Assata

Assata
Author: Assata Shakur
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2016-02-15
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1783606819

'Deftly written...a spellbinding tale.' The New York Times In 2013 Assata Shakur, founding member of the Black Liberation Army, former Black Panther and godmother of Tupac Shakur, became the first ever woman to make the FBI's most wanted terrorist list. Assata Shakur's trial and conviction for the murder of a white state trooper in the spring of 1973 divided America. Her case quickly became emblematic of race relations and police brutality in the USA. While Assata's detractors continue to label her a ruthless killer, her defenders cite her as the victim of a systematic, racist campaign to criminalize and suppress black nationalist organizations. This intensely personal and political autobiography reveals a sensitive and gifted woman. With wit and candour Assata recounts the formative experiences that led her to embrace a life of activism. With pained awareness she portrays the strengths, weaknesses and eventual demise of black and white revolutionary groups at the hands of the state. A major contribution to the history of black liberation, destined to take its place alongside The Autobiography of Malcolm X and the works of Maya Angelou.

Assata Taught Me

Assata Taught Me
Author: Donna Murch
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2022-03-29
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1642595179

Black Panther and Cuban exile, Assata Shakur, has inspired multiple generations of radical protest, including our contemporary Black Lives Matter movement. Drawing its title from one of America's foremost revolutionaries, this collection of thought-provoking essays by award-winning Panther scholar Donna Murch explores how social protest is challenging our current system of state violence and mass incarceration. Murch exposes the devastating consequences of overlapping punishment campaigns against gangs, drugs, and crime on poor and working-class populations of color. Through largely hidden channels, it is these punishment campaigns, Murch says, that generate enormous revenues for the state. Under such difficult conditions, organized resistance to the advancing tide of state violence and incarceration has proved difficult. This timely and urgent book shows how a youth-led political movement has emerged since the killing of Trayvon Martin that challenges the bi-partisan consensus on punishment and looks to the future through a redistributive, queer, and feminist lens. Murch frames the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement in relation to earlier struggles for Black Liberation, while excavating the origins of mass incarceration and the political economy that drives it. Assata Taught Me offers a fresh and much-needed historical perspective on the fifty years since the founding of the Black Panther Party, in which the world's largest police state has emerged.

Still Black, Still Strong

Still Black, Still Strong
Author: Dhoruba Bin Wahad
Publisher: Semiotext(e)
Total Pages: 296
Release: 1993
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

An essential document of the Black Panther Party written by three leading thinkers and party activists who were jailed following the FBI'S 1969 mandate to destroy the organization "by any means possible." Still Black, Still Strong is partly based upon the 1989 videotape Framing The Panthers by producers Chris Bratton and Annie Goldson. It recounts the stories of Dhoruba Bin Wahad, Mumia Abu-Jamal and Assata Shakur, all of whom were arrested and jailed during the COINTELPRO probe of the Black Panther Party. Dhoruba Bin Wahad, who organized chapters of the Black Panther Party in New York and along the Estern Seaboard and worked with tenants in Harlem and on drug rehabilitation in the Bronx, was accused of murdering two officers while still in his teens and imprisoned for 19 years. He always maintained his innocence and won his freedom by forcing the FBI to release thousands of classified documents proving that he had been framed. The justice department eventually rescinded Bin Wahad’s conviction and he was released in 1990, seven months after the documentary premiered. Mumia Abu-Jamal, a journalist who headed the Black Panther free breakfast program for inner-city school children in Philadelphia, was also accused of the murder of an officer and sent on death-row, where he still is today. Assata Shakur was a college educated social worker in her twenties when she was accused of shooting a cop, then arrested and tortured and denied medical treatment. Her interview was conducted in Cuba where she has been exiled since her escape from a New Jersey women's prison in 1975. Bin Wahad, Shakur and Abu-Jamal offer a little-known history and an incisive analysis of the Black Panthers' original goals, which the U.S. Government has tried to distort and suppress. As one confidential, 1969, memo to J. Edgar Hoover put it, "The Negro youth and moderates must be made to understand that if they succumb to revolutionary teaching, they will be dead revolutionaries."

Assata Shakur

Assata Shakur
Author: Barbara Casey
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017-02-15
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781939521606

In 1977 after numerous trials for murder, attempted murder, armed robbery, bank robbery, and kidnapping-all eventually leading to acquittals or dismissals-Assata Shakur aka JoAnne Deborah Chesimard was found guilty of the murder of New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster and the grievous assault of Trooper James Harper, Convicted to life plus 33 years, Shakur escaped two yean later from the Clinton Facility for Women and fled to Cuba where she has lived in exile ever since. Assata Shakur: A 20th Century Escaped Slave is the story of one of FBI's "Most Wanted Terrorists" before she became a fugitive and since. Book jacket.

Cuban Revolution in America

Cuban Revolution in America
Author: Teishan A. Latner
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2018-01-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 146963547X

Cuba's grassroots revolution prevailed on America's doorstep in 1959, fueling intense interest within the multiracial American Left even as it provoked a backlash from the U.S. political establishment. In this groundbreaking book, historian Teishan A. Latner contends that in the era of decolonization, the Vietnam War, and Black Power, socialist Cuba claimed center stage for a generation of Americans who looked to the insurgent Third World for inspiration and political theory. As Americans studied the island's achievements in education, health care, and economic redistribution, Cubans in turn looked to U.S. leftists as collaborators in the global battle against inequality and allies in the nation's Cold War struggle with Washington. By forging ties with organizations such as the Venceremos Brigade, the Black Panther Party, and the Cuban American students of the Antonio Maceo Brigade, and by providing political asylum to activists such as Assata Shakur, Cuba became a durable global influence on the U.S. Left. Drawing from extensive archival and oral history research and declassified FBI and CIA documents, this is the first multidecade examination of the encounter between the Cuban Revolution and the U.S. Left after 1959. By analyzing Cuba's multifaceted impact on American radicalism, Latner contributes to a growing body of scholarship that has globalized the study of U.S. social justice movements.

Inadmissible Evidence

Inadmissible Evidence
Author: Evelyn A. Williams
Publisher: Dissertation.com
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2000
Genre: African American lawyers
ISBN: 9780595141708

Excerpts from Kirkus Review (11-1-1993) “Any analysis of the American Black experience demands close attention to both the political and the personal, and this extraordinary memoir by Williams … offers just that, as well as making a noteworthy contribution to recent American legal History.” “Becoming a Children’s Court probation officer … she contended with the political pressures of placing the children of Ethel and Julus Rosenberg … In the early 70’s, the author took on her most important case, defending her niece, Assata Shakur, “leader” of the Black Liberation Army.”

Autobiography as Activism

Autobiography as Activism
Author: Margo V. Perkins
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2009-10-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1628467428

Angela Davis, Assata Shakur (a.k.a. JoAnne Chesimard), and Elaine Brown are the only women activists of the Black Power movement who have published book-length autobiographies. In bearing witness to that era, these militant newsmakers wrote in part to educate and to mobilize their anticipated readers. In this way, Davis's Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974), Shakur's Assata (1987), and Brown's A Taste of Power: A Black Woman's Story (1992) can all be read as extensions of the writers' political activism during the 1960s. Margo V. Perkins's critical analysis of their books is less a history of the movement (or of women's involvement in it) than an exploration of the politics of storytelling for activists who choose to write their lives. Perkins examines how activists use autobiography to connect their lives to those of other activists across historical periods, to emphasize the link between the personal and the political, and to construct an alternative history that challenges dominant or conventional ways of knowing. The histories constructed by these three women call attention to the experiences of women in revolutionary struggle, particularly to the ways their experiences have differed from men's. The women's stories are told from different perspectives and provide different insights into a movement that has been much studied from the masculine perspective. At times they fill in, complement, challenge, or converse with the stories told by their male counterparts, and in doing so, hint at how the present and future can be made less catastrophic because of women's involvement. The multiple complexities of the Black Power movement become evident in reading these women's narratives against each other as well as against the sometimes strikingly different accounts of their male counterparts. As Davis, Shakur, and Brown recount events in their lives, they dispute mainstream assumptions about race, class, and gender and reveal how the Black Power struggle profoundly shaped their respective identities.

Assata Taught Me

Assata Taught Me
Author: Kalungi Ssebandeke
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 81
Release: 2017-05-04
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1786821109

Fanuco's taking English lessons from the only American he knows. The thing is, she's the FBI's most wanted woman and he's a Cuban teenager desperate to live the American Dream. When will he realize his mentor is a former Black Panther, a convicted felon and has a million dollars on her head?

Afeni Shakur

Afeni Shakur
Author: Jasmine Guy
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2010-05-11
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1439117969

Afeni Shakur, one of the most visible figures in both the hip-hop and civil rights movements, reveals her moral and spiritual development in an innovative memoir spanning four decades. Before becoming one of the most well-known members of the Black Power movement, Alice Faye Williams was not unlike any other poor, African American girl growing up in the impoverished South. But when her family moved to New York during the radical sixties, she became intoxicated by the promise of social change. By the time she turned twenty-one, Alice had a new name—Afeni Shakur, derived from the Yoruba term for "lover of people"—and a new vision for the future. The rest is history. In 1969, Afeni was arrested along with other members of the Black Panther party on 189 felony charges that included 30 counts of conspiracy. Though she was eventually acquitted of the charges, Afeni spent eleven months in jail before being released. Once on bail, she became pregnant with a son: Tupac Amaru Shakur, a rap megastar until his tragic death in 1996. In this searing work, renowned actress and Afeni's trusted friend Jasmine Guy reveals the evolution of a woman through a series of intimate conversations on themes such as love, death, race, drugs, politics, music, and, of course, her son. Filled with startling revelations and heartbreaking truths, Afeni's memoir is a powerful testament to the human spirit and the perseverance of the African American people.

Look for Me in the Whirlwind

Look for Me in the Whirlwind
Author: Sekou Odinga
Publisher: PM Press
Total Pages: 671
Release: 2017-08-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1629634077

Amid music festivals and moon landings, the tumultuous year of 1969 included an infamous case in the annals of criminal justice and Black liberation: the New York City Black Panther 21. Though some among the group had hardly even met one another, the 21 were rounded up by the FBI and New York Police Department in an attempt to disrupt and destroy the organization that was attracting young people around the world. Involving charges of conspiracy to commit violent acts, the Panther 21 trial—the longest and most expensive in New York history—revealed the illegal government activities which led to exile, imprisonment on false charges, and assassination of Black liberation leaders. Solidarity for the 21 also extended well beyond “movement” circles and included mainstream publication of their collective autobiography, Look for Me in the Whirlwind, which is reprinted here for the first time. Look for Me in the Whirlwind: From the Panther 21 to 21st-Century Revolutions contains the entire original manuscript, and includes new commentary from surviving members of the 21: Sekou Odinga, Dhoruba Bin Wahad, Jamal Joseph, and Shaba Om. Still-imprisoned Sundiata Acoli, Imam Jamil Al-Amin, and Mumia Abu-Jamal contribute new essays. Never or rarely seen poetry and prose from Afeni Shakur, Kuwasi Balagoon, Ali Bey Hassan, and Michael “Cetewayo” Tabor is included. Early Panther leader and jazz master Bilal Sunni-Ali adds a historical essay and lyrics from his composition “Look for Me in the Whirlwind,” and coeditors kioni-sadiki, Meyer, and Panther rank-and-file member Cyril “Bullwhip” Innis Jr. help bring the story up to date. At a moment when the Movement for Black Lives recites the affirmation that “it is our duty to win,” penned by Black Liberation Army (BLA) militant Assata Shakur, those who made up the BLA and worked alongside of Assata are largely unknown. This book—with archival photos from David Fenton, Stephen Shames, and the private collections of the authors— provides essential parts of a hidden and missing-in-action history. Going well beyond the familiar and mythologized nostalgic Panther narrative, From the Panther 21 to 21st-Century Revolutions explains how and why the Panther legacy is still relevant and vital today.