Childhood Between Two Americas
JoAnne Deborah Byron was born on 16 July 1947 in the Elmhurst neighbourhood of Queens, New York, and raised in a family that was, in the specific terms of mid-century Black American life, working its way up: her mother was a schoolteacher, her grandparents owned property in Wilmington, North Carolina, where she spent significant stretches of her childhood. The experience of moving between North and South as a child — between the de facto segregation of New York and the de jure segregation of North Carolina — gave her an unusually clear view of how racial hierarchy operated across different regional forms: it was the same system producing different costumes, and the violence underneath was identical in structure even when it presented differently on the surface.
She was a gifted student who attended the City College of New York, where she encountered the political ferment of the late 1960s — the civil rights movement fracturing into Black Power, the anti-war movement, the women's movement, the specific intensity of New York radical culture in a period when every institution seemed to be contesting its own terms. She moved through several political affiliations before joining the Black Panther Party's New York chapter in the late 1960s, drawn to the Panthers' combination of community service work and structural political analysis rather than to the kind of organisational militancy that some other formations were practising. In the Panthers, she was involved in the free breakfast programmes, health clinics, and political education work that constituted the organisation's community face — the work that Fred Hampton in Chicago and the New York chapter both understood as the foundation of serious revolutionary politics.
The Black Liberation Army and Underground Politics
The Black Liberation Army was not, in the conventional sense, an organisation — it had no central headquarters, no formal membership rolls, no unified command structure. It was more accurately a network of people who had concluded, in the early 1970s, that the Black Panther Party's move toward electoral and community service politics was a retreat from the more confrontational approach that the conditions of Black life in America required, and who organised themselves into small cells conducting what they described as armed struggle against the repressive apparatus of the American state. The BLA claimed responsibility for a series of attacks on police officers in New York and other cities between 1971 and 1973, operations that the FBI and local police departments responded to with a level of force and surveillance that swept up many people who were associated with Black radical politics regardless of their specific involvement in BLA activities.
Shakur's precise role in the BLA has been the subject of sustained dispute between her supporters, who argue that she was targeted by COINTELPRO as a symbol and leader rather than because of direct evidence of specific acts, and prosecutors and law enforcement, who maintained that she was a central figure in BLA operations. What is clear is that by 1973 she was among the most prominent targets of the FBI's campaign against the BLA, that she had been stopped and searched by police on multiple occasions in the preceding months, and that the 2 May 1973 New Jersey Turnpike stop was not an ordinary traffic stop but an encounter that all parties understood in advance was likely to be dangerous.
The New Jersey Turnpike: What the Evidence Shows
In the early morning hours of 2 May 1973, a car carrying Assata Shakur (then JoAnne Chesimard), Zayd Malik Shakur, and Sundiata Acoli was stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike near Exit 9 by State Troopers Werner Foerster and James Harper. The stop was apparently initiated because the car had a broken tail light; Foerster and Harper recognised the occupants and understood that the situation was potentially significant. What happened in the minutes that followed is disputed, but its outcomes are not: when it was over, Trooper Foerster was dead, shot with his own service weapon; Trooper Harper was wounded; Zayd Shakur was dead; and Assata Shakur was wounded, shot twice — once in the shoulder and once in the chest — and lying on the highway.
The medical evidence presented at her subsequent trial, and the forensic analysis that her lawyers and subsequent researchers have conducted, is central to the question of her guilt. The gunshot wounds she sustained were consistent with her having been shot while her hands were raised — the entry and exit trajectories showed that the bullet that passed through her arm entered from the front and travelled upward, indicating that her arm was raised at the time of impact. The nerve damage to her median nerve — which her doctors testified would have made it physically impossible for her to use her right hand to aim and fire a weapon in the immediate aftermath of the injury — was documented by medical witnesses. Her lawyers argued, and have continued to argue, that she was wounded in the opening moments of the confrontation, before she could have fired a shot, and that the prosecution's account of her as the organising intelligence of an attack on the officers was forensically inconsistent with the physical evidence.
"Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them."
Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography, 1987Six Trials, One Conviction
Between the Turnpike incident in May 1973 and her conviction in March 1977, Assata Shakur was tried six times in connection with various alleged BLA activities — bank robberies, kidnappings, murders — and in every case other than the Trooper Foerster murder was either acquitted or had charges dismissed. The pattern of prosecutions was itself evidence, her lawyers argued, of the government's determination to incarcerate her regardless of the specific evidence available — to throw enough charges at her that one would eventually stick, to keep her in pretrial detention and judicial process for years as a form of punishment independent of any particular conviction.
The 1977 trial on the Foerster murder charge was conducted in Morris County, New Jersey, after a change of venue from Middlesex County. The jury was all-white. The lead prosecutor was described by defence observers as having presented the case in terms that went beyond the specific facts to invoke a broader narrative of Black urban terrorism — the cultural panic about the BLA and about Black radical violence generally that the media coverage of the period had cultivated. The defence's medical evidence about the impossibility of Shakur having fired during the encounter was contested by prosecution experts. The jury convicted after deliberating. She was sentenced to life in prison plus thirty-three years.
Prison, Childbirth, and Amnesty International
The conditions of Assata Shakur's imprisonment were the subject of sustained criticism from human rights organisations throughout her time in custody. She was held for extended periods in the men's wing of Rikers Island — in conditions that Amnesty International described in 1978 as "totally inappropriate for a woman" and that included inadequate medical care, restricted movement, and treatment that Amnesty classified as cruel, inhuman, or degrading. She was pregnant at the time of the Turnpike incident, and her daughter Kakuya was born while she was in prison. The circumstances of the birth — in the hospital wing of a correctional facility, with the attendant restrictions on her and her child's movement — became one of the specific indictments in the human rights case against her treatment.
She was eventually transferred to the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women in Dannemora, New York, where on 2 November 1979, in an operation that has never been fully reconstructed in its details, she was freed by a group of BLA members who overpowered guards during a visit. She was driven away and disappeared into an underground network that kept her hidden from federal authorities for years. She eventually made her way to Cuba, arriving around 1984, where the government of Fidel Castro granted her political asylum — a decision that the United States government protested vigorously and that has been a recurring point of diplomatic tension between Washington and Havana ever since.
Cuba and the Autobiography
In Cuba, Assata Shakur has lived what she has described as a relatively ordinary life — working, writing, and maintaining connections with the international community of people who regard her case as emblematic of the American criminal justice system's treatment of Black political radicals. Her 1987 autobiography, Assata: An Autobiography, is one of the most widely read texts in American radical political education — regularly assigned in university courses on race, gender, incarceration, and political resistance, and regularly cited by activists as a foundational text for understanding the relationship between state violence and Black political organising in the 1960s and 1970s.
The book is not only a political account but a literary one — written with a poet's attention to language and a novelist's attention to the specific texture of experience, moving between the childhood in Queens and Wilmington, the political awakening at City College, the Panther years, the trials, and the prison time with a formal control that makes it considerably more than a political memoir. It is the record of a life lived at the intersection of some of the most significant political forces in twentieth-century America, written by someone who was both subject to those forces and an active agent within them, and who has had decades of exile in which to reflect on what they meant and what they cost.
The 2013 Terrorist Designation and Its Politics
On the fortieth anniversary of the Turnpike incident, in May 2013, the FBI announced that Assata Shakur was being added to its Most Wanted Terrorists list — making her the first woman ever placed on that list — and that the reward for information leading to her capture was being doubled to two million dollars. The announcement was accompanied by a statement from the New Jersey State Police that described her as a "domestic terrorist" who was "living comfortably" in Cuba while the family of Werner Foerster continued to suffer.
The designation was widely criticised by civil liberties organisations and by the international human rights community. The NAACP, the National Lawyers Guild, and numerous academic organisations signed statements arguing that the terrorist designation — which carried the specific legal and political weight of the post-9/11 counter-terrorism framework — was being applied retroactively and inappropriately to a case that predated the legal definition of domestic terrorism and involved disputed facts that a properly functioning justice system should have examined more carefully. The designation also complicated the Obama administration's diplomatic opening to Cuba, which was then being negotiated; Cuba made clear that it would not extradite Shakur regardless of American pressure, and the diplomatic opening proceeded without her case being resolved.
The Question of Guilt and the Question of Justice
The question of whether Assata Shakur killed Werner Foerster is, in the strict legal sense, settled — she was convicted by a jury and the conviction has not been overturned. In the political and historical sense, it remains genuinely contested. The forensic evidence about the impossibility of her having fired the weapon, the medical testimony about her wounds, the pattern of prosecutions that produced acquittals in every other case, the all-white jury in a politically charged atmosphere, the documented programme of COINTELPRO targeting of BLA members and BPP figures — all of these are real facts that a reasonable person can weigh against the jury's conclusion and find reason to question it.
What is not contested is that she has spent more than forty years in exile as a consequence of that conviction, that the United States government has spent those forty years pursuing her with legal mechanisms ranging from extradition requests to terrorist designations, and that she is now in her late seventies, living in Cuba, unlikely to return to the United States voluntarily, and unlikely to be forcibly returned as long as the Cuban government maintains its current political position. The question of what justice would look like in her case — for Foerster's family, for the Shakur family, for the broader political community whose history her case represents — is not one that the current legal and diplomatic situation offers any mechanism for answering.