The Cuban Foreign Ministry reported Friday that the legendary writer, activist, and political prisoner Assata Shakur has died of natural causes in Havana. She was 78.
“On September 25, 2025, American citizen Joanne Deborah Byron, ‘Assata Shakur,’ passed away in Havana, Cuba, due to health conditions and advanced age,” the ministry said in the press release.
Her daughter Kakuya Shakur confirmed the news on Facebook. “At approximately 1:15 PM on September 25th, my mother, Assata Shakur, took her last earthly breath. Words cannot describe the depth of loss that I am feeling at this time,” she wrote. “I want to thank you for your loving prayers that continue to anchor me in the strength that I need in this moment. My spirit is overflowing in unison with all of you who are grieving with me at this time.”
Shakur was born Joanne Deborah Byron in Flushing, Queens, in 1947, and grew up in Wilmington, North Carolina. She graduated from CUNY and joined the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California, shortly after. There she witnessed FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO initiative infiltrate the BPP and other organizations, as the government deliberately sowed chaos and misinformation within Black leftist groups fighting for basic human rights in the 1960s and 70s.
Shakur briefly led the Harlem BPP’s Free Breakfast for Children program before joining the Black Liberation Army, a group that engaged in militant guerilla tactics to “take up arms for the liberation and self-determination of Black people in the United States.” This included allegedly robbing banks, bombing buildings, and murdering police officers.
Shortly after joining, Shakur rejected her born name, recognizing it as a name forced upon her enslaved ancestors when they were brought from West Africa to the U.S. “It sounded so strange when people called me JoAnne. It really had nothing to do with me. I didn’t feel like no JoAnne, or no Negro, or no amerikan. I felt like an African woman,” she wrote in her autobiography. Assata means “she who struggles.”
On May 2, 1973, Shakur was involved in a shootout with police on the New Jersey Turnpike after she and two Black men were pulled over by two officers for a broken taillight. One of the men was killed, as was an officer. Shakur was shot twice and later detained at Middlesex County Jail, chained to her hospital bed bleeding out while federal officers questioned her.
Shakur was then moved to Rikers Island, where she spent nearly two years in solitary confinement.
Shakur argued that the police fired first, and she herself was shot with her hands up—a key part of the trial. Yet she was eventually convicted by an all-white jury of first- and second-degree murder, among other charges. She was in various prisons from 1973 to 1979, and maintained her innocence until the day she died.
“It had been and is in my view that it was the racism in Middlesex County, fueled by biased inflammatory publicity in the local press before and throughout the trial, fanned by the documented government lawlessness, that made it possible for the white jury to convict Assata on the uncorroborated, contradictory, and generally incredible testimony of trooper Harper, the only other witness to the events on the Turnpike,” Shakur’s lawyer Lennex Hinds wrote in 1998.
In 1979, Shakur was broken out of the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women in New Jersey by fellow BLA members in an elaborate plot involving hostages, a stick of dynamite, and a stolen van. No one was injured.
Shakur briefly lived as a fugitive in the U.S., as police monitored her daughter and friends and performed massive, armed sweeps of Black neighborhoods in New York City in search of her. She made it to Cuba in 1984, where she was granted political asylum. There she wrote books and essays, including her immensely popular Assata: An Autobiography. In 2013, she became the first woman ever added to the FBI’s “Most Wanted” list.
“People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows,” she wrote in the later chapters of her autobiography. “After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.”
Shakur was a poor Black woman in segregated America who was fed up, weary of this society’s constant denial of her humanity. Her life, words, and actions are a poignant example of the wide spectrum of responses—from peaceful protest to militance—that Black Americans have always had to their violent experiences as racialized others in this country.
One of Shakur’s latest essays, from 2013, was a message to the media. It’s one that rings particularly true today, as President Trump continues to call for its muzzling.
“Like most poor and oppressed people in the United States, I do not have a voice. Black people, poor people in the U.S. have no real freedom of speech, no real freedom of expression and very little freedom of the press,” she wrote. “I am only one woman. I own no TV stations or radio stations or newspapers. But I feel that people need to be educated as to what is going on and to understand the connection between the news media and the instruments of repression in Amerika. All I have is my voice, my spirit and the will to tell the truth. But I sincerely ask those of you in the Black media, those of you in the progressive media … to let people know what is happening. We have no voice, so you must be the voice of the voiceless.”
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