As a Chicago public high school student in the 2010s, Vee Morris Moore — who uses they/them pronouns — was tasked with writing an English paper on Black activists. Their public education up to that point highlighted prominent figures in the Civil Rights Movement, but not leaders of more radical movements like the Black Panther Party. That’s when they first learned about Assata Shakur.
“She’s one of the first introductions for me, I would say, seeing radical Black women not just take up space, but [be] the guiding factor in what politics looks like and what movement looked like during that time,” said Morris Moore, who is the organizing and programming director of the queer Black woman-led Assata’s Daughters (AD).
Before AD was founded in 2015, there weren’t many radical abolitionist spaces in Chicago that centered Black women, Black girls or femmes. Shakur was a pioneer in the Black radical movement, so the organization was formed and modeled on Shakur’s work on solidarity, building Black power, and mobilizing oppressed people to fight back, Morris Moore explained.
“That work is not sexy. It’s not as visible. It’s work that matures over time. You don’t always see the immediate effects of that type of organizing, the way you can kind of see the impact of like direct action organizing, for example,” Morris Moore said.
On Sept. 25, 2025, Shakur passed away at age 78 in Havana, Cuba, the Caribbean country where she lived in exile. She died from “health conditions and advanced age,” according to Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Her daughter, Kakuya Shakur, confirmed her death on Facebook.
“The beautiful thing about death is that it is, in my opinion, the beginning to infinity,” Morris Moore said.
Shakur mastered what it means to be a Black liberationist, according to Morris Moore. “No matter when Black people see liberation, and who is or isn’t living during that time, I think that the Black folks that are finally able to dismantle and overthrow white supremacy are going to do that on the shoulders of Assata Shakur,” they said.
Shakur is known worldwide as a revolutionary political activist who advocated for liberation as a member of both the Black Panther Party and the underground Black Liberation Army. Shakur was 30 when she was convicted of first-degree murder of a New Jersey state trooper during a 1973 shootout that also left her wounded and killed one of her fellow activists. She escaped prison in 1979 and received political asylum in Cuba in 1984.
Shakur, along with comrade Angela Davis and other supporters such as rappers from Chuck D to Common, always maintained her innocence. The U.S. government painted Shakur as a terrorist, but Shakur identified herself as “a 20th century escaped slave,” drawing historical connections to enslaved ancestors Harriet Tubman and Nat Turner who took freedom into their own hands.
“I, like many other young people, were faced with the threat of prison, underground exile or death. The FBI, with the help of local police agencies, systematically fed false accusations and fake news articles to the press, accusing me and other activists of crimes we did not commit,” Shakur penned in a 1998 open letter to Pope St. Paul II during his visit to Cuba. Shakur spoke about being targeted by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO, the government’s secret spy program that “neutralized” the Black Panther Party and other Black nationalist groups.
“She’s a shero in that people like Assata, they sacrifice. They didn’t start the movement to be a sacrifice. They started it righteously because, like all of us who are in movements, we do it because we’re moved to do it. Because we care about our people,” radical intellectual and activist Lisa Brock said.
While studying at Howard University in the 1970s, Brock learned about Shakur. Brock joined the Washington, D.C. chapter of the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression (NAARPR), which was founded in Chicago and grew out of the struggle to free 26-year-old comrade Angela Davis, who was jailed for aggravated kidnapping and first-degree murder. The movement’s unrelenting freedom campaign helped lead to Davis’ acquittal.
Shakur’s New Jersey case was one that the organization built a defense for, as they did for Davis. By the 1970s, Shakur had been indicted 10 times, but only one resulted in a conviction.
As a member of the NAARPR, Brock organized Solidarity Day rallies, where political prisoners shared their experiences from the inside and spoke with attendees. During a demonstration in 1978, Shakur called in and gave a speech.
Brock and like-minded activists advocated for Shakur’s freedom through the Hands Off Assata movement, which began in the mid-2000s in response to the federal government’s heightened efforts to expedite her return to the U.S. from Cuba. For six years, Brock and others would travel from city to city, declaring her birthday “Assata Shakur Day.”
Brock credits the movement for Shakur’s story gaining greater notoriety.
“It’s not the result of the mainstream news media changing. It’s the result of our movement. We have built a movement and a narrative that encompasses her and correctly sees her as one of our sheroes,” she added.
Shakur was born JoAnne Deborah Byron on July 16, 1947, in Flushing, Queens, New York. As a college student at Borough of Manhattan Community College, and later the City College of New York in the 1960s, she became involved in the Black Liberation movement, the student rights movement and the Anti-Vietnam War movement.
She joined the New York Chapter of the Black Panther Party in 1970 after attending the BPP’s constitutional convention in Philadelphia. She worked with other BPP members to launch a medical clinic, led political education courses for college students and supported defense campaigns for incarcerated people and supported the free breakfast program.
Shakur left the BPP and later became a member of the Black Liberation Army, an underground Black nationalist militant organization that included former BPP and Republic of New Afrika members.
In 1988, after four years of exile in Cuba, Shakur released her seminal text, “Assata: An Autobiography.” The autobiography recounts what happened after the 1973 shooting on the New Jersey turnpike, and the torture and mistreatment she experienced while pregnant and incarcerated.
Shakur also connects the struggle for liberation for Black Americans to that of Black people across the diaspora who are also impacted by the same systems, such as colonialism and imperialism.
For Essence McDowell, an organizer and founder of Kemityu Arts & Media, Shakur’s autobiography is a blueprint for organizers in the struggle. She first read Shakur’s autobiography in her 20s as a graduate student.
“I wasn’t quite an organizer in that way, but I was understanding the world in a lens that was really centered on me being a Black woman and me understanding a Pan-African lens. So it really just sharpened my ideology and helped me understand the United States in a different way,” McDowell said.
Shakur’s written works can be applied to the current conditions Black people are experiencing today, McDowell said. Over the years, she’s reread Shakur’s autobiography again and again. The current “destructive white supremacist, patriarchal violence” of President Donald J. Trump’s administration pushed her to begin organizing again this year after she stopped in 2018. McDowell is currently working to build a Black Feminist Collective.
“There’s no alternative for me to live comfortably amidst this destructive white supremacist, patriarchal violence that’s happening right now,” McDowell said, referring to the aggressive immigration raids happening in Chicago and the conflicts happening globally in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan and Gaza.
“So I have to turn back to organizers like Assata, like rereading the autobiography. It’s so empowering, because I find so much hope and encouragement in these legacies of resistance. If I’m not in direct confrontation with injustice, I’m not doing my job. I’m not living in my purpose,” she said.
Though Shakur escaped incarceration, there’s a heavy sense of grief in knowing that her sacrifice meant never returning home to the U.S., or being in community with her loved ones.
“She went to prison, she was tortured, she was treated horribly and then lived in exile. She wasn’t able to be with her family over much of that time,” Brock said.
Shakur was able to spend time with her daughter during her middle years, Brock explained, but she didn’t get to know her grandchildren.
“It’s a big sacrifice that she ultimately gave for us, for Black people, and I think that’s what it means to me, and I think that’s what it means for all of us. We love her for that,” Brock said
In the early aughts of her exile in the 1990s, Shakur was above ground in Cuba; she met with visiting political groups, such as the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party, and with organizations such as the Radical Women’s International Feminist Brigade. She participated in conferences and met with activists from the Federation of Cuban Women and at the World Youth Festival, held in Havana in 1997.
There were multiple attempts over the years by the local government in New Jersey and in Congress to compel the Cuban government to extradite her to the U.S. As the bounties increased over the years, Shakur was forced to go deeper underground. In 2013, the FBI added Shakur’s name (Joanne Deborah Chesimard) to its Most Wanted Terrorists List with a $2 million bounty. She was the first woman to be listed.
“I think the thing that I have found the most solace in her death is that they never captured her, even though they were trying to right up until she died,” Morris Moore said.
Freedom fighters, McDowell said, are often seen as one-dimensional. Shakur was a whole person: a mother, grandmother, daughter, niece, as well as a poet and an artist.
“If I really honor her, and if I really believe in what she taught, I have to move forward in a way that reflects that. I have to keep organizing,” McDowell said. “I have to keep being in community. I can’t get discouraged because it’s not nearly as aggressive as it was in the 70s and 60s. So I can do it if she did it, and that’s how I honor her, is just keep fighting and keep organizing, even when it feels hard.”
