Assata and the Refusal of the Cage
On living free, dying free, and what we might salvage.
ASSATA SHAKUR
Say her name slow,
say it like breath,
say it until the cage
begins to tremble.
***
The first time I opened Assata: An Autobiography I was nineteen, in a dorm room that smelled faintly of stale pizza and weed, the kind of room where everything felt provisional and uncertain. The walls were cinderblock, painted an indifferent off-white, and the fluorescent light overhead buzzed as though it too were restless. I was surrounded by books stacked high on my desk, most of them borrowed from the library, spines cracked but pages barely touched, evidence more of intention than of understanding.
I picked up her book expecting something dutiful, another text I could skim, but her face on the cover held me before I even turned the first page. She looked directly at the camera, and through it at me, with a gaze that was both fierce and searching, as if she were asking whether I was ready to know her story, whether I was prepared to bear the weight of what she carried. And then I began to read.
Assata’s voice leapt from the page. It was not distant or academic. It was alive, sharp with humor and pain, vivid with love and rage. She wrote of her childhood, of her political awakening, of the brutality of police, of the constant sense of being hunted. She did not ask permission. She did not soften the edges for palatability. She spoke as if her life depended on being heard, and maybe it did. I underlined a line with a pen that sputtered and skipped, pressing the ink into the paper until the nib tore slightly through: It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win.
Those words felt less like a sentence than like an indictment and a summons. I was nineteen, unprepared, but I knew immediately they would follow me.
Years later, when I was invited to write a children’s book in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever: The Courage to Dream, I thought again of that dorm room. Wakanda, in the imagination of millions, is a place of Black futurity unscarred by colonial plunder, the freest Black place ever conjured in mainstream popular culture. I decided to name my title character Assata. I wanted to plant her name in that soil, to ensure that children encountered it not in an old police report or FBI propaganda but in a place that symbolized liberation without compromise. My hope was simple: that a child might pause, ask who she was, and follow the thread back to the real woman. That through a comic-book kingdom, they might stumble into history, and in history find the lesson that freedom is never given but always taken.
Because this is what must be said clearly: Assata Shakur lived free, and she died free.
That single fact sets her apart in the long and devastating ledger of Black resistance in America.
She was born JoAnne Deborah Byron in 1947 in New York City, raised Queens, moving often between relatives. Her childhood was full of contradictions—warmth and instability, family love alongside the everyday violence of poverty and racism. By the late 1960s she was politicized, drawn first into student activism, then the Black Panther Party, where she worked on community programs like free breakfasts and healthcare clinics, and later into the Black Liberation Army, which believed armed resistance was necessary to confront a state that killed and imprisoned Black people without consequence.
For that choice she became a marked woman.
The United States government had already declared war on Black radical movements. The FBI’s counterintelligence program, COINTELPRO, was designed to neutralize those the state deemed subversive. Its targets ranged from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to the Black Panthers to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. himself. Agents bugged phones, forged letters, spread rumors, planted informants, framed leaders, and in some cases orchestrated assassinations. The goal was not simply to watch but to destroy. Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois Black Panthers, was twenty-one years old when Chicago police, working with the FBI, stormed his apartment and shot him to death as he slept beside his pregnant partner. That was COINTELPRO.
It was under this shadow that Assata lived her adult life.
She was arrested repeatedly in the early 1970s, accused of bank robberies, kidnappings, and conspiracies. In nearly every case the charges collapsed or juries acquitted her. Still, the state pursued her relentlessly. Then, in May of 1973, she was stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike with two members of the Black Liberation Army. A shootout followed. A state trooper was killed. Assata was shot twice and captured. Forensic evidence showed she had not fired a weapon—her wounds made it nearly impossible—but she was charged with murder. After years of trials marked by bias and irregularities, she was convicted in 1977 and sentenced to life in prison.
Even then, her story was not finished. In 1979, with the help of allies, she escaped from prison. For several years she lived underground, moving in secrecy, before resurfacing in Cuba in 1984, where she was granted asylum. There she raised her daughter, taught, wrote, and continued to speak out against U.S. imperialism. For decades she lived in Havana, labeled a terrorist by America, but living instead as a mother, a teacher, a writer, and a revolutionary in exile.
That she was never recaptured is not accident. It is triumph. To say she lived free and died free is not to ignore the costs she bore but to name the victory she achieved against an empire that devours its radicals. Malcolm X was assassinated. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Fred Hampton was murdered in his bed. Huey Newton was killed in the street. Others were buried in prisons, their lives consumed by decades of captivity. Assata slipped their net. She chose life elsewhere rather than death inside. That was her victory.
That was our victory.
Of course, America cannot admit this. To the state she remains a terrorist. But the word is less about her than about control. It is the word empire uses to describe anyone who dares to refuse its inevitabilities, anyone who escapes its grasp. It is meant not only to criminalize her but to terrify the rest of us, to suggest that freedom outside empire is impossible.
But to read her words is to know otherwise.
Her autobiography reveals her not as symbol alone but as woman. She wrote of the loneliness of exile, of missing her daughter, of the exhaustion of being hunted, of the indignities of prison. She also wrote of love, of laughter, of the small joys that kept her human. She was not marble, not myth. She was flesh and blood, vulnerable and alive. It is precisely her humanity that makes her defiance more powerful. She refused inevitability not as an abstract idea but as a daily choice lived in her body.
Her story is not safely behind us. It is our present tense. The surveillance that tracked her has metastasized into a digital prison of algorithms and metadata. The raids on Panther apartments echo in today’s militarized ICE and National Guard invasions of neighborhoods. The criminalization of radical texts finds its reflection in school libraries stripped of books. The playbook has not changed, only the tools. To know her story is to recognize that what happened then is happening now, in different guise but with the same intent.
What does she teach us?
Refusal, first. America insists poverty is permanent, prisons are natural, war is unavoidable. She refused inevitability and in doing so revealed it as lie.
Solidarity, second. She survived because others risked themselves to hide her, to move her, to protect her. The state called it conspiracy. We should call it love.
Exile, third. Americans are taught to believe there is no outside, no alternative, that this country is the inevitable end of history. She chose otherwise. She chose Cuba over captivity. She showed that sanctuary is not betrayal but clarity, that sometimes to leave is the only way to live.
She belongs to a lineage of Black feminist radicals who remain our clearest guides in dark times: Angela Davis, Elaine Brown, June Jordan, Toni Cade Bambara. They knew that fascism grows where white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism converge. Together they form a liturgy across generations, call and response, reminding us that survival requires both voice and struggle, that silence is not safety but surrender.
I think often of that dorm room, of the cheap pen scratching at thin paper, of the way her words ignited in me. And I think of the child who may one day open my book and meet a character named Assata, who may pause at the name and ask who she was. If they follow that question, they may find her autobiography, and through it discover a life that refuses resignation. They may learn early what so many of us learned late: that freedom is not a holiday or a slogan but a practice. That inevitability is a lie. That survival inside empire is not freedom.
Assata lived free. She died free. That is her gift, and her burden upon us. The question is whether we will honor her not only in memory but in action. Will we defend one another as she was defended? Will we refuse inevitability when the state tells us cages are natural? Will we build solidarities strong enough to withstand what is already upon us? Will we, in short, have the courage to live free rather than simply survive?
To remember her rightly is to choose. To refuse forgetting. To refuse distortion. To refuse resignation. She lived free. She died free. And now it is our turn.
If my work has ever moved you, taught you, or simply made you feel seen—please consider buying my novel This Thing of Ours or becoming a paid subscriber here on Substack. I keep my writing accessible because I believe in sharing freely, but sustaining that model requires support. Your investment helps me continue doing this work with care, depth, and honesty.
