What Assata Shakur Still Teaches Us About Black Freedom, Love And Survival

I can’t remember the first time I heard Assata Shakur’s words.

“It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win.”

They’ve been with me for so long that I can’t locate their beginning. Somewhere in the years I spent becoming a writer and organizer, a Black woman trying to understand what it meant to love Black people enough to fight for us, Assata’s words became part of the language I carried.

I’ve heard her words shouted into megaphones and spoken in crowded rooms. I’ve seen them on protest signs and T-shirts, in books passed from one pair of hands to another. The words have traveled so far that it’s possible to know them without knowing much about the woman who wrote them.

But those weren’t all of Assata’s words. She also wrote:

“We must love each other and support each other.”

Nearly a year after her transition, that’s the part I keep returning to.

Maybe it’s age. I’ll be 50 in November. I’ve been loving Black people my whole life and, in one way or another, fighting for Black futures for almost 30 years. Maybe it’s exhaustion. Or maybe, after all these years of watching Black folks be asked to survive one impossible thing after another, I hear something in those words that I couldn’t hear when I was younger.

I’ve always understood the fight.

I’m only beginning to understand what it means to be held.

America has a particular way of remembering and erasing Black people all at once, especially when we can no longer speak for ourselves. Some of us become easier to love in death. Our politics soften around the edges. Our demands become quotations. And those who can’t be made respectable enough for American memory are often left exactly where the state placed them.

Assata knew what it meant to live inside somebody else’s story.

Born Joanne Deborah Byron and later known as Joanne Chesimard, Assata was convicted in 1977 in connection with the 1973 New Jersey Turnpike shootout that killed state trooper Werner Foerster. She maintained her innocence. After escaping prison in 1979, she eventually made her way to Cuba, where she received political asylum. She remained there until her death in September 2025 at 78.

But there was always more to Assata than the story the government chose to tell about her.

In Assata: An Autobiography, she writes about police violence and political awakening alongside motherhood and friendship, fear and loneliness, prison, and having other people decide what can happen to your body. She writes herself back into a story that had already been written about her.

There’s something about the name she chose that I understand differently now.

Assata: she who struggles.

For years, I heard strength in that name. Now I hear room for weariness, too. To struggle isn’t to be invincible. It means we can believe fiercely in freedom and still become tired from having to fight for it.

I know something about being tired.

I’ve spent much of my adult life writing, organizing, and teaching, doing work that requires me to pay attention to what’s happening to us and to bear witness. There’s privilege in being trusted with people’s stories. There’s weight in it, too.

Some evenings, you put down your bag and realize you haven’t put down anything else. And on the toughest days you return to the words that instructed you on precisely how to love, struggle, and be free.

I return to James Baldwin’s Collected Essays when I need someone unwilling to participate in America’s innocence. Baldwin understood how much cruelty becomes possible when a country refuses to know itself. I read him differently as I get older. I’m less interested now in his certainty than in how closely he paid attention, the way he could look at America without blinking and still insist that telling the truth about a place wasn’t the same thing as giving up on it.

Robin D. G. Kelley’s Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination stays close to me because I sometimes forget that responding isn’t the same as dreaming.

There’s always another emergency. Another law. Another killing. Another election. Another school board meeting. Another book pulled from a shelf. Another right we thought our mothers and grandmothers had already fought hard enough to secure. The emergencies pile up until stopping the next terrible thing is all we have time to imagine.

Kelley asks me to look beyond that. What do we want when survival isn’t the only question? What might we build if our imagination wasn’t limited to stopping the next terrible thing from happening to us?

I first encountered many of the ideas in Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Thought before I knew their academic names. Black women have always made knowledge from our lives. At kitchen tables. In beauty shops. In classrooms and church basements. While raising children, caring for elders, and figuring out how to move through places that weren’t built with us in mind. There are things we know because we studied them, and there are things we had to study because our lives required us to know them.

Mariame Kaba’s We Do This ’Til We Free Us pushes me to think about how we practice liberation now—how we care for one another, how we respond to harm, and how we build the kinds of relationships and communities we say we want to live in. Freedom can’t only be something waiting for us on the other side of everything we’re fighting. Some part of it has to be practiced by us right now.

And then there’s Kiese Laymon’s Heavy: An American Memoir.

I return to Heavy because I know something about carrying too much and calling that carrying strength.

Laymon writes about what gets stored in a Black body: family, expectation, hunger, shame, violence, secrets, love. Reading him makes it difficult to pretend the political and the personal live separately. What happens to us enters the body. So does what we refuse to say about what happened.

I’ve spent enough of my own life believing strength meant being able to hold what was breaking me without letting anyone see my hands shake.

I don’t live that way anymore.

And so I return to Assata.

“We must love each other and support each other.”

What does support look like when we take that seriously?

Sometimes it looks like money when the rent is due. A meal brought over without being asked. Somebody watching the children. A ride home. A phone answered after midnight. A friend taking something off your plate without first requiring you to prove that the plate is too heavy.

Sometimes it’s sitting beside somebody who’s run out of words.

I wouldn’t have described any of this as liberation when I was younger. Back then, freedom felt enormous to me. It belonged to movements, to tearing down harmful systems and building something better in their place.

I still want that freedom.

But age has made me interested in its smaller rooms.

What happens when the meeting is over? Who makes sure the organizer eats? Who sits in the hospital room? Who notices when the person everybody depends on has gone quiet? Who allows the strong Black woman to become something other than strong?

Nearly a year after Assata’s death, I keep thinking about all the years I repeated her words and how easily I moved toward fighting and winning.

Now I keep hearing what came after.

Love each other.

Support each other.

Maybe the books I keep returning to are helping me understand why.

Baldwin asks us to tell the truth. Kelley asks us to imagine beyond survival. Collins reminds us to trust the knowledge Black women have made from our lives. Kaba asks us to practice some part of freedom with one another now. Laymon makes us reckon with what all this surviving can do to a body.

And Assata reminds me that the work has never been only about fighting.

Her name means “she who struggles.”

There’s mercy in that definition. Struggle doesn’t require us to pretend the weight is light. It makes room for the days when we carry the work and the days when somebody else has to carry us.

Black people have already proven how much we can survive.

I want us to do more living.

SEE ALSO:

Carrying It On for Assata Shakur, The Embodiment Of Black Liberation

My Love Letter To Assata Shakur, 1 Year Into Her Ancestry