Assata Shakur died on September 25 in Havana, Cuba. A political refugee, she had been granted political asylum under international law by a sympathetic Cuban government. She was 78 years old.

Assata Shakur was an almost mythical figure among movement people in the United States. Born in Jamaica, Queens in 1947 and later a student at the City University of New York, she became an activist against the American war against the Vietnamese people’s fight for national self- determination. She supported the Cuban revolution, and actively opposed the apartheid government in South Africa.

Assata joined the Black Panther Party, which was destroyed by the American government’s COINTELPRO program, an effort initiated by racist FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, designed to neutralize the leaders of the Black movement for self-determination in America.

She then joined the small group called the Black Liberation Army.

Assata was shot in the back and in the arm after a car in which she was a passenger was stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike. She was gravely wounded and captured in 1973.

Despite a shattered shoulder bone she was accused of hoisting a gun and shooting a state trooper, an impossibility.

She was tried by all-white jury, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison plus 30 years.

Tortured, kept in solitary in an all men’s prison for two years, she was  liberated by comrades six years later, and fled to Cuba which welcomed her and gave her asylum.

The state of New Jersey and Obama’s FBI put a target on her back by offering $2 million bounty for her capture, dead or alive.

When Michael Ratner and I wrote a book about how and why the CIA assassinated Che Guevara, the Cubans published it. They had a book launch in Havana.

We met her there  at the book launch. She bravely came, exposing herself to danger, but nonetheless to show her solidarity with our effort to expose the CIA.

We say goodbye to this great woman, acknowledging her and the example of courage and humanity she set for all of us.

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