planet.”
Since the FBI’s commencement and alleged completion of COINTELPRO — the program that targeted Assata and other Black liberation activists between 1956 and 1971— little has changed in how the settler state attacks those who fight for the oppressed masses of the world. Assata Shakur is one of many people labelled as a so-called “terrorist” by the US and other Western and allied governments.
“They wanted to portray her as a terrorist, something that was an injustice, a brutality, an infamous lie,” President Fidel Castro once remarked about Assata. The FBI eventually classified her as the first woman on their Most Wanted Terrorists list. A few years later, the first woman Al-Qassam Brigades member Ahlam Al-Tamimi was added to this same list illustrating the joint struggle that the Palestinian and Black liberation movements share.
Much like the case of Assata and Ahlam, Palestinian resistance factions, the Axis of Resistance, and Palestinian solidarity organizations and individual activists across the globe are designated as “terrorist[s]” for siding with the masses of the world who oppose imperialism. Those of us who recognize prisons as a colonial tool for waging warfare against a subjugated people are particularly criminalized.
Assata’s political work with the Black Panthers and the BLA specifically identified American police and prisons as racist and oppressive forces that must be eliminated. Her offerings of steadfastness remind us to continue to fight for and honour those still inside and those who have been martyred by the colonial prison system.
Free Mumia Abu-Jamal, Free Abdullah Barghouthi, Free Kamau Sadiki, Free Jakhi McCray, Free Malik Farrad Muhammad, Free Ahmad Sa’adat, Free Kojo Bomani Sababu, Free Casey Goonan, Free Imam Jamil Al-Amin, Free Elias Rodriguez, and Free Them All!
Long live Assata Shakur, Sekou Odinga, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Sheikh Khader Adnan, Ed Poindexter, Ismail Haniyeh, Dr. Mutulu Shakur, Yahya Sinwar, and many more who have been martyred and/or have joined the ancestors.
A revolutionary freedom fighter, a political prisoner, a mother, a woman in exile— Assata Shakur’s lifelong practice of militancy and sacrifice will continue to be aspirational to all who wish to see the day that imperialism receives its final blow.
“It is our duty to fight for our freedom.
It is our duty to win.
We must love each other and support each other.
We have nothing to lose but our chains.”
Rest in Power, Comrade Assata!
Read also:
source: Samidoun
https://abolitionmedia.noblogs.org/?p=21720
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