Assata: An Autobiography (Assata Shakur)

Assata: An Autobiography
Assata: An Autobiography
Author	Assata Shakur
Written in	1987
Publisher	Lawrence Hill Books
First published	1987
Type	Book
ISBN	1-55652-074-3

Forward by Angela Davis

In the 1970s, as Assata Shakur awaited trial on charges of being an accomplice to murder, I participated in a benefit at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, to raise funds for her legal defense. At the time, Assata was being held nearby in the Middlesex County Correctional Facility for Men. Lennox Hinds, a member of the Rutgers faculty, had invited me to be one of the featured speakers at the benefit. Lennox was a leader of the National Conference of Black Lawyers and represented Assata in a federal lawsuit contesting the appalling conditions of her confinement in the New Jersey prison. He had previously worked on my case, and we had both served in the leadership of the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression since its founding in 1973. Attending the benefit were Rutgers faculty members, a sizable number of black professionals, and local activists who were the mainstay of numerous campaigns to free the political prisoners of that era.

It was an upbeat event, imbued with the optimism of the times. My own recent acquittal on charges of murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy stood as a dramatic example of how we could successfully challenge the government's offenses against radical anti-racist movements. However powerful the forces arrayed against Assata-the FBI's counterintelligence program, and the New York and New Jersey police organizations-no one could have persuaded us then that we were not capable of building a triumphant movement for Assata's freedom. This benefit was one small step in that direction, and, as we left the event, we were quite satisfied with the three thousand dollars we raised that afternoon.

By then, every radical activist had learned to assume that our public meetings were subject to routine police and/or FBI surveillance. Yet we were entirely unprepared for what seemed like a reenactment of the 1973 events for which Assata faced charges of murder. Assata, Zayd Shakur, and Sundiata Acoli had been stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike by state troopers who claimed that they had a faulty tail light. The encounter left Assata critically wounded and two others-state trooper Werner Forster and Assata's friend Zayd Shakur-dead. As a group of us left the benefit and drove down a country road towards Lennox Hinds's house, where we were having a small after-party, we were quite startled when local police signaled for our car to stop. My friend Charlene Mitchell, at that time the executive director of the Alliance, was told to step out of the car, along with the driver and the other person riding with us. As the policemen taunted us by clearly placing their hands on their holstered guns, I was instructed to stay in the otherwise empty automobile. Lennox, whose car we had been following, immediately doubled back and approached the police with his attorney's identification card in hand, explaining that he was our lawyer. This caused the officers to become more visibly nervous, including one who pulled a riot gun from his police car and proceeded to aim at Lennox from close range. All of us froze. We knew only too well that any innocent gesture could be construed as a reach for a weapon and that this confrontation could easily become a recapitulation of the events that had left Assata with a murder charge.

The spurious explanation given by police for the ambush was a warrant for my arrest (later proven false). Though they allowed us to leave, it was only shortly after we arrived at Lennox's house that we discovered they had already called for reinforcements and literally surrounded the house. With one of the first black woman judged in New Jersey and several other prominent community figures at the house, we were nonetheless compelled to call on higher powers, in the form of Congressman John Conyers in Washington. We figured a request for a federal escort out of the state of New Jersey might put some pressure on local police. These were the kinds of measures-and friends-needed in such a volatile time.

I relate this incident in detail because it may help readers of Assata's autobiography not only to focus on the political role of the police during the 1970s but also to better understand important historical aspects of the routine racial profiling associated with current police practices. Such a historical perspective is especially important today when brazen expressions of structural racism-such as the pattern of mass imprisonment to which communities of color are subjugated-are rendered invisible by the prevailing moral panic over crime. And if this were not enough, we find that at the same time such remedies as affirmative action programs and such safety nets as social welfare are being consistently disestablished.

When Richard Nixon raised the slogan of “law and order” in the 1970s, it was used in part to discredit the black liberation movement and to justify the deployment of police, courts, and prisons against key figures in this and other radical movements of that era. Today, the ironic coupling of a declining crime rate and the consolidation of a prison industrial complex that makes increased rates of incarceration its economic necessity has facilitated the imprisonment of more than two million people in the United States. In this ideological context, political prisoners like Assata Shakur, Mumbai Abu-Jamal, and Leonard Peltier are represented in popular discourse as criminals who deserve either to be executed or to spend the rest of their lives behind bars.

During the late 1990s, the racist hysteria directed against Assata was resuscitated when the New Jersey State Police reputedly prevailed upon Pope John Paul II to use the occasion of his first trip to Cuba to pressure Fidel Castro to extradite Assata. As if this were not enough, New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman offered a $50,000 reward-later doubled-for Assata's return, and congress passed a bill calling on the government of Cuba to initiate extradition procedures.

In an open letter to the Pope, Assata asks a question that should concern all of us: “Why, I wonder, do I warrant such attention? What do I represent that is such a threat?” We would all do well to seriously ponder her questions. Why, indeed, was she constructed by the government and mass media as a consummate enemy in the 1970s, only to reemerge at the turn of the century as a singular target of governors, Congress, and the Fraternal Order of Police? What has she been made to represent? What ideological work has this representation performed?

In the 1970s, Assata Shakur's image was deployed on official FBI wanted posters and in the popular media as visual evidence of the terrorist motivations of the black liberation movement. Black militants were assumed to be enemies of the state and were associated with communist challenges to capitalist democracy. The protracted search for Assata, during which she was demonized in ways that are now unimaginable, served to further justify the imprisonment of vast numbers of political activists, many of whom remain locked up today.

Twenty-five years later, the retailoring of the image of Assata as an enemy is even more damaging, omitting the original political context and representing her as a common criminal-a bank robbery and a murderer. This lifting of her image out of the past for very contemporary purposes serves to justify the consolidation of a vast prison industrial complex, which Assata herself has described as “... not only a mechanism to convert public tax money into profits for private corporations [but also] an essential element of modern neoliberal capitalism.” In her view, this new formation serves two purposes: “one, to neutralize and contain huge segments of potentially rebellious sectors of the population, and two, to sustain a system of super-exploitation, where mainly black and Latino captives are imprisoned in white rural, overseer communities.”

As the above quotation reveals, Assata remains very much engaged with contemporary radical politics specific to the United States, even though she has been unable to visit the country since her escape from prison and her decision to settle in Cuba many years ago. As you read her extraordinary autobiography, you will discover a woman who has nothing in common with the hostile representations that refuse to expire. I urge you to reflect on what it must mean for her to have been unable to attend her mother's funeral or to visit with her new grandchild. As you follow her life story, you will discover a compassionate human being with an unswerving commitment to justice that travels easily across racial and ethnic lines, in and out of prison and across oceans and time. She speaks to all of us, and especially to those of us who are sequestered in a growing global network of prisons and jails. At a time when optimism has receded from political vocabulary, she offers invaluable gifts-inspiration and hope. Her words remind us, as Walter Benjamin once observed, that it is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given to us.

Angela Y. Davis

University of California, Santa Cruz

March 2000

Forward by Lennox S. Hinds

The publication of this extraordinary autobiography provides a rare opportunity to see behind the carefully orchestrated distortions of fact concerning the life and motivations of Assata Shakur. Writing simply and vividly about the racism that permeated her childhood and young womanhood-those ordinary experiences of Black people in the United States that have driven millions to despair and many to rebellion-Assata leads us all to understand more about the society we live in. Clearly, it was the racism riddling every aspect of the early life of this sensitive, intellectually gifted, and life-passionate child, as she struggled to establish her own identity, that led her to seek solutions to the catastrophic impact of racism and economic oppression on all people of color in the United States. It is racist America that provides the context for the making of this Black revolutionary.

People struggling for self-determination are a phenomenon of the twentieth century. These struggles are frequently understood and supported by people of goodwill in the United States when the struggles take place in South Africa, El Salvador, the Philippines, or Palestinian refugee camps. Assata Shakur's own words, as she writes about her struggles for growth and meaning in the streets of New York and in the South as a child and as a woman, present as clear a case for self-determination and development in the United States as do the lives of her brothers and sisters throughout the world. For although her book is intensely personal, it is also absolutely political. She writes about her experiences not as a historical icon seeking to crystallize the "Official Life" but as one whose experiences searching for change can provide a key to her own life and to all those others, who, as she so vividly puts it, "have been locked by the lawless. Handcuffed by the haters. Gagged by the greedy," and for whom "a wall is just a wall and nothing more at all. It can be broken down."

As a lawyer, teacher, and student of history, I know that while Assata's story may be unique in its energy, creativity, and passion for life and principle, it is typical of the ways the United States has responded historically to individuals that the government sees as political threats to domestic tranquility.

Since Assata touches only lightly on the events that led to her being a target for police fire on the New Jersey Turnpike in 1973 and on the flimsy evidence on which she was finally convicted in 1977, I will attempt to sketch some of the details that contributed to the fearsome image generated by the state and perpetrated in the media.

I first met Assata Shakur in 1973, as she lay in the hospital, close to death, handcuffed to her bed, while state, local, and federal police attempted to question her. As the national director of the National Conference of Black Lawyers, an organization that has been called on to defend political activists in the Black community since its founding in 1968, I was no stranger to the carefully orchestrated disinformation campaigns that federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies had engaged in against Black activists under the leadership of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Prior to meeting Assata, we had represented Angela Davis, had initiated inquiries into the 1969 police executions of Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark and the 1971 police attack and indictments of the leadership of the Republic of New Afrika, and had defended many other Black men and women who had been identified as targets of the FBI. The FBI's systematic surveillance of and attacks on Black groups and individuals were orchestrated by its counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO), which was directed specifically against what the FBI termed "Black nationalist hate groups." COINTELPRO's first targets were Martin Luther King and thousands of less prominent civil rights activists. Elsewhere, I have written extensively about COINTELPRO and the criminal disruption and destruction of Black leaders and groups that were the specific goals of this government program. The pertinent and unimpeachable documents collected in the Church committee report of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities were also reprinted in that book. In addition, the findings of the Domestic Intelligence Subcommittee, headed by Senator Walter Mondale, which were published by the U.S. Government Printing Office in 1976, provided incontrovertible documentation of this government-sponsored conspiracy against the civil and human rights of all sorts of political activists and, most particularly, Black people. It is important to remember that Assata Shakur's decision to join the Black Panthers occurred soon after J. Edgar Hoover ordered the forty-one FBI offices to intensify their efforts "to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and otherwise neutralize" Black nationalist organizations and their leaders. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Nation of Islam, and above all, the Black Panthers were specifically targeted, as were, among many Blacks, Stokely Carmichael, Rap Brown, Elijah Muhammad, Fred Hampton, Mark Clark, and, as we shall see, Assata Shakur, also known as JoAnne Chesimard.

As is now clear, a carefully orchestrated intelligence and counterintelligence campaign was conducted by the FBI in cooperation with state and local law enforcement agencies designed to criminalize, defame, harass, and intimidate Assata beginning at least in 1971. By the time Assata Shakur was shot and captured on the New Jersey Turnpike on May 2, 1973, she was wanted for a number of most serious crimes.

Massive prejudicial publicity had been generated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the New York City Police Department to create an image of dangerousness and to convict her in every aspect of the mass media before any trial. Orders had been issued to apprehend her, dead or alive. She spells out the dread and terror when she writes:

Everywhere i went it seemed like i would turn around to find two detectives following behind me. I would look out my window and there, in the middle of Harlem, in front of my house, would be two white men sitting and reading the newspaper. I was scared to death to talk in my own house.

Assata could no longer go home. She was on the FBI's Most Wanted list, accused of being armed, of being a bank robber and, subsequently, of being a kidnapper and murderer. A photograph alleged to be Assata Shakur taken at the scene of a bank robbery in August 1971 appeared in a full-page advertisement in the New York Daily News on July 10, 1972. It was a duplicate of a poster placed in every bank in the city and state of New York and post offices and subway stations. This advertisement announcing "Wanted for Bank Robbery, $10,000 Reward" was printed above four photographs, one of them the picture of a woman allegedly taken during the 1971 bank robbery. Beneath the picture, in bold capital letters, was the name "JoAnne Deborah Chesimard."

During her trial for this bank robbery, which ended in acquittal, a jury found that it was not a picture of Assata Shakur (JoAnne Chesimard). The photograph had been released by the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's office to the New York Clearing House Association (a bank's association), which placed the ad and posters. Even after Assata had been acquitted of this bank robbery in January 1976, another advertisement offering the same reward for unapprehended bank robbers appeared in the Daily News in March 1976. This time, however, the photograph was a recognizable mug shot of Assata, with the word "APPREHENDED" across her face. This poster appeared two months after her acquittal on the August 1971 charge, two years after her acquittal on the September 1972 bank robbery charge, and while no bank robbery charges were outstanding against her.

On February 12, 1973, four months before Assata was apprehended on the New Jersey Turnpike, New York magazine published an article under the title "Target Blue," written by Robert Daley, an excerpt of this book of the same title. The cover of the magazine depicted a uniformed police officer. The subtitle was "The Story Behind the Police Assassinations." The article purported to provide intimate details about the Black Liberation Army, whose activities, the article claimed, were cop killing, bank robbing, and efforts to overthrow the U.S. Government. Above a picture of Assata Shakur were the words "Gunmen of the Black Liberation Army," and she was described by former Deputy Police Commissioner Daley as the "mother hen who kept them together, kept them moving, kept them shooting." Notwithstanding this trial by media, the only indictment against Assata for killing a police officer was dismissed in October 1974 for lack of evidence.

As the chart that follows this essay shows, on May 2, 1973, when the shooting on the New Jersey Turnpike occurred, Assata was "wanted" for all these crimes. The irony is that not one of the charges led to conviction. When she was apprehended, shot down on the New Jersey Turnpike, leading to her only conviction, she should have enjoyed the presumption of innocence that the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is supposed to grant to any of us when accused.

On May 2, 1973, Assata, Sundiata Acoli, and Zayd Malik Shakur were traveling south on the New Jersey Turnpike in a white Pontiac. They were stopped by New Jersey state trooper James Harper for reasons consistent with the FBI COINTELPRO guidelines, which directed that activist be arrested for minor traffic Violations. The Pontiac allegedly had defective taillights. Harper's testimony, however, leaves open the suggestion that the Pontiac was simply a target.

Harper testified that when he first saw the Pontiac he was two miles north of the turnpike administration building, headquarters for the troopers. He followed the car for two miles until it was close to the administration building before he pulled it over because "the light was better and there was more security." The Pontiac was traveling at normal speed in the center lane. Harper first passed it in the left lane, observed the driver, and "made a mental note of his description." He then moved to the right lane and let the Pontiac pass him, at which time he "made a mental note of the sex and race of the passengers." He then approached the Pontiac in the left lane, motioned the driver (Sundiata) to pull over, and called the administration building for assistance. When trooper Robert Palenchar was directed to assist Harper, he commented over his radio, "Meet you at the pass, partner," and sped to the administration building at 120 miles an hour. Trooper Werner Foerster also went to assist in this "stop" for which, Harper testified, only a summons would have been issued.

Over the years, I was to learn much about the selective, arbitrary, and ferocious ways the law and its processes would be applied against Assata Shakur from the moment I met her in that hospital in May 1973 where she clung to life.

I can certainly not improve on Assata's account of her experiences before, during, and after her numerous trials, but I must point out that she understates the awfulness of the conditions in which she was incarcerated. As she mentions, even a hearing officer appointed by Middlesex County, at the instruction of one of the federal judges before whom we argued our suits on the inhumanity of the conditions in which she was held, found the conditions shocking.

In the history of New Jersey, no woman pretrial detainee or prisoner has ever been treated as she was, continuously confined in a men's prison, under twenty-four-hour surveillance of her most intimate functions, without intellectual sustenance, adequate medical attention, and exercise, and without the company of other women for all the years she was in their custody. We filed one civil rights lawsuit after another complaining of the barbarous treatment selectively meted out to her, with limited success. As you read her story, imagine the effect these conditions must have had on this proud and sensitive woman.

Another bitter irony of her situation is that during the course of those years awaiting trial in New Jersey, the many other charges that caused her to become a fugitive, leading to the shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike, were dropped for lack of evidence, were dismissed, or resulted in acquittal, and yet the physical conditions under which she was held worsened, at best. Once again, the manipulation of facts by the media became a substitute for reality-none of the acquittals or dismissals was publicized. The massive security precautions for the pending New Jersey trial were the major stories on the front pages of the local newspapers, day after day, in the community from which the jury was selected.

The sheer number of these baseless charges supports the contention held by many people that the extraordinary efforts of the state of New Jersey to get Assata Shakur convicted, notwithstanding the flimsy evidence, were undertaken to justify the fabricated image of mad-dog killer that had failed, so humiliatingly, to get her convicted in New York state and federal courts.

Assata was convicted in New Jersey as an accomplice to the murder of state trooper Werner Foerster and of atrocious assault on James Harper with the intent to kill. Under New Jersey law, if a person's presence at the scene of a crime can be construed as "aiding and abetting" the crime, that person can be convicted of the substantive crime itself. The state of New Jersey convicted Sundiata Acoli for these same murders after Assata was severed from the proceedings because of her pregnancy. The jury at Assata's trial for the same offenses was permitted to speculate that her "mere presence" at a scene of violence, with weapons in the vehicle, was sufficient to sustain a conviction-even though three neurologists testified at the trial that her median nerve had been severed by gunshot wounds, rendering her unable to pull a trigger, and that her clavicle had been shattered by a shot that could only have been made while she was seated in the car with her hands raised. Other experts testified that the neutron activation analysis administered by the police right after the shootout showed no gun residue on her fingers, meaning she had not shot a weapon. She was also convicted of possession of weapons-none of which could be identified having been handled by her and of the attempted murder of state trooper Harper, who had sustained a minor injury at the shootout.

It had been and is my view that it was the racism in Middlesex County, fueled by biased, inflammatory publicity in the local press before and throughout the trial, fanned by the documented government lawlessness, that made it possible for the white jury to convict Assata on the uncorroborated, contradictory, and generally incredible testimony of trooper Harper, the only other witness to the events on the turnpike. Harper's testimony as well as that of all the other state's witnesses was riddled with inconsistencies and discrepancies. On three separate official reports, including his grand jury testimony, Harper said that he saw Assata take a gun from her pocketbook, while in the car, and shoot him. He admitted, on cross-examination during both Sundiata's trial and Assata's trial, that he never saw Assata with a gun and did not see her shoot him-that, in fact, he had lied.

In addition, the judge refused to permit the defense to present any testimony on COINTELPRO. The truth is very simple. Assata Shakur did not receive a fair trial in Middlesex County, New Jersey, She had been convicted in the press and in the minds of the general public from the moment she was apprehended in New Jersey and over and over again until the trial. The conviction in court was but a formality.

Dear Sister, thank you for sending us your vital voice and sharing your passion and commitment with us. Meanwhile, we in this society must remind ourselves again how we threaten our own interests and rights when we condone by our silence the government's use of surveillance, attacks on the legitimacy of political activists, and the use of the criminal law to suppress and punish political dissent.

In 1975, Attorney General Edward H. Levi, under the direction of President Carter and in consideration of the Church committee's findings, designed the first set of guidelines to keep the FBI within the Constitution in its investigations of individuals and groups allegedly dangerous to national security. The Levi guidelines, while not heartily applauded by civil libertarians, did attempt to restrain the unbridled use of the government's power to penetrate and disrupt organizations.

By 1983, Attorney General William French Smith, under President Reagan, had rescinded the Levi guidelines, and each year since then protections of the Bill of Rights have been further eroded. For example, the FBI is now free to investigate persons or groups accused of advocating criminal activity. Clearly, the federal government is continuing the unrestrained abuse of power by which it attempted to destroy Assata Shakur and other Black individuals and groups by surveillance, rumor, innuendo, eavesdropping, arrest and prosecution, incarceration, and murder throughout the sixties and seventies.

As long as members of Congress, still intimidated by ABSCAM, are afraid to antagonize the FBI, and as long as FBI guidelines are drafted internally by the FBI and as long as the Justice Department is subject to the political imperatives of the President, monitored only within the system but without public accountability, we are all in danger of the kinds of repression and government secrecy that victimized Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Viola Liuzzo, Medgar Evers, Fred Hampton, Obadele Imari, Assata Shakur, and many other brothers and sisters whose ideas and advocacy are threatening to the administration. We are all potential victims.

I encourage you now to enter the heart and soul of Assata Shakur who, despite all that has happened to her, preserves fresh idealism and confidence in the power of principled people to make change together for the common good of the peoples of the world.

LENNOX S. HINDS

New York City

Contents

Forward by Angela Davis

Forward by Lennox S. Hinds