The Past, Present, and Future of Assata's Message

It is our duty to fight for our freedom.It is our duty to win.We must love each other and support each other.WE HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT OUR CHAINS.

Anyone who is familiar with the cultural practices associated with Black Lives Matter will immediately recognize the last lines of Assata Shakur's "To My People," written in 1973, shortly after she was arrested. These words are often performed as a collective invocation, a concluding ritual to remind activists of their purpose as they close sessions devoted to outreach, organizing, education, etc. My sense is that the performances of this invocation are meant to accentuate the situatedness of the on-the-ground work of radical agents of change on a historical continuum that extends back to the 1960s, a time when U.S. political culture was being reshaped by the contributions of young revolutionaries determined to change the world. Assata herself implicitly urges the acknowledgment of such a relationship to history by her rephrasing of one of the concluding lines of the The Communist Manifesto of 1848 by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: "We have nothing to lose but our chains."

Her message helps us to hold on to that sense of historical continuity as we reflect on the way racist violence in our contemporary world seems to recapitulate the violence of the past. Assata evokes numerous examples from the 1960s and early 1970s: from the KKK bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, and police massacres of protesting students at southern black universities to the assassinations of prominent activists and quotidian police killings of black men and women. Today, almost fifty years after she signaled the 1973 killing of ten-year-old Clifford Glover by a New York police officer, later acquitted, we realize how distressingly the death of Clifford Glover resonates with the 2014 death of twelve-year-old Tamir Rice, whose killer, a Cleveland police officer was also acquitted.

Despite the hold the past seems to exert over the present—especially with respect to the violence of racism—we never seem to extricate ourselves from the influence of Enlightenment notions regarding the inevitability of human progress. Although we have already observed the sesquicentennial of the abolition of slavery, we are still engaging with issues that ought to have been addressed during the period immediately following abolition. Moreover, even when we manage to develop conversations regarding what Derrick Bell called "the permanence of racism" (1992), we inevitably leave out the catastrophic impact of colonialism on the indigenous population. As I read Assata's message today, I interpret it as a call to apprehend these continuities and connections and to recognize that progress is not preordained, but is rather the product of the collective imagination of people whose unity is forged through struggle.

Assata's "To My People" was published in Triple Jeopardy, the newspaper of the Third World Women's Alliance, which represents an early feminist impulse toward acknowledging connections, relationalities, and intersectionalities. Feminist frameworks and methodologies help us to grasp why Assata Shakur herself continues to be demonized decades after she first became the focus of the state's machinery of repression. Almost forty-five years after writing "To My People," she continues to be a target of the same governmental criminalization processes she so fervently criticizes in this statement. At the time, as Assata points out, she was accused of multiple bank robberies and a range of other offenses. However, in all cases—with the notorious exception of the New Jersey Turnpike encounter, which left a state trooper and one of her companions dead—either charges were dropped or she was ultimately acquitted. Today, she lives in Cuba, under constant threat of kidnapping, because in 2013 the FBI included her on its ten Most Wanted Terrorists list, singling her out as the first woman to be so targeted. The announced reward—first one, then two million dollars—seemed deliberately designed to motivate mercenaries, especially given their proliferation due to the privatization of the so-called war on terror, to capture her and return her to...