Want to Start a Revolution?: Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle

6. Framing the Panther: Assata Shakur and Black Female Agency

138 6 Framing the Panther Assata Shakur and Black Female Agency Joy James How we imagine a revolutionary is shaped by our ideas concerning gender, sex, and race, not just ideology.1 How we imagine transformative black political leadership is very much influenced by how we think of gender and agency. The absence or presence of maleness shapes common perceptions of women revolutionaries. The same is not true for femaleness in perceptions of male revolutionaries. One can easily imagine antiracist revolutionary struggle against the state without (black) women clearly in the picture, but to imagine revolution against state violence in the absence of (black) men often draws a blank. Men appear independent of women in revolutionary struggles; women generally appear as revolutionaries only in association with men, often as “helpmates.” As a category, the female revolutionary remains somewhat of an afterthought, an aberration; hence she is an abstraction— vague and not clearly in the picture. In this regard, former Black Panther Party (BPP) and Black Liberation Army (BLA) member Assata Shakur is extraordinary, as we shall see later. Assata Shakur is unique not only because she has survived in exile as a political figure despite the U.S. government’s bounty —“dead or alive”— on her head but also because she may prove to be “beyond commoditization ” in a time in which political leadership seems to be bought and sold in the marketplace of political trade, compromise, and corruption. Above all, Shakur is singular because she is a recognizable female revolutionary, one not bound to a male persona. Framing the Panther 139 Gender Politics and “Panther Women” Influential male narratives have helped to masculinize the political rebel in popular culture and memory. Nationally and internationally, the most prominently known black political prisoners and prison intellectuals are male. The brief incarceration of Martin Luther King, Jr., in Alabama, produced the “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (1963), which popularized civil disobedience against repressive laws. The imprisonment as a petty criminal of Malcolm X in the 1950s engendered the political man and somewhat fictionalized Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965; published posthumously and creatively embellished and edited by Alex Haley, who had worked for the Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI], which sought to discredit Malcolm X). The 1971 killing by prison guards of George Jackson, author of Soledad Brothers: The Prison Letters of George Jackson and the posthumously published Blood in My Eye, helped to incite the Attica prison uprising in New York.2 The violent and deadly repression by the National Guard deployed by New York governor Nelson Rockefeller created more male martyrs and more closely linked incarceration, repression, and rebellion to the male figure. Current organizing for a new trial for former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal is galvanized by his incisive commentaries and critiques in Live from Death Row.3 Conventional political thought and memory associate few women with revolutionary literature or with armed resistance, political incarceration, or martyrdom stemming from struggles against enslavement or racist oppression. Along with Harriet Tubman, Shakur would become one of the few black female figures in the United States recognized as a leader in an organization that publicly advocated armed self-defense against racist violence . From its emergence in 1966, originally named the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, given police brutality and police killings of African Americans and cofounded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, the Black Assata Shakur booking photo. 140 Joy James Panther Party captured the national imagination and inspired its paranoia .4 The Black Panther Party remains the organizational icon (with Malcolm X the individual icon) for black militant resistance to racial domination and terror. The average American political spectator was and is more captivated or repelled by the Black Panthers’ stance on armed self-defense and their battles with local and federal police—and resulting martyrs—than with the BPP social service programs largely organized and run by women. Hundreds of women, including Shakur before she was forced underground , served in the Black Panther Party’s rank and file, implementing the medical, housing, clothing, free breakfast, and education programs. Female Panthers displayed an agency that (re)shaped American politics, although their stories recede in popular culture before the narratives of elites or icons. Violence, race, and sex mark the symbolism surrounding BPP icons. African American male revolutionaries are not perceived as having been politicized through their romantic or personal relationships with female counterparts; rather, their speeches and deeds...