Uhuru!
From the African People’s Socialist Party we salute the legacy of Comrade Assata Shakur, a fierce warrior of the Black Revolution of the 1960s, a relentless fighter for African people, a leader of the Black Liberation Army and esteemed resident of the People’s Republic of Cuba at the behest of President Fidel Castro for more than 40 years.
Police bullets could not stop her; prison walls could not hold her; U.S. courts could not convict her. Decades of billboards on the New Jersey turnpike offering a $2 million reward for information on her whereabouts never produced a snitch. Like a fish in the sea of African people, Assata Shakur represented the brilliance and courage of African resistance.
She was heroic in our fight against this unjust, oppressive relationship that’s been imposed on Africans and colonized peoples of the world and fought with all her capacity. She used every form of struggle to fight for African freedom.
Assata embodied the fierce determination of African people to be free of colonial domination, to be self-determining, regardless of the personal price. The threat of colonial violence was merely another obstacle to be overcome, as we have done for more than 600 years since our Africa was assaulted and we were kidnapped and forced to labor for the benefit of colonial white power.
She was jailed and brutalized as part of the U.S. colonial counterinsurgency against the Black Revolution of the 1960s. She was struck twice by police bullets and while in the hospital, was intentionally abandoned by hospital staff to be tortured by the armed guards stationed on the pretext of preventing her escape. She was forced to suffer dehumanizing conditions while imprisoned in male prisons and solitary confinement. Despite what she endured, she maintained her revolutionary stance. “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win.”
Her escape from the Clinton Correctional Facility in New Jersey on November 2, 1979 was celebrated by our Movement. Assata’s escape occurred on the same day as a conference of our Party’s Solidarity Committee set in Oakland, California. I opened this conference with, “Assata Shakur was liberated!”
In response to the immediate U.S. campaign to recapture Assata, our Party-led African National Prisoners Organization called for a National Hands Off Assata campaign, which included scorched-earth style postering of “Assata is Welcome Here!” signs that was extended to include windows and doors at our homes and offices.
Our Party also extends a salute to Cuba, the mighty island that has historically played an important role in the anti-colonial struggle within the U.S. Cuba embraced our freedom fighter, granting her political asylum and refusing to turn her over to the U.S. government. In fact, neocolonialist Barack Hussein Obama, in an attempt to entice Cuba into giving Assata away, promised to lift the illegal war-like sanctions imposed on the Cuban people, but Cuba stood firm. We have profound respect for Cuba, who did similarly for Robert Williams when he fled from white lynch mobs in North Carolina in 1957.
We are in an era today similar to that of the period of the Black Revolution of the 1960s. Anti-colonial resistance is roiling, the global parasitic social system that we have defined as a colonial mode of production is experiencing a deep and profound crisis. This has resulted in world colonial powers, under the leadership of the premier U.S. settler-colony, carrying out open assault against Africans, Mexicans/Indigenous, Palestinians and colonized people all over.
Our Party and Movement were attacked by the same forces who attempted to carry out a legal lynching of Assata Shakur. The FBI came to the home of my wife and I in the same fashion they had done Fred Hampton in 1969—predawn raids using flash bang grenades and assault rifles with lasers pointed at my chest.
We are off the heels of the Uhuru 3 trial, where the U.S. government attempted to imprison us for 15 years and crush the leadership of the African Revolution. We are currently fighting to appeal a bogus and contradictory conspiracy conviction. This process led to us founding the Hands Off Uhuru! Hands Off Africa! Campaign and Hands Off Uhuru Fightback Coalition, which has organized support for our struggle for self-determination from forces across the political spectrum.
As Comrade Assata stated about her own conditions as a political refugee, “…justice for me is not the issue I am addressing here; it is justice for my people that is at stake. When my people receive justice, I am sure that I will receive it, too.” Our fightback against the colonial counterinsurgency has not simply been to make sure I didn’t go to prison—it was to advance the struggle for African freedom.
Our existence as the African People’s Socialist Party, born from the same legacy of anti-colonial resistance that defined the period of the 1960s, ensures that the Revolution that comrades like Assata represented will reach its successful conclusion.
We salute Comrade Assata Shakur, one of Africa’s best daughters. She lives.
Assata Shakur presente!
Vanguard up!
Relentless!
