Assata Shakur spent more than four decades as the most famous American living under Cuba's protection. When she died in Havana on September 26, 2025, at 78, her daughter and the Cuban government announced the news. In the United States, her name still divided people sharply. To the New Jersey State Police and the FBI, she was a convicted cop killer who had escaped justice. To her supporters, she was a political prisoner who had escaped a system bent on destroying her.
From Queens to the Movement
She was born JoAnne Deborah Byron in Queens, New York, on July 16, 1947, and spent part of her childhood in Wilmington, North Carolina. At Borough of Manhattan Community College and City College of New York, she joined student protests against the Vietnam War and for Black studies. She took the name Assata Olugbala Shakur, joined the Black Panther Party in Harlem, and later left for the underground Black Liberation Army. Like many in the movement, she was a target of the FBI's COINTELPRO program. Our archive tells more of that early story in Assata Shakur, 1947 and Assata Olugbala Shakur: Freedom Fighter in Exile.
The Turnpike and the Escape
On May 2, 1973, state troopers stopped a car carrying Shakur and two companions on the New Jersey Turnpike. A shootout followed. Trooper Werner Foerster and her companion Zayd Malik Shakur were killed; Shakur was badly wounded. She said she was shot with her hands in the air and never fired a gun. In 1977, an all-white jury convicted her of murder, and she was sentenced to life in prison.
On November 2, 1979, armed comrades freed her from the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women in New Jersey. She lived underground for several years before surfacing in Cuba in 1984, where Fidel Castro's government granted her political asylum.
Havana and the Global Black Horizon
Cuba gave Shakur more than a hiding place. It placed her inside a long tradition of Black Americans who looked abroad for freedom, from African Americans who embraced the Cuban Revolution to the Panthers who went into exile in Algeria, like Eldridge Cleaver. In Havana, she wrote, studied and spoke to visitors. Her 1987 autobiography, Assata, became required reading in Black studies classrooms and activist circles. Its lines—"It is our duty to fight for our freedom"—became a chant at protests decades later.
Washington never stopped trying to bring her back. In 2013, on the 40th anniversary of the Turnpike shooting, the FBI made her the first woman on its list of Most Wanted Terrorists, with a combined reward of $2 million. Shakur answered in her own words, which we reprint in Assata Shakur in Her Own Words. Every turn in U.S.–Cuba relations raised the question of her return. Cuba refused.
A Contested Legacy
Shakur's life raises questions that remain unsettled: about violence and self-defense, about trials of Black radicals in the 1970s, and about which governments call someone a fugitive and which call her a refugee. As historian Kimberly Monroe writes, she remains "a lasting symbol of resistance, political commitment, and global struggles for liberation." For a poet's answer, read Mustafa Santiago Ali's tribute, For Sister Assata Shakur.
Her story is part of our study guide, Power to the People: The Black Panther Party at 60, alongside Bobby Seale, Angela Davis and the women of the Black Panther Party.
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