Assata Shakur was thirty-two when she escaped from Clinton Correctional Facility in New Jersey in November 1979. She had been in custody since 1973, after a New Jersey Turnpike traffic stop that ended with one state trooper and one occupant of her car dead. She maintained then and maintains now that she did not fire a weapon during the incident. The FBI maintained then and maintains now that she did. She has been in Cuba since 1984, where Fidel Castro granted her political asylum.
The autobiography is written from inside that exile and inside that argument. It moves in non-linear time, the years in prison interleaved with the years of her political formation in the late 1960s, the early Black Panther Party, the BLA, and the COINTELPRO operations that, as we now know from FBI documents released after her conviction, were targeted at members of her cohort.
The book is most powerful when Shakur is writing as a poet, which she is by training. Long passages move into verse without warning. The prose registers slide. The effect, intended or not, is that the official account of her life — the one the New Jersey courts produced and the one the FBI has maintained for fifty years — gets crowded out by the voice of the woman the official account is about.
Read it for the voice. Read it also as a primary source on COINTELPRO's actual operations, which are documented now in the Church Committee files and the Hampton-Clark estate litigation. The Lawrence Hill Books edition is the standard.
Editorial commentary
Assata Shakur's Assata: An Autobiography (1987) is the political memoir of one of the most consequential figures of the late-period U.S. Black Liberation movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. The memoir documents Shakur's political formation, her engagement with the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army, her 1973 arrest, her 1977 conviction, her 1979 escape from prison, and her subsequent exile in Cuba.
Assata Shakur was born JoAnne Deborah Byron in 1947 and was active in the U.S. Black Liberation movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. She was arrested in New Jersey in 1973 after a turnpike traffic stop in which one police officer and one Black Liberation Army member were killed, was convicted in 1977 in proceedings whose evidentiary basis has remained substantially contested, escaped from prison in 1979, and has lived in political asylum in Cuba since 1984. Her 1987 autobiography remains in print across multiple editions.
The memoir's documentary contribution is its first-person account of the political and personal experience of a Black radical organizer through the specific period of intensified federal counter-intelligence operations against Black political organizations — the COINTELPRO program — that operated between 1956 and 1971. Shakur's memoir provides one of the most extended first-person accounts of operating under those conditions.
The legal proceedings against Shakur in the New Jersey case have remained substantially contested. The evidence presented at trial included contested ballistics findings, contested forensic evidence, and witness testimony whose reliability has been argued in subsequent legal review. The case has remained one of the recurring reference points in U.S. discussions of political prisoners from the period.
The Lawrence Hill Books 2001 reissue with a foreword by Angela Davis is the standard contemporary edition. Shakur's exile in Cuba, where she has lived since 1984, has shaped the diplomatic relationship between the United States and Cuba across multiple subsequent decades. The case is documented in the U.S. State Department's annual human-rights reports and in the Cuban government's responding documentation.
This entry sits within the archive's broader catalogue of primary-source documents, book reviews, audio essays, and discussion circles. Readers approaching the material for the first time will find suggested reading paths in the curated bundles in the shop section; readers with prior background in the tradition will find adjacent material via the Read Alongside links at the foot of each detail page. The archive's editorial policy is to reproduce public-domain texts in full, to excerpt in-copyright material under fair-use conventions with attribution to canonical sources, and to cite living scholars by name where their work is engaged. Provenance fields on each document record the source, the year of first publication, and the canonical digital edition used as the basis for the version on this site.
Where this archive links to a book purchase, the link routes through Bookshop.org, which directs a share of the purchase price to independent bookstores. Affiliate disclosures are at the foot of every page; the editorial selection is not influenced by the affiliate arrangement.
Editorial commentary
Assata Shakur's Assata: An Autobiography (1987) is the political memoir of one of the most consequential figures of the late-period U.S. Black Liberation movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. The memoir documents Shakur's political formation, her engagement with the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army, her 1973 arrest, her 1977 conviction, her 1979 escape from prison, and her subsequent exile in Cuba.
Assata Shakur was born JoAnne Deborah Byron in 1947 and was active in the U.S. Black Liberation movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. She was arrested in New Jersey in 1973 after a turnpike traffic stop in which one police officer and one Black Liberation Army member were killed, was convicted in 1977 in proceedings whose evidentiary basis has remained substantially contested, escaped from prison in 1979, and has lived in political asylum in Cuba since 1984. Her 1987 autobiography remains in print across multiple editions.
The memoir's documentary contribution is its first-person account of the political and personal experience of a Black radical organizer through the specific period of intensified federal counter-intelligence operations against Black political organizations — the COINTELPRO program — that operated between 1956 and 1971. Shakur's memoir provides one of the most extended first-person accounts of operating under those conditions.
The legal proceedings against Shakur in the New Jersey case have remained substantially contested. The evidence presented at trial included contested ballistics findings, contested forensic evidence, and witness testimony whose reliability has been argued in subsequent legal review. The case has remained one of the recurring reference points in U.S. discussions of political prisoners from the period.
The Lawrence Hill Books 2001 reissue with a foreword by Angela Davis is the standard contemporary edition. Shakur's exile in Cuba, where she has lived since 1984, has shaped the diplomatic relationship between the United States and Cuba across multiple subsequent decades. The case is documented in the U.S. State Department's annual human-rights reports and in the Cuban government's responding documentation.
This entry sits within the archive's broader catalogue of primary-source documents, book reviews, audio essays, and discussion circles. Readers approaching the material for the first time will find suggested reading paths in the curated bundles in the shop section; readers with prior background in the tradition will find adjacent material via the Read Alongside links at the foot of each detail page. The archive's editorial policy is to reproduce public-domain texts in full, to excerpt in-copyright material under fair-use conventions with attribution to canonical sources, and to cite living scholars by name where their work is engaged. Provenance fields on each document record the source, the year of first publication, and the canonical digital edition used as the basis for the version on this site.
Where this archive links to a book purchase, the link routes through Bookshop.org, which directs a share of the purchase price to independent bookstores. Affiliate disclosures are at the foot of every page; the editorial selection is not influenced by the affiliate arrangement.