Assata

"Most important part of this book was Assata describing how a political underground actually works beyond the sensationalization and romance. Beyond that it’s her story of coming of age, becoming member of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and BLA(Black Liberation Army), her trial, and subsequent exile. No she should not be remembered for being a civil right leader she is beyond that. "

"This is one story that tells the injustice done to a black women. She had to flee the U.S for her safety. "

"I've worked with the activist group Assata's Daughters in Chicago, but realized I knew very little about their namesake, Black Liberation Army leader Assata Shakur. Convicted of murder in connection with the 1973 shooting of a police officer, Shakur escaped prison and sought refuge in Cuba, where she now lives. I had no idea what to expect from her memoir, but I did NOT expect to be so strongly moved , or to learn that she had anticipated much of the current conversation around mass incarceration, white privilege, and institutional racism.<br/><br/>Part of the shock is how normal her life was prior to becoming a revolutionary. A precocious child, she was raised by her mother in New York and her grandparents in North Carolina just prior to the civil rights movement. Some of her earliest memories involved confrontations with Southern racism, and her family's refusal to bow down to it. When a segregated amusement park refused to let them in, Assata's mother pretended to be a foreign tourist, complaining loudly in Spanish until the manager was cowed into acquiescence. "Anybody no matter who they were could come right of the boat and get more rights and respect than amerikan born blacks" ( p 28). Yet Shakur is just as hard on white racism in her New York schools, where teachers mocked and abused black students, and where she was regularly tokenized or expected to act as a black "goodwill ambassador". Her sense of injustice was informed by the class differences she experienced, honed by seeing white families whose lives resembled "The Donna Reed Show".<br/><br/>Her account of life in prison is raw and horrifying: mothers not allowed to visit their children, "their frantic screams went unheard" (53). Shakur's analysis of institutional racism feels astonishingly contemporary; she discusses the de facto slavery of prison labor, and the inherent injustice of finding a "jury of her peers" when most black potential jurors "had children families jobs and simply could not afford to be on a lengthy jury trial". (67)<br/><br/>Perhaps the saddest of Shakur’s reflections is on how internalized racism poisons black people and their relationships with each other and their own culture. She notes that as a black child, she hid her own music, food and speech, assuming they were inferior; how black teens would torment each other for being "black and ugly" or having big lips. "The slavemasters taught us we were ugly, less than human, unintelligent, and many of us believed it...And if you ask me, a lot of us still act like we're back on the plantation with massa pulling the strings". (p 116) <br/><br/>While in hiding she catches a subway car full of black women..."and it registers. Without one exception, every one of these sisters is wearing a wig....I am hiding my beautiful, nappy hair under this wig and hating it, hiding my stuff to save my life. I who have had to give up my headwraps, and my big beaded earrings, my dungaree jackets, my red, black, and green poncho, and my long African dresses in order to struggle on another level, look out from under my wig at my sisters. Maybe we are all running and hiding...A whole generation of black women hiding out under dead white people's hair. I have the urge to cry but I don't...I pray and struggle for the day when we can all come out from under these wigs". (239)<br/><br/><br/>Essential reading."

"Assata’s passion to fight for Black lives while being a Black woman and facing her own battles before and after educating herself to become liberated is horrifyingly amazing for lack of a better word. I feel like sometimes we often forget our icons from powerful movements are also regular people, with regular lives. In a way her autobiography humanized her for me, overall this is a really good read!! "

"This woman. A literal civil rights hero to many, villainized by the white powers in government. She was a vocal and powerful woman then, her name still represents the power and justice of the movement. "

"Phenomenal book. Changed my life "