Dhoruba Bin Wahad, Co-Founder of Black Liberation Army, Reflects on the Legacy of Assata Shakur and Revolutionary Sacrifice

On May 30, 2026, a Celebration of the Life and Legacy of Assata Shakur was held at the Riverside Church in New York City. Dhoruba Bin Wahad, co-founder of the Black Liberation Army, wrote these words of tribute, in hopes they would be included in the program.

Solidarity and Greetings to all gathered to commemorate and reflect on the Life and legacy of Assata Shakur.

I am indeed appreciative of this opportunity to address this momentous gathering of comrades, friends, and family of my comrade Assata.

I know that many of you gathered here today may not have known Assata, but are instilled with, and inspired by, her lifelong resistance and revolutionary struggle against the white supremacist settler construct that is the United States of America.

I also appreciate that some of you gathered here today actually knew Assata, aided and supported her during her long exile in Cuba, and to these comrades I salute you and express my profound gratitude.

Finally, to those gathered in this iconic Riverside Church in Harlem, who in their own way have struggled for the liberation of African people, oppressed people, the downtrodden, the disregarded “Wretched of the Earth”, I salute all of you.

We may seem as strangers to one another, but we are only comrades who have never met.

I’d like to take this opportunity to tell the unvarnished truth about my Comrade Assata. It was during the early 1970s when our retaliatory resistance against the armed agents of racist state terrorism assumed organized intensity. Police murder of Black youth, accompanied by the plague of heroin addiction, informed the legacy and legend of Assata, you now pay homage to.

Few of you gathered here today would have ever heard of Assata were it not for the emergence of the Black Liberation Army (BLA).

I say this because, despite scholarly deceitfulness surrounding the BLA, Assata Shakur was a soldier in the centuries-old war against African peoples, a war that began with the North Atlantic Slave Trade, a racist war that continues to this very moment by violent and non-violent means.

The scholarly deceit I speak of lies in the denial of this war, and the deception that Black people fought for Civil Rights, rather than for Human Rights, and that Human Rights can be granted by the inhumane, rather than appropriated by those criminalized and defamed.

This fact is important. Because Assata was not an innocent victim of police repression, shot wantonly with her hands raised in submission.  She was a revolutionary, and revolutionaries are never victims of injustice. How many freedom fighters were wantonly killed in the struggle for the liberation of their people? Medgar Evers, Amilcar Cabral, Che Guevara, some murdered even while surrendering?

Facts speak louder than fiction:  In 1971, Assata wasn’t a designated  FBI COINTELPRO target. She was a medical cadre of the National Committee to Combat Fascism in Washington Heights, Harlem, New York. NCCF chapters were formations of the original Black Panther Party.

Indeed, by 1972, COINTELPRO had already achieved some of its most significant achievements with the assassination of Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King, and the breakup of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

Earlier in late 1971, COINTELPRO was reconfigured as NEWKILL and CHESIROB.  Both were acronyms for FBI repressive campaigns authorized by the Nixon White House specifically targeting the emergence of the BLA and its clandestine leadership, one of whom was Joanne Chesimard, hence the acronym CHESIROB for Chesimard Robberies.

I choose to remind everyone of these historical facts, rather than repeat historical fantasies of Assata’s victimhood. Why? Because Assata was a warrior in the tradition of Harriet Tubman, in the tradition of Denmark Vesey, and our ancestors who resisted the brutality, murder, and enslavement of African People for over 300 years.

In the struggle for freedom, revolutionaries are never victims, or innocents. Assata was not an unfortunate victim like George Floyd – or Clifford Glover – she was a conscious, committed, and revolutionary Freedom Fighter!

In this historical moment, we should be mindful that White Supremacy and the American Empire are in decline.

Besieged by the Global South’s emerging Unity, White America has become increasingly lawless.  And like a rabid dog backed into a corner, capitalist White supremacist state violence knows no limits.

The land that gave Assata refuge, Cuba, now faces imminent attack by the U.S. in its attempt to reassert the Monroe Doctrine of the 19th century in the Western Hemisphere.

The People of Iran are under attack by the U.S. and its Zionist White Supremacist cohort, Israel. We must demand peace in Western Asia and an end to Zionist settler expansionism.

My beloved comrades and friends, we should not merely eulogize Assata, we should live like her. In this historical moment, Revolutionary resistance to the racist, imperialistic, and violent enemies of humanity requires nothing less.

Long Live the Spirit of Assata Shakur!

Long Live the Independence of the Cuban People!

Dhoruba bin-Wahad is a former member of the Black Panther Party (BPP) and the Black Liberation Army (BLA). He was a leading member of the New York chapter of the BPP, a Field Secretary of the BPP responsible for organizing chapters throughout the East Coast, and a member of the Panther 21.

source: Black Agenda Report

If Iran has the Strait of Hormuz, What Can Black People Use for Leverage and Power?

The militant reaction to the Tennessee legislature’s recent obliteration of the state’s only predominantly Black voting district struck an emotional chord with Africans throughout the U.S. Protesters crowded into the legislative chamber, chanting, waving placards, sounding air horns, and leaving no doubts about their anger. State Representative Justin Pearson then eloquently spoke for many when he said:

Today’s vote to redraw the congressional districts in Tennessee set our state back over 150 years. It was a political lynching that violated the rights of every Tennessean. This racist and reckless action was also an attack on Black political power that should appall everyone in the state, whether you are Black or not, a voter or not, live in Memphis or not, or are a Democrat or not.

The emotions fueling the protesters and countless other people across the country are rooted in subconscious if not conscious, memories of the experiences of African elders and ancestors in that state. It was in Tennessee where Diane Nash, John Lewis, James Lawson and many others waged sit-ins and launched freedom rides that prompted violent reactions by white racists, which caused much bloodshed. It was at Fisk University in Nashville that W.E.B. DuBois prepared himself for a phenomenal academic career that was to guide and inform Black resistance for generations. It was in Tennessee that an amazing, successful struggle was waged in the 1970s to prevent the demise of Tennessee State University when there were efforts to merge that HBCU into a predominantly white state university pursuant to desegregation mandates. It was in Tennessee, on a motel balcony in Memphis, that a bullet ended the life of our beloved champion and martyr, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who was acting in solidarity with striking Black sanitation workers.

If not placed in a proper historical context, the ruthless attack by the Tennessee legislature on the reforms that elders and ancestors paid for with their blood induces a sense of nauseating dread and even a sense of hopelessness. But hope should spring eternal because the hand of the Lord rests firmly on Africans in the U.S. How else can the Black experience in this country be explained? Few, if any, communities have been the focus of such sustained and vicious attacks that have caused setbacks, but which have never resulted in defeat. In referencing that fact, Pearson boldly declared: “Today, you will take the only Black-majority district from us. But I want you to know: No matter what you do, no matter how much you try to break us and make us bend and quit — we will still be here.”

Beneath the justified bravado is also a haunting question for which many have no ready answer. If the fight must go on, what is the pathway to victory? This is extremely concerning to a community that has invested an inordinate amount of its time, talent and treasure in the electoral process. Because practically all the Black community’s political eggs have been placed in a single electoral system basket, the loss of opportunities for strategic voting is comparable to taking the only available boat from a non-swimmer whose life depends on crossing a lake. In fact, the entirety of sanctioned political options available to Black people are tightly controlled by enemies who stand ready at any time to snatch away anything that might be effectively used to pursue liberation. Why then is there any reason to believe there is a way forward?

There are many who have recognized the political trap set for the Black community and they have not taken the bait. Like oppressed communities around the world they have struggled to become independent from their oppressors. Before his untimely death, Jackson, Mississippi, Mayor Chokwe Lumumba brought his commitment to Black self-determination with him into office, and began the process of implementing his plans for self-governing “people’s assemblies” and a network of cooperative enterprises. In Michigan, the Detroit Black Community Food Sovereignty Network works to build community self-reliance through urban agriculture and cooperative buying. Community Movement Builders fights to establish self-determining communities through cooperative economic advancement and collective community organizing. In various parts of the rural south, there are new small farms worked by very young Black people who can sometimes be seen wearing dreads and African print smocks rather than bib overalls. There are also organizations that address many of the community needs that were the focus of the Black Panther Party’s survival programs, including monitoring police operations. But while there is tremendous potential for the Black community to govern itself, ultimately, it lacks a strategy for defending itself from racist, capitalist aggression.

U.S. power is daunting, but the U.S. empire is not invulnerable. Whether in Vietnam, Cuba, the Sahel, or various other places, revolutionary forces with far less resources, power and influence have effectively resisted imperialism. Right now, the U.S. is getting whupped by Iran, and it’s worth examining how they are doing it because there are implications for the Black struggle in the U.S. It hasn’t mattered how many bombs the U.S. has rained down on Iran, it has forced the U.S. into practical submission because of one thing – the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s stranglehold on this vital waterway has given that country a stranglehold on the U.S.

Africans in the U.S. and throughout the world desperately need something comparable to Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz. It need not be control of a waterway, but it must be control of something that can potentially inflict lethal blows on the U.S. political, economic or social systems. It is sad, bordering on pathetic, that within this country, Black people have fought, shed their blood and lost their lives to gain only reforms like the Voting Rights Act that can be, and has been gutted simply because it provided an opportunity for Africans to gain some measure of political influence. If the people are going to risk their liberty and lives for liberation, then it is only right that their struggle yields the capacity to say to all who dare challenge them: “Back off or we will destroy all that you hold dear!”

The idea of gaining true power and leverage for Africans is not new. In 1945, at a Pan-African conference in Manchester, England, serious consideration was given to prospects for the liberation of Africa from foreign control and the unification of the continent under a single socialist government. The realization of that vision would provide opportunities for Africans both on the continent and throughout the world to be able to meet any attack on Black safety, security or stability with a genuine threat to withhold Africa’s vast reserves of oil, gold, coltan, uranium, copper, chromium and much more.

If you think the loss of the Strait of Hormuz is giving the U.S. fits, the loss of access to Africa’s natural resources would cause capitalists everywhere to become positively apoplectic. The African World has been unable to gain control of its resources because western imperialism has been laser-focused on maintaining its greedy grip on the continent. The militarization of Africa through U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) has not been a charitable or benevolent enterprise. Likewise, it has been no coincidence that Congo, which may possess the highest concentration of mineral wealth anywhere, has been plagued by perpetual externally induced turmoil, which has made it easy for foreign corporations to engage in plunder with impunity.

As African Liberation Day fast approaches, there will be commemorative events all over the world. These gatherings will provide opportunities to have serious discussions about how to continue the intergenerational struggle to gain for Black people everywhere the leverage and power needed to force oppressors to back off and back down. This is not an objective that will be achieved in the near term. It is nevertheless an imperative, and we need look no further than Iran’s strategic use of the Strait of Hormuz to understand why.

Mark P. Fancher is an attorney and writer. He can be contacted at [email protected].

source: Black Agenda Report

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“In Order to Break Free, One Must Be Acutely Aware of Being a Slave” — Malik Muhammad

This essay from Malik was written at the end of March 2026 while in custody at Eastern Oregon Correctional, shortly before they were transferred to South Carolina.

There’s a pattern here: for the last 3 years Ramadan, I’m targeted. I’m snatched from mainline and taken to the hole under “Investigation”. I’m hit with some bogus “Unauthorized Organization” and I’m locked away in the hole for the rest of the year. It’s often that those targeted in prison, those considered activists or revolutionaries are sent to the hole, not for something they’ve done, but for what the administration thinks we MIGHT do. For them, it’s better to be preemptive. Not unlike the U.S. and Israel’s “preemptive” strikes on Iran. It’s just a cover for doing what they want anyways.

For 3 years, I’ve been dealing with this, now I’m here again, spend my Ramadan in the hole again due to nothing more than white fragility. The white male ego. Hurt at the notion that not only do I not like or respect the fascist state, but there’s a whole wide network of folks who also hold hatred for the state and do no think what they do is a “public good”, but rather, a genocide. Slavery by another name.

So I sit in the hole for “Disrespect” in talking to my partner on the phone about my frustrations with C.O.’s [ed.: Correctional Officers]. I was given 14 days – that ended on March 16. They refuse to return me, instead placing me on “STM hold” indefinitely [ed.: Security Threat Management]. No cause. But then, the state doesn’t need a reason to repress us – they need reasons NOT to.

The real reason for all this? Enlightening people, giving people knowledge. I was buying books for people, studying books like “Blood In My Eye”, Settlers, “Open Veins Of Latin America”, studying black anarchist thought from Lucy Parsons to William C. Anderson, Martin Sostre to Lorenzo Irvin and more. That was my true crime. With the book ban nationwide, there’s a clampdown on literature. Oregon just relies heavily on division, racism, politics and drugs to keep people inundated. So when they see a multiracial group of guys studying together, discussing global politics, the intersectionality of oppression, deconstructing they systems that work to create our material conditions, studying the history of movements and people in resistance and defiance together – that disturbed them. Give oppressed people the books with which to liberate themselves – EDUCATION – they lose their fucking minds. The truth of the matter is: you cannot have a mind that knows itself. In order to break free, one must be acutely aware of being a slave.

So the true reason I sit in segregation again is the same as always – fear. Fear of blacks, fear of potential unknowns, those they cannot control. They ask that I be “friendly” and talk with staff, they ask me to apologize for my conversation and not “see staff as enemies”. I will not. I will not censor myself. I will not capitulate. I’ll leave prison saying “Fuck 12” as I did coming in. Pigs are swine, not friends. ACAB includes CO’s too. No matter the hole you put me in, I will not break my principles. You cannot suppress the people forever. That spark of knowledge will grow and spread, with me in the hole or not.

Love, Rage & Solidarity,

~ Malik

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