On May 2, 2013 the Federal Bureau of Investigation added Assata Shakur to its list of “Most Wanted Terrorists.” The Uhuru Movement stands opposed to this vicious attack by the imperialist state against Assata and the African Liberation Movement as a whole.
We demand complete liberation for Assata Shakur, a heroic warrior for the liberation of Africa and African people.
Assata Shakur was a member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army who was convicted of killing a New Jersey pig along with a host of other charges in the mid-70s. In 1979, the Black Liberation Army helped to liberate Assata from the colonial prison. She later sought political asylum in revolutionary Cuba where she remains today.
Assata and her comrades were attacked by state troopers while driving on the New Jersey turnpike in May of 1973, during which Zayd Shakur of the Black Liberation Army was shot and killed by the police.
The cops shot Assata twice. Later, the police tortured her in the hospital. One pig, named Werner Foerster, was shot twice in the head with his own gun.
Assata was convicted of murder. We don't believe a word of the lies put out by the police and the imperialist media, but the fact of the matter is that African people have a right to resist the colonial domination of our lives by the State. The police function in the African community as a colonial occupying army.
We say that Assata Shakur didn't do it – but she had a right to! Whether or not she pulled the trigger that ended the life of that pig is irrelevant to our demand for justice and freedom for Assata Shakur.
The police attacks and subsequent legal lynching of Assata Shakur—who was sentenced to life in prison by an all-white jury—did not occur in isolation.
They were part of a broader counterinsurgency operation of the U.S. government that was known as COINTELPRO and was designed with the express purpose to "to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" the Black Power Movement of the 1960s.
Under the strategy of neocolonialism—or white power in black face—the U.S. is once again intensifying its counterinsurgent efforts to criminalize and destroy the anti-colonial struggles of Africans and other oppressed peoples.
It was under the administration of the “first black president” Barrack Hussein Obama and the African neocolonial attorney General Eric Holder that Assata Shakur was placed on the “most wanted terrorist” list.
It was an African sell-out FBI agent who made the public announcement of these ramped up efforts to arrest and imprison Assata.
By labeling Assata Shakur as a “terrorist” the U.S. government is labeling the entire African Liberation Movement as a terrorist movement. They are calling all Africans who fight back against colonial oppression “terrorists” as a justification to intensify their repressive violence against African people.
Anyone who fights the status quo of parasitic capitalism—a system built on slavery, genocide, and colonialism—is a “terrorist” in the eyes of white power.
As Assata Shakur wrote, “I advocate self-determination for my people and for all oppressed inside the United States. I advocate an end to capitalist exploitation.”
Assata is the sister of political prisoner, Mutulu Shakur and is also the step-aunt of Tupac Shakur.
Hands off Assata Shakur!
Free all African political prisoners and prisoners of war!
Victory to the African Liberation Movement!
Uhuru!
