Posted on by Candidate Keith Cascio

Almost a Reparationist Assata Shakur

A seminally important Black American woman, who the FBI and New Jersey law enforcement consider a domestic terrorist, and who a broad coalition of civil rights activists nevertheless consider a folk hero, passed away thirty-four days ago, on September 25, 2025, at age 78. Since her passing, the international debate over her crimes and her merits rages afresh. Her legacy is an exceedingly controversial, even reputationally dangerous, topic on which to express political opinions, and it is also, uncoincidentally, a powerful intellectual irritant, eliciting deep insights about American society and the Black struggle. She is Assata Olugbala Shakur, known to admirers as Queen Assata Shakur, born JoAnne Deborah Byron, widely known under her married name Joanne Chesimard, and Godmother to Tupac Shakur. And she cannot be ignored.

I set out here to express my most circumspect analysis, based on the knowledge my team and I gathered via study, especially since her passing. I remain open to feedback from the law enforcement community, or the civil rights activist community, if I get any of this wrong. As a Republican candidate for California’s most historic Black district, I am pro-civil rights, pro-Black liberation, and I consider the American civil rights movement totally unfinished. I am also unequivocally and unapologetically pro-law enforcement. Part of my political mission is to prove there is no contradiction there.

Shakur famously said “It is our duty to fight for freedom”, and indeed she viewed herself, and millions view her, as a Freedom Fighter. With the hindsight of decades, and having benefited from the profound economic insights delivered by the modern reparations movement, it seems clarifying, unifying and healing to instead view her and her associates as misguided and/or distracted and/or stymied Reparationists. In other words, under better and clearer circumstances she could have been, would have been, and should have been a self-empowered reparations activist, an advocate for a business solution, rather than an unrepentant and suicidal advocate for revolutionary violence. And, surely influenced by the remarkable cultural chaos of the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was the misunderstanding of a quest for, basically, money, as if it were instead a quest for simple liberty, that led inevitably to an out-of-control spiraling and escalating descent into pernicious violence that, when assessed in its totality, fully earns the terrorism label, and thus strictly obligates professional law enforcement agencies such as the FBI to officially declare her a terrorist (though not on the basis, as is widely misunderstood, of shooting or murdering anyone), because for them to do otherwise would be to abandon the sound functioning of professional law enforcement in the United States and irresponsibly undermine the distinguishing world-class advantages of American society.

Economic realists, and thus reparations advocates, such as we are, do not view the Black struggle as a quest for mere liberty, if that concept is interpreted in an angstfully anti-capitalist, even Marxist, sense. And Shakur was, indeed, explicitly and loudly anti-capitalist. Mere Marxist liberty, i.e. the freedom to be poor, perhaps also the empty freedom to be displaced and far from home, is cheaply and relatively easily achievable. But that is why we reparationists view the Black struggle as a quest for the payment of debts owed, having been rightly earned through hundreds of years of backbreaking work and also brilliant intellectual work, the IP fruits of which have been routinely stolen with inadequate compensation. Yes, the Black struggle is a struggle for decency, and rights, and safety, and fairness, and equality, etc, but those abstract conditions become properly negotiable in the USA once you make it about money.

In general, Black civil rights activists do not perceive Assata Shakur as a criminal or a “cop killer”, whereas law enforcement spokespeople take every opportunity to castigate her as just that, a “cop killer”. The reasons for the persistent coexistence of extremely different perspectives are, for one, the trust-collapsing tendentious legal rhetoric used by professionals and elected officials who are obligated to sway public perception to protect the institution of law enforcement, and furthermore the hidden elements of the capitalist American economy that everyone actively ignores and that, by design, create confusion. As a reminder, we write here as patriotic Americans and as proud Republican capitalists. But, for example, the annihilation of Black Americans that Shakur wrote of fearing is a red herring, because in truth aggressive capitalism seeks permanent exploitation, never annihilation. But we tend not to talk about or even think about this brutal tendency towards exploitation.

In the course of epic civilization-level struggles, unpredictable historical events transform particular ultra-high-profile individuals into cultural symbols, a process that tends to suddenly obscure historically irrelevant aspects of their lives and massively magnify the historically symbolic aspects. Such a powerful and unavoidable group-epistemic phenomenon has shaped the legacies of such diverse figures as JFK (who had blemishes), MLK Jr (who had blemishes), Malcolm X (who had blemishes), Charlie Kirk (who had blemishes, and whose violent death in the prime of youth came fifteen days before her peaceful death of old age), and, of course, Assata Shakur (who had blemishes).

Perhaps it is Kafkaesque, but in the business-oriented American sociopolitical environment, police form the interface, they are who you face, but they are not your true enemy. They are bureaucratic professionals performing a paid job and they want and deserve to go home to their families. It might sound oddly anticlimactic and almost counterintuitive, but policing cannot and must not be dangerous work. Indeed, measured in fatality rates, loggers (lumberjacks), aircraft pilots, oil derrick operators, roofers, power linemen, crossing guards, and highway maintenance workers all have more dangerous jobs than American police. Professional police will justifiably insist that their safety not be made an instrument of political struggle.

Meanwhile, can we realistically expect American Black folks to shed tears of self-sacrificial sympathy, empathy or remorse, after enduring hundreds of years of violent racial exploitation and the insult of ambivalent contempt and widespread lack of curiosity on top of that?!

We should consider some factors that pressed on the minds of Assata Shakur and her two associates Zayd Malik Shakur (born James F Costan) and Sundiata Acoli (born Clark Edward Squire) that fateful night May 2, 1973, when the fatal Turnpike shootout occurred. Surely heavy on her mind was that four years earlier, in December 1969, FBI agents, under the direction of the viciously anti-Black racist COINTELPRO program, deliberately assassinated Black Panther deputy chairman Fred Hampton in Chicago, along with his colleague Mark Clark, aided by relentless surveillance, deception, infiltration, sedative drugs and more than one hundred disfiguring bullets. Also possibly affecting their state of mind, could have been the sneaking suspicion that the radical methods and tactics of their new organization, the Black Liberation Army, a radicalized and more violent offshoot of the Black Panther Party distinct from and predating the Symbionese Liberation Army, were totally doomed and that the BLA model was a dead end and a gruesome trap. Two years earlier, April 6, 1971, Assata Shakur had been ignominiously shot in her stomach with her own gun while attempting to threaten the life of a client of hers in order to collect a drug debt. In May of 1971 BLA killers had perpetrated the ambush shootings and permanent maimings of NYPD officers Curry and Binetti on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and the heinous ambush murders of NYPD Officers Jones and Piagentini in Harlem. In January 1972 other BLA killers had perpetrated the even more heinous ambush murders of NYPD Officers Foster and Laurie in the East Village. In July 1972 other armed BLA associates hijacked Delta Air Lines Flight 841 in Detroit with one hundred and one terrified human beings on board, forced it to Miami, then Boston, then 4000 miles away to the country of Algeria in Africa, collected a $1M ransom, and escaped. In January 1973, merely four months earlier, BLA would-be killers ambushed and shot NYPD officers in Queens NY (Michael O’Reilly, 37, and Roy Pollina, 36) and Brooklyn NY (Carlo Imperato, 28, and his brother, Vincent, 32). All combined, this was a genuinely terroristic track record, one that had the effect of changing American policing forever, towards harsher militarized tactics, thus not in a way that made our country a happier or a safer place. BLA activities created the modern American law enforcement obsession with the targeting of police officers, also not a development that has benefited anyone in the USA. BLA activities also wrecked the efficient functioning of the 911 dispatch system, by using it as a trap to lure and kill police, another unwelcome “gift” that has harmed the interests of all Americans, Black and non-Black. Also on Shakur’s mind would have been the fact that she had publicly advocated for violent resistance to law enforcement, and she had not disavowed the murderous rampages, and her defiant provocation was well-known. By mid 1973, she was a fugitive, there was a manhunt underway for her, she was hiding and moving around safehouses frequently, which made her vulnerable to victimization by criminals, and thus in need of armed protection. But on the night of May 2, was it prudent to keep loaded guns in the cabin of the white Pontiac LeMans with Vermont license plates, while traveling on the New Jersey Turnpike? Alternatively, the guns could have been stowed in the trunk. What scenario would benefit from loaded guns in the car? Didn’t it greatly increase the risk of a shootout with police, which is a futile and counterproductive outcome? Would we view her choices as reasonable under the circumstances? But, to be real, we must view that terrible night as the next phase of a wildly out-of-control spiral into a desperate “fog of war” that brings mistakes, miscalculations, and senseless violence.

If, in her desperation as a fugitive, a hunted Black woman in a racist country (although perhaps less racist than many other countries, as attested by famously well-traveled Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver, who she never met, in his 1978 book Soul on Fire), Assata Shakur had feared being tried by an all-white jury, then her fear was legitimate, because she was indeed tried by an all-white jury in 1977. So, as Shakur knew all too well, the American justice system was shockingly racist, even as late as the late 1970s.

One officer was killed in the May 2 Turnpike shootout: New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster (incidentally, an immigrant from Leipzig, Saxony, Germany). Fellow BLA associate Sundiata Acoli was quickly tried for, and convicted of, Foerster’s murder in 1974, and the prosecution clearly stated the theory that Acoli, who was paroled in 2022 at the age of 85, was the triggerman who fired the fatal shots. How could Assata Shakur be tried for the murder of the same officer, which is precisely what happened in 1977? Because of the confusing and supremely important common law Felony Murder Rule. To unpack the meaning of that legalism, she was tried, not so much for shooting anyone, but for failing to distance herself from a situation, and distance herself from people, who were behaving in a way that a reasonable person would consider to carry an extreme risk of getting someone killed. It surprises a lot of us to realize that you can be convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison essentially for a form of collusive negligence, but you absolutely can, and these convictions happen all the time. Indeed, as her stalwart attorneys Lennox Hinds of Rutgers and William Kunstler have tirelessly reminded us, without the Felony Murder Rule, it would have been impossible to convict her of murder, since the facts established during the 1977 trial were that neutron activation analysis showed she had no arsenic residue on her hands or clothing that would indicate having fired a gun, that no guns recovered from the scene had her fingerprints on them, that the configuration of her own gunshot wounds tended to indicate she was in a hands-up surrender position when she was shot and thus unlikely to have shot first and subsequently surrendered, that once her right arm was shot it was limp and useless for gun play, that while her pants were stained with Foerster’s blood this was consistent with simply being near the action, and that the gun that killed Trooper Foerster was found under Zayd’s leg. But collusive negligence is much clearer and easier to prove when the individual is blatantly affiliated with, and has refused to renounce, a genuinely terroristic and murderous radical political organization.

Indeed, in November 1973 violently impulsive BLA associate Twymon Myers died violently in a dramatic shootout with St Louis police. In November 1979, after Assata Shakur was convicted and incarcerated, BLA associates exploited relatively lax prison protocols at the time to rescue her and spring her out of prison, by threatening to shoot hostages at Clinton Correctional Facility for Women. Overall, what BLA did in the 1970s, the ambushes, the 911 traps, the jailbreak, the plane hijack, was to take advantage of the USA’s relatively open society at the time, as compared against the more militarized and locked-down society we suffer through today, thanks in large part to their pointless ruthlessness. In October 1981 BLA committed yet another spectacularly aggressive and yet ultimately pointless and vicious crime, robbing a Brinks armored truck in Nanuet, New York, and in the process murdering a guard and two more police officers, Edward O’Grady and Waverly Brown. On that deadly day Shakur was a fugitive hiding somewhere inside the United States. At no point did she publicly distance herself from this decade-long spree of murderous violence, nor disavow it, and thus her complicity in the trail of death persisted all the way through to her passing away last month. Until the bitter end, she failed to denounce the philosophy and activities of Black Liberation Army.

She escaped to Cuba in 1985, where she would remain ever after. She reported that her favorite Spanish word is “venceremos”. After her escape to Cuba, and after most of her BLA associates had been either killed or imprisoned, could she personally be considered a danger to the public? Realistically, perhaps not. Could she symbolically be considered a danger to the public, especially to the dedicated members of the profession of American law enforcement? Yes, it seems. Because the threatening of the safety of law enforcement officers as an instrument of political struggle simply cannot be normalized. Between a combination of personal choices, and perhaps some fateful happenstance, Shakur had fallen into a situation where law enforcement must condemn her, her organization, and her ideology, because charismatic support for murderous terrorism puts the safety of all officers at risk.

So we cannot be shocked that American state and federal law enforcement routinely used inflammatory and perhaps misleading language meant to aggressively vilify her and poison her reputation. In 1998 they called her a “cold-blooded murderer”, which would make most Americans assume that she actively killed someone. In 2005, George W Bush’s FBI, partly as a diplomatic bargaining chip to put pressure on Cuba and other uncooperative countries, elevated her to the status of a “domestic terrorist”. In 2013, in the press conference announcing the addition of her to the FBI’s “Most Wanted Terrorists” list and a doubling of the money reward for her capture, Black FBI Special Agent Aaron Ford accused her of murdering Trooper Werner Foerster “execution style”, which would surely make most Americans assume that he believed she shot someone. There are plenty of terrorist masterminds all over the world who’ve never personally killed anyone, but that doesn’t inflame public sentiment as emotionally as prompting the public to imagine that she personally and ruthlessly shot brave police officers. Of course when we discover that trusted law enforcement officials have played on our emotions and our credulity, it makes us cynical.

This track record of death made Assata Shakur so controversial that even the NAACP (disclosure: I am a proud silver lifetime member) never took a position on her while she was alive. American law enforcement are known to monitor and politically punish candidates and elected officials who make excuses for Assata Shakur or question her designation as a cop killer. In a 2013 interview with Democracy Now!, then-NAACP President Benjamin Jealous stated, “We have not taken any position on the Shakur case”. The day after she died, now that it was politically much safer to do so, the NAACP, for the first time, posted laudatory statements about her on both Facebook and Instagram.

The air of war (Vietnam), political assassination, chaos, violence, uncertainty, and wild appetite for risk, during the early 1970s, surely induced the disorienting political environment that clouded the reasoning of a brilliant Black Panther activist like Shakur, and made reckless violence seem necessary, maybe even promising, when a clearer head recognizes that the American Black struggle is not a struggle for mere Marxist freedom, i.e. the freedom to be poor in a faraway place, but it is actually a struggle for status and acceptance right here in the USA, which in the USA necessarily implies money, and thus it is a thoroughly intellectual project of advocacy requiring the careful documenting and negotiation of quantitative debts. We speak here of slavery reparations, of good, old-fashioned indebtedness, of a historically special variety that passes down through a heritable phenotypic trait, because that happens to be the ruthless scientifically-racial basis on which the uniquely American system of race-based chattel slavery was originally predicated. Far from exotic or untested, such a lineage-based system is the way Native American tribal benefits have been administered in this country for over one hundred years. It seems almost as if the designers and formalizers of American slavery, in their childish cruelty and idiotic greed, wanted to maximize the likelihood of reparations. No?

Insofar as she was almost correct, almost a reparationist, Assata Shakur inspires all of us civil rights activists. By the same token, insofar as she was terribly and tragically mistaken to misunderstand herself as merely a Freedom Fighter, as if everyone doesn’t already know that we primarily fight over money here in the USA, she trapped herself in the necessity of being condemned as a domestic terrorist by all American law enforcement agencies and their partners in government. We should stay humble and realize it is easy to call balls and strikes decades later after the dust settles, and that in large part we owe the crispness of whatever modern clarity we seem to wield to the self-consciously experimental and irreducibly uncertain struggles of bold action-oriented fighters like Assata who treated Black liberation as a matter of personal urgency. After all, can any of us answer the question of how the American Black community was supposed to politely and patiently unriddle the head games of dishonest white supremacy? Can any of us answer how much patience is, or should have been, sufficient? The right way to honor her legacy is to lament “If only she could have avoided the terrible pressures of her wild, wild time, and been a business-minded reparationist like us! She would have been an amazing and intuitive advocate for the repaying of sacred debts! But, alas, despite such marvelous potential, and despite a lack of evidence that she ever shot anyone other than herself (in the stomach, in 1971), and despite a lack of evidence that she ever personally murdered anyone, our beloved Assata tied herself too closely to real terrorism, for which her reputation will forever be stained!”

  • Acknowledgements. We would like to thank:
    • Our campaign advisor Kevin R at First AME Church of Los Angeles for highlighting the political urgency of reckoning with the legacy of this seminal woman.
    • Community organizer, reparations activist, policy analyst, and 2026 CA Assembly Candidate Carolyn Essex for critiquing an earlier draft and providing perspective and guidance on the legacy of Queen Assata Shakur.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *