In Honor and Memory of Assata Shakur

Black Alliance For Peace

01 Oct 2025

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They called Assata Shakur a fugitive; we claim her as a compass. Her work and her words will continue to chart the path toward our liberation.

Originally published in The Black Alliance for Peace.

On September 25, 2025, the revolutionary Assata Shakur transitioned, leaving behind a legacy of uncompromising resistance and a blueprint for internationalist solidarity. As an anti-imperialist organization rooted in the long thread of the Black Radical Peace Tradition, we honor her with a renewed commitment to the liberation struggle to which she dedicated her life.

Sister Assata understood that we are a people at war, and the struggle against this war is not one-dimensional. It is a fight for human dignity, community survival, popular power, self-determination, and complete liberation.

The targeting, imprisonment, and torture she endured were the state’s counterinsurgent tactics to squash a movement by capturing its warriors—those who have the radical idea that African/Black people have the right to defend themselves and to be free. This repression continued for decades and across administrations, notably when the Obama administration escalated the attack by placing a $2 million bounty on her head in 2013, forcing her to curtail her public work. This moment demonstrated that the state's war on African/Black revolutionaries is bipartisan and upheld through collaboration with compradors and misleaders.

They call her a fugitive; we claim her as a compass. Her words will continue to chart the path toward our liberation.

Her escape to Cuba was not a retreat but an act of revolutionary internationalism. Sister Assata lived by the principle that the African/Black struggle in the United States is inextricably linked to the struggles of the oppressed throughout the Americas and the world. Her sanctuary was a testament to the Black Radical Peace Tradition. It is a tradition that understands, as our previous work has articulated, that true peace is not the absence of conflict, but the presence of justice, which requires defeating systems of oppression. It is the peace that comes when empires fall and when the colonized are free. She knew that her liberation from behind the walls and from the clutches of the United States was not complete. Sister Assata continued to live her life dedicated to struggling for the day when that peace is achieved.

Assata’s ideology was, at its core, a simple one—to love our people is to fight for our people. Her resistance was rooted in love, dignity, and an unwavering belief in our capacity to win. She taught us that resistance is a duty, that our enemies are not individual people but a brutal system, and that our humanity is non-negotiable.

Sister Assata has made her transition, but her legacy remains. Her journey reminds us that liberation is a borderless struggle. It is our task to continue on the path that she and our other freedom fighters paved for us.

No compromise.

No retreat.

Assata Shakur

Black Liberation Movement

Black Liberation Army

Republic of New Afrika

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