X Olamina remembers hearing Assata Shakur’s powerful words featured in a 2017 album by R&B and soul singer and songwriter Jamila Woods. At the time, Olamina had been organizing around police violence in their hometown of Dallas, Texas, and the track “Assata’s Daughters” featured lines from the Black revolutionary’s writing that had become a rallying cry during protests against police brutality in 2015.

“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,” the song quotes Shakur in a chorus of children’s voices.

For Olamina, those words triggered childhood memories of a local bookstore that sold Shakur’s books and displayed photos and artwork of her alongside other revolutionary figures such as Harriet Tubman and Malcolm X. 

“For Black folks who have been involved in liberation work, it seems like she’s kind of always been in the lexicon,” Olamina said in an interview.

On Sept. 25, Shakur died at age 78 in Cuba, where the writer, speaker, and revolutionary had spent the last four decades of her life after she was convicted in 1977 of murdering a New Jersey state trooper and granted asylum by Fidel Castro. Shakur and her supporters have always maintained she did not commit the killing. Her 1987 book “Assata: An Autobiography” details her early years and the events leading up to the conviction.

Despite spending much of her life in exile, Shakur’s presence as an icon in the U.S. has only grown. In interviews with Prism, young activists reflected on her influence on contemporary movements for Black liberation and how she inspired and actively helped shape the political consciousness of a new generation of freedom fighters.  

After years of study and deepening their understanding of Shakur’s legacy and political philosophy, Olamina infuses Shakur’s work in programs hosted by the collective they founded, Hood School NYC, for students, healers, and local community members organizing via cultural work. Hood School hosts workshops, supports mutual aid efforts, and brings together other community organizations to host writing sessions and open mics. Late this summer, the group hosted a Black August cookout featuring dance and poetry classes, teach-ins, talks with elders from the Black Panther Party, and activities for children, including coloring books featuring Shakur. 

Prior to Shakur’s passing, Olamina also incorporated her writings in Hood School’s poetry workshops, recognizing that poetry can be an especially useful entry point for those new to political organizing or still learning how to articulate their own political philosophy.  

“Everybody can write a poem, even those who say they’re not poets,” Olamina said. They praised Shakur’s poem “Affirmation”; the last stanza reads, “And i believe that a lost ship/ steered by tired, seasick sailors/ can still be guided home/ to port.” 

“That resonates with people in their lives and their politics,” Olamina said. “I don’t think that political education is meant to be this endeavor that alienates people who don’t speak the same way or who don’t have this vocabulary.”  

Assata’s Daughters 

Shakur was engaged in political organizing and consciousness-raising work long before her 1977 conviction and 1979 escape from New Jersey’s Clinton Correctional Facility that brought her widespread notoriety and introduced her to the broader public. Her autobiography and subsequent writings speak to her time as a college student at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and the City College of New York in the late 1960s, where she participated in mass mobilizations to improve the university’s Black studies curriculum and advocate for more Black faculty. As a member of the Black Panther Party and later, the Black Liberation Army, Shakur hosted political education programming, helped establish medical clinics, and advocated for the release of political prisoners, while also bringing attention to and calling out misogyny within the movement itself.

Thus, in 2015, when organizers Page May, Caira Conner, and Ariel Perkins envisioned a volunteer-based collective designed to offer political education for young Black girls and femmes living on Chicago’s South Side, they looked to Shakur as a guiding light. Vee Morris-Moore, the group’s organizing and programming director, explained that Assata’s Daughters was established amid a need for more political homes for the city’s youth, particularly ones that approached such education through a radical Black queer feminist lens. 

“Assata Shakur was chosen to be a namesake for our organization mainly because we wanted something that spoke directly to our politics,” Morris-Moore told Prism. “We wanted to not just honor, but also materialize and reflect the work, ideology, and spirit that Assata Shakur birthed into movement work.”

Movements have been represented by men, but it is women like Assata Shakur who, in our opinion, have been the most effective and the most impactful in what it actually means to liberate Black people.

Vee Morris-Moore, organizing and programming director of Assata’s Daughters

Over the past decade, Assata’s Daughters has provided resources to community members, particularly mutual aid support at the onset of the pandemic. Additionally, the collective has collaborated on campaigns against police violence, including calling for the removal of police from Chicago’s public schools and the ousting of former Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez, who waited more than a year before charging a police officer who fatally shot teenager Laquan McDonald 16 times in 2014. 

“Oftentimes, movements have been represented by men, but it is women like Assata Shakur who, in our opinion, have been the most effective and the most impactful in what it actually means to liberate Black people,” Morris-Moore said. “Through her work with the Black Liberation Army, she really modeled what it looks like to equip Black people with the tools they needed to not just defend themselves but to be their own leaders.”

More than a chant

In a 2018 article for Women’s Studies Quarterly, activist, writer, and founding National Director of BYP100 Charlene Carruthers reflected on Shakur’s life, her status as an icon in the movement for Black liberation, and the enduring importance of her struggle for contemporary organizers. Carruthers aptly noted the omnipresence of Shakur’s quotes, particularly the chant used in Woods’ “Assata’s Daughters,” and the dangers of not fully engaging with the complexity of her writings.  

“Despite the popularity of her story and words, Shakur’s politics, philosophy, and the breadth of her work have not traveled as widely,” writes Carruthers. “Rarely is there rigorous discussion or explanation of who she is, or her commitment to the Black Liberation Army and the Republic of New Africa in mass mobilizations. … She is a full human being who, like other freedom fighters, greets many of us in pithy quotes. Assata deserves more.”

For Olamina, the overuse of a singular Shakur quote—often the one featured in Woods’ song—means that her words are frequently decontextualized.   

“People are doing this ‘it is our duty to fight for our freedom’ chant and leaving it there, but [that quote] came from an entire letter,” said Olamina. “So when you do run across these quotes, make sure that they’re attached or linked to the full document and the context that they were written in, because no quote is going to be able to stand in for the whole person that said it. Making sure that people know that it comes from more is a good place to start.” 

Meaningful engagement with Shakur—the kind that can help avoid her message and image from becoming diluted—can come from reading her autobiography; watching “Eyes on the Rainbow,” the 1997 documentary made about her life; and watching or reading transcripts from interviews she gave from Cuba, Olamina said. 

“She was in the Black Liberation Army and was militant and is just as important in those ways as she was in the ways that she thought about community, love, joy, and fun,” Olamina said, adding that learning about Shakur was the first time they saw a Black woman in militant spaces who was also frank about misogyny within the movement while holding steadfast against U.S. imperialism.

Practical ways to engage 

For Assata’s Daughters, engagement with Shakur’s writing serves as the entire framework for the organization’s political education curriculum. 

“We live in a day and age where Black history is just about illegal, so honestly, a lot of young people nowadays don’t even know about Assata Shakur,” Morris-Moore said. “We often give her autobiography away to people who participate in our program.”

The collective also hosts educational series exploring Shakur’s life in connection to larger issues such as the Black or Black woman experience, Black radical tradition, and political injustice.

“I think it is always both interesting and affirming to watch young people kind of understand the choices that she made, the work that she did, and, in some ways, being inspired and able to see the connections between her lived experiences and their own,” Mooris-Moore said. 

In recent years, Assata’s autobiography has been read in book clubs and abolitionist study groups, and featured on reading lists circulated online. For instance, Noname Book Club, a popular reading community that links members both in and outside of carceral facilities using radical texts, selected “Assata: An Autobiography” as its book for October.

In 1973, Shakur wrote in a letter titled “To My People” about how oppressive forces create the very resistance movement that they seek to quell. 

“Every time a Black Freedom Fighter is murdered or captured, the pigs try to create the impression that they have quashed the movement, destroyed our forces, and put down the Black Revolution,” wrote Shakur. “That is nonsense. That is absurd. Black revolutionaries do not drop from the moon. We are created by our conditions. Shaped by our oppression.”

Offerings such as these lend insight into how Shakur’s life is increasingly relevant to organizers today and why efforts to study her writing are growing in communities across the country. Assata’s Daughters is focused on how to support Black Chicagoans amid the deployment of the National Guard and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids ordered by President Donald Trump. The collective is organizing rapid response efforts, particularly in support of families of individuals who have been kidnapped by ICE. 

Meanwhile, Olamina encouraged students of Shakur to get involved in the movement to free political prisoners, particularly those of Shakur’s generation, such as award-winning journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal, who the FBI surveilled for years before he was convicted of murdering a Philadelphia police officer. Abu-Jamal has always maintained his innocence, and evidence shows that the case was tainted. 

Olamina said organizations such as the Jericho Movement and Black & Pink are useful places to begin to learn more. 

“Sometimes we’re in denial of the period that we are in,” Olamina said. “But I think that Assata presents us with this option to just go boldly into the reality and to start to fashion our own solutions.”

Editorial Team:
Sahar Fatima, Lead Editor
Carolyn Copeland, Top Editor
Rashmee Kumar, Copy Editor