Celebrating Black Panther Assata Shakur, Who Turns 77 Today, Is Celebrating Hope

The first shot severed her median nerve, the second her clavicle. At trial, medical testimony proved it was impossible for Assata Shakur to have fired a weapon on or about 1:00 AM on May 2nd, 1973 in a case that was one of the worst incidences of unchecked police violence and brutality. The court transcripts and documentation by Shakur’s attorney, Lennox Hinds in his 1978 work, Illusions of Justice, dispel any lingering doubts one might have. 

Assata had been one of three people inside a white Pontiac driving down the New Jersey Turnpike when the car she, Sundiata Acoli and Zayd Shakur were in was pulled over by State Trooper James Harper. Who knows why? Cops said a tail light was busted. Or they said the Pontiac was traveling just above the speed limit. The data told quite another story that at the time had not been reported in the mainstream media, but is one we know quite well: driving while Black. That’s the undeniable truth.

As is the truth that Zayd Shakur was killed that night. And the truth that Sundiata Acoli briefly escaped (captured roughly 48 hours after the shooting, Sundiata languished in prison for 50 years before being released in 2022). And the truth that Assata was almost mortally wounded.

The trajectory of the bullets prove she had to have had her hands up, surrendering, when she was fired upon by troopers. No gun powder residue was found on her hands after the shooting, and no weapons had her fingerprints on it. All of these are documented truths, along with her being beaten, choked and otherwise tortured while she was chained–arms and legs–to a hospital bed. She shared in her autobiography that she likely survived because a few nurses, seeing this, determined to keep vigilant watch.

In 1977, by the time Assata was convicted of killing of the trooper it was medically impossible for her to have killed, she’d been acquitted or otherwise had dismissed charges in six other trials. But her name and image, predigested by white media had been everywhere for going on a decade. And there was a dead cop. A conviction was probably guaranteed before the first juror was sat. Assata was sentenced to life in prison.  

But today, on her 77th turn around the sun, she remains free, having been liberated by her fellow Party and BLA member, Sekou Odinga, who walked into Clinton Prison for Women in New Jersey and walked out with her. Sekou had organized a team of soldiers and on November 2nd, 1979, six years and six months after the shooting on the Turnpike, Assata was driven to freedom. 

By the time I really learned about her, not just heard her name carried by shifting winds, Assata was here,  I’m 20-nothing, and returning to college as my first marriage whimpered, after 18 months, to a painful halt. I threw myself into academics and student life, getting elected as president of my student government and helping to launch the first Black Student Union in at least 15 years. Our world was less Grandmaster Flash’s The Message than it was PE’s Fear of Black Planet. 

Like Black generations before us, and like the children of Gen Z we would go on to birth and raise, we were young people living in a world where survival meant walking between the raindrops–-walking meaning dodging, raindrops meaning police bullets. By the time Public Enemy arrived to say Fight the Power, we’d been primed. 

But not only by the horrors, also by the hope that resides in the life and liberation of Assata Shakur. 

From Assata: An Autobiography

It is our duty to fight for our freedom.
It is our duty to win.
We must love and support one another.
We have nothing to lose but our chains.

Over the years, I’ve interviewed Assata Shakur, asking her once about whether or not she longs to be back home. The Queens, New York-born sister who was raised in North Carolina, talked about us, African Americans, our ways, customs and habits. But coming back to the US, even if guaranteed a fair trial, which undoubtedly would acquit her, would be, she said like a Jewish person returning to Nazi Germany in 1940. Her observation was at least 10 years before the rise of Trump and the MAGAs.

I didn’t know then quite how true her words were–not just according to me or other Black writers and activists, but even according to Trump’s pick for Veep, J.D. Vance, who called the former president America’s Hitler.

In a world of lies and public executions, in a world of so much harm done and so much that seems just there on the horizon;  despite the attacks people face just saying her name; or artists face memorializing her in an offering, it doesn’t stop us from loving Assata.

Loving her is loving hope, love freedom, loving the idea that it is possible for us to finally stop having to walk between the raindrops, but run, stroll, hike–or rest–beneath the warmth of another sun, as Richard Wright longed for nearly a century ago. It’s why we celebrate her life, say from our very seat of our hearts, Happy Birthday Sister Assata. We are honored to live in a time where you too, are living.

SEE ALSO:

Assata Shakur’s Co-Defendant Sundiata Acoli Fights For His Freedom After Nearly 50 Years In Prison

Sekou Odinga, Movement Elder And Former Political Prisoner Who Freed Assata Shakur, Dies At 79

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