Assata Shakur, the Black revolutionary once known as JoAnne Chesimard who found decades-long sanctuary in Cuba after escaping from a New Jersey prison where she was serving a life sentence in the 1973 shooting death of a state trooper, died on Thursday in Havana. She was 78.
Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced her death without specifying a cause, citing only “health conditions and advanced age.”
Assata Shakur was both lionized and demonized long after she and the Black Liberation Army, the militant group she had embraced, faded from broad public consciousness. To supporters she was a tireless battler against racial oppression. To detractors she was a stone-cold cop killer, the first woman to land on the F.B.I.’s “most wanted terrorists” list, with $2 million in state and federal money offered for her capture.
For her part, Ms. Shakur regarded herself as “a 20th-century escaped slave.”
In the early 1970s, an era of American ferment on multiple fronts, Ms. Shakur channeled her radicalism through the Black Liberation Army, a Marxist-Leninist organization that had broken away from the Black Panthers. Its members planted bombs, killed police officers and carried out robberies that they described as “expropriations.”
Ms. Shakur herself was indicted 10 times by federal and state authorities in New York and New Jersey on charges of murder, robbery and kidnapping. All but one of those cases ended in acquittals, dismissals or hung juries. The lone exception began with a car ride in the early morning of May 2, 1973.
She and two colleagues were in a beat-up Pontiac when New Jersey state troopers stopped them on the New Jersey Turnpike for having a broken taillight. The police account was that she and the others left the car with guns blazing. She fired first, they said, touching off a shootout in which a state trooper, Werner Foerster, was killed and another, James Harper, was wounded. One of Ms. Shakur’s companions, James Costan, was also wounded and died later. She, too, was shot, in the left shoulder and the underside of her right arm.
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The post Assata Shakur Dies at 78; Convicted Revolutionary Found Refuge in Cuba appeared first on New York Times.
