Assata Shakur, an icon of Black liberation who was exiled to Cuba, dies aged 78 | US news

On September 25, Assata Shakur, former member of the Black Liberation Army, died at the age of 78 in Havana, Cuba, according to the Cuba Foreign Ministry. Cuban officials have cited the reason for his death as old age and health problems. Shakur, a long symbol of the resistance and release of blacks, spent several exile decades in Cuba after being found guilty of having killed a soldier from New Jersey in 1977 and escaped from prison.

“Around 1:15 p.m. on September 25, my mother, Assata Shakur, took her last earthly breath,” wrote her daughter Kakuya Shakur on Facebook. “Words cannot describe the depth of the loss that I feel right now.”

Born Joanne Deborah Byron on July 16, 1947, in Queens, New York, she was then raised in Wilmington, North Carolina, during racial segregation. She abandoned the high school and returned to New York to work a low -wage job. His life changed in 1964 when a conversation with African students on communism and Vietnam challenged his opinions. “We are taught such a young age to be against the Communists, but most of us have no idea what communism is,” Shakur wrote in his 1987 Memoirs, Assata: An Autobiography. “Only an idiot allows someone else to tell him who is his enemy.”

In the 1960s, she frequented Borough of Manhattan Community College, then the City College of New York and got involved with the group of black activists Golden Drums Society, where she pleaded for black studies. She married her militant colleague Louis Chesimard in 1967 and divorced in 1970, the same year that she joined the Black Panther Party.

“One of the most important things in the party was to make clearly that was the enemy,” wrote Shakur in his memories, “not the white people, but the capitalist and imperialist oppressors.”

In 1971, she changed her name to Assata Olugbala Shakur to better reflect her identity as an African woman – Assata meaning “she who fights”, in Swahili, Olugbala meaning “love for the people”, to Yoruba, and Shakur meaning “grateful” in Arabic.

Shakur left the Black Panther party shortly after joining it, quoting its dissatisfaction with their lack of knowledge of the history of blacks and the discouragement of criticism of the party. Later, she joined the Black Liberation Army (Bla), a black Marxist-Leninist nationalist group who fought for black freedom through an armed front. From 1971 to 1973, she was accused of multiple crimes as well as other members, including bank thefts, and the murder of a drug trafficker, who were all acquitted or licensed.

On May 2, 1973, a state soldier, James Harper, shot a car in which she was for a failed back light, with another soldier, Werner Foerster, in a second patrol car. Following an exchange of gunshots, the member of the Black Liberation Army Zayd Malik Shakur and Foerster died. Shakur was found guilty of the murder of Foerster in 1977 and sentenced to life in prison. Two years later, the members of the Black disguised as visitors helped her get out of Clinton Correctional Facility for Women in New Jersey. Later, she appeared in Cuba, where the government of Fidel Castro granted her asylum.

In 2013, Shakur was the first woman to land on the FBI’s most sought -after terrorists. While the adversaries broadcast Shakur, his life and his memoirs inspired the racial justice movements for decades.