Black rights leader Assata Shakur passes away

 
On 25 September, Assata Shakur, a former member of the Black Liberation Army, died aged 78 in Havana, Cuba, according to Cuba's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, reports the Guardian. Cuban officials cited the reason for her death as old age and health conditions. Shakur, a longstanding symbol of resistance and Black liberation, spent several decades exiled in Cuba after she was convicted of killing a New Jersey state trooper in 1977 and escaped from prison.

"At approximately 1:15pm on September 25th, my mother, Assata Shakur, took her last earthly breath," her daughter Kakuya Shakur wrote on Facebook. "Words cannot describe the depth of loss that I'm feeling at this time."

Born JoAnne Deborah Byron on 16 July 1947, in Queens, New York, she was later raised in Wilmington, North Carolina during a time of racial segregation. She dropped out of high school and moved back to New York to work a low-wage job. Her life changed in 1964 when a conversation with African students about communism and Vietnam challenged her views. "We're taught at such an early age to be against communists, yet most of us don't have the faintest idea what communism is," Shakur wrote in her 1987 memoir, Assata: An Autobiography. "Only a fool lets somebody else tell him who his enemy is."

In the 1960s, she attended Borough of Manhattan Community College and then the City College of New York and became involved with Black activist group Golden Drums society, where she advocated for Black studies courses.

>>Agency