Assata Shakur

• 1. Introduction

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  Cuba's Ministry of Foreign Affairs reported that a woman died in Havana on the 25th of September 2025. She was 78 years old. For 45 of her years, she had been a fugitive from the United States.

  American authorities knew her as Joanne Deborah Chesimard. Under that name, in 2013, she became the first woman ever placed on the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists list. Her supporters knew her as Assata Shakur, a name she chose for herself.

  Police, prosecutors, defense lawyers, and Shakur herself have described her life in sharply different terms. Some see a killer who slipped out of reach of justice. Others say federal counterintelligence targeted her for her politics.

  This documentary asks three questions. What really happened on a New Jersey highway in the early hours of one night in 1973? Why did so many courtrooms reach such different verdicts about the same woman? And what does it take to stay out of reach for so long?

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• 2. Making of an Activist

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  JoAnne Deborah Byron was born in Flushing, Queens, on the 16th of July 1947. She spent her first three years with her mother, a schoolteacher named Doris E. Johnson, and her retired grandparents, Lula and Frank Hill. In 1950 her parents divorced, and she moved with her grandparents to Wilmington, North Carolina. After elementary school she returned to Queens to live with her mother and stepfather, and she attended Parsons Junior High School. She kept visiting her grandparents in the South.

  Money was tight in the Queens household, and the arguments were frequent. She spent little time at home. She ran away again and again, staying with strangers and taking jobs for short stretches. Eventually her mother's sister, Evelyn A. Williams, took her in. Williams was a civil rights worker who lived in Manhattan.

  Aunt Evelyn became what Shakur called the heroine of her childhood. She remembered her aunt as "very sophisticated and knew all kinds of things." Williams took her niece to museums, theaters, and art galleries. "She would give me a book and say, 'Read this,' and i would eat up that book like it was ice cream," Shakur recalled. Years later Williams would also serve as one of her lawyers.

  Classrooms were a different story. Shakur converted to Catholicism as a child and spent six months at the all-girls Cathedral High School. She moved to a public high school and dropped out, but her aunt helped her earn a General Educational Development degree. She later wrote that teachers seemed startled when she answered a question well, as if they never expected a black student to be engaged. The history she was taught, she said, left out the oppression of people of color. She later wrote: "I didn't know what a fool they had made out of me until i grew up and started to read real history."

  In the mid-1960s she attended the Borough of Manhattan Community College and then the City College of New York. She joined civil rights protests and sit-ins. A 1964 debate about the Vietnam War with several African students at Columbia University stayed with her. Someone asked her what communism was, and she realized she had no idea. Her picture of a communist came from a cartoon spy in a black trench coat. She concluded: "Only a fool lets somebody else tell him who his enemy is."

  In April 1967 she married Louis Chesimard, a fellow student-activist at the City College of New York, in a Catholic ceremony. The marriage ended within a year, and they divorced in December 1970. Her 320-page memoir gives the marriage a single paragraph and blames differing views of gender roles. That same year, 1967, she was arrested for the first time. She was one of 100 community college students charged with trespassing after they chained and locked the entrance to a college building. They were protesting the low number of black faculty and the lack of a Black Studies program.

  Oakland, California, was her next stop. There she joined the Black Panther Party and helped organize protests and community education programs. Back in New York, she led the party's Harlem chapter, coordinating the Free Breakfast for Children program, free clinics, and outreach. Before long she left. She disliked the macho behavior of the men, and she thought party members and leaders knew too little African-American history.

  She then joined the Black Liberation Army, an offshoot inspired by the Vietcong and by the Algerian fighters of the Battle of Algiers. The group waged guerrilla activity against the United States government. Its tactics included planting bombs, holding up banks, and killing drug dealers and police.

  In 1971 she began using the name Assata Olugbala Shakur and rejected JoAnne Chesimard as a "slave name." Assata is a West African name derived from Aisha, said to mean "she who struggles." Shakur means "thankful one" in Arabic, and Olugbala means "savior" in Yoruba. "I felt like an African woman," she explained. Within months, the new name began turning up in police files.

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• 3. Wanted for Questioning

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  On the 6th of April 1971, a struggle with a guest at the Statler Hilton Hotel in Midtown Manhattan left Shakur shot in the stomach. Police said she knocked on the guest's door, asked "Is there a party going on here?", then showed a revolver and demanded money. In 1987 she confirmed to a journalist that the incident had a drug connection, but she would not say more. She was booked on charges including attempted robbery and released on bail. She is alleged to have said she was glad to have been shot, because afterward she no longer feared it.

  A bank robbery in Queens in August 1971 turned her into a face on bank walls. A photograph of a woman in thick-rimmed black glasses, her hair piled high, pointing a gun, was widely displayed. The woman was later alleged to be Shakur. The New York Clearing House Association paid for full-page advertisements. Asked about bank robberies in Cuba in 1987, Shakur answered: "There were expropriations, there were bank robberies."

  A hand grenade attack in Maspeth, Queens, on the 21st of December 1971 destroyed a police car and injured two officers. The New York City Police Department named Shakur as one of four suspects. A witness picked her and Andrew Jackson out of FBI photographs, and a 13-state alarm followed three days later. Officials in Atlanta said the two had lived together there for several months that summer.

  The list kept growing. She was sought for questioning after a police officer was wounded in Brooklyn on the 26th of January 1972. After an $89,000 Brooklyn bank robbery on the 1st of March 1972, a Daily News headline asked: "Was that JoAnne?" On the 14th of September 1972, Monsignor John Powis accused her of an armed robbery at Our Lady of the Presentation Church in Brownsville. He said the robbers tied him up, gagged him, and locked him in a bathroom.

  In 1972 the FBI declared her the subject of a nationwide manhunt. It alleged that she led a Black Liberation Army cell responsible for a "series of cold-blooded murders of New York City police officers." The Bureau cited the killings of Officers Joseph Piagentini and Waverly Jones on the 21st of May 1971. It also cited the deaths of Officers Gregory Foster and Rocco Laurie on the 28th of January 1972. She was alleged to be directly involved in the Foster and Laurie murders.

  Robert Daley was a Deputy Commissioner of the New York City Police. He called her "the final wanted fugitive, the soul of the gang, the mother hen who kept them together, kept them moving, kept them shooting." Some sources describe her as the de facto head of the army after co-founder Dhoruba Moore was arrested. Years later, some officers said her importance had been inflated. One said police built a "myth" to "demonize" her because she was "educated," "young and pretty."

  Historians Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas describe a different machine at work. They write that the FBI and local police launched a "national search-and-destroy mission" for suspected army members through counterintelligence campaigns such as NEWKILL. Documents point to an investigation named CHESROB. It sought to link "Joanne Chesimard (Assata Shakur) to virtually every bank robbery or violent crime involving a black woman on the East Coast." Once she was in custody, she was never charged with any of the crimes that had driven the manhunt.

  Asked in Cuba about the army and police killings, Shakur gave a political answer. "In reality, armed struggle historically has been used by people to liberate themselves," she said. Some members, she explained, believed black people had to fight back against police brutality or be annihilated. By June 1973 an apparatus that would grow into the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force was issuing near-daily briefings on her status.

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• 4. The Turnpike

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  At about 12:45 a.m. on the 2nd of May 1973, State Trooper James Harper pulled over a car in East Brunswick, New Jersey. The reason was a broken tail light, and the car was also going slightly over the speed limit. Trooper Werner Foerster arrived in a second patrol vehicle as backup. The stop happened 200 yards south of what was then the Turnpike Authority administration building.

  Sundiata Acoli was driving the two-door car. Assata Shakur sat in the right front seat, and Zayd Malik Shakur sat in the right rear. Harper asked the driver for identification, noticed a discrepancy, and questioned him at the back of the vehicle. After that, every account of the confrontation diverges.

  According to police, Harper testified at Acoli's trial that the gunfight began within "seconds" of Foerster's arrival. He said Foerster reached into the car, pulled out a semi-automatic pistol and ammunition magazine, held them up, and said: "Jim, look what I found." Harper said Shakur then reached down beside her right leg, drew a pistol, and shot him in the shoulder. Prosecutor C. Judson Hamlin told a jury that Acoli shot Foerster with a .38 caliber pistol and used Foerster's own gun to "execute him." Investigators found two jammed pistols near the body.

  Casualties were heavy. Foerster was killed and Harper was wounded. Zayd Shakur was dead or dying in the car, and both Assata Shakur and Acoli were wounded. Acoli drove the white Pontiac LeMans, which carried Vermont license plates, about 5 miles before stopping. Three patrol cars chased him while turnpike booths were alerted. Ordered to halt by a trooper, he ran into the woods as the trooper emptied his gun.

  Shakur stayed. She walked toward the trooper with her bloodied arms raised in surrender. Acoli was caught after a 36-hour manhunt involving 400 people, state police helicopters, and bloodhounds. Zayd's body was found in a gully along the road. A New Jersey police spokesperson said the group was headed for a "new hideout in Philadelphia" and then Washington. A book in the car was said to list potential army targets. Shakur testified that she was on her way to a job as a bar waitress in Baltimore.

  Shakur had gunshot wounds in both arms and a shoulder. Under heavy guard at Middlesex General Hospital, she was reported in serious condition. Harper, shot in the left shoulder, was in good condition. She was interrogated and arraigned from her hospital bed, and her defense team called her medical care substandard. Her lawyers later won a court order from Judge John Bachman moving her to Roosevelt Hospital in Edison. A few weeks later she went to the Middlesex County Workhouse. She said the police beat and choked her whenever doctors or nurses stepped outside.

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• 5. Seven Trials

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  Between 1973 and 1977, courts in New York and New Jersey indicted Assata Shakur ten times, producing seven separate trials. The charges included two bank robberies, a kidnapping, the attempted murder of two Queens police officers, and eight felonies tied to the turnpike shootout. Three trials ended in acquittal and one in a hung jury. One brought a change of venue, one a mistrial because of pregnancy, and one a conviction. Three indictments were dismissed without any trial.

  The first big test came in December 1973, over a $3,700 robbery of the Manufacturer's Hanover Trust Company in the Bronx. Her co-defendant was Kamau Sadiki, born Fred Hilton. Her lawyers asked for six more months to prepare. Judge Lee P. Gagliardi refused, and the Second Circuit denied her petition. In protest the lawyers stayed silent, so Shakur and Sadiki defended themselves.

  Chaos followed. Her aunt and lawyer, Evelyn Williams, was cited for contempt after walking out of the courtroom when her motions failed. The defendants shouted at the judge and were sent to a holding pen, where they listened over loudspeakers. The prosecution leaned on two men, Avon White and John Rivers, who had pleaded guilty to the robbery. They were promised their charges would be dropped in exchange for testimony. The jury deadlocked a fourth time, and the judge declared a mistrial.

  A retrial before Judge Arnold Bauman went differently. Shakur represented herself, assisted by lawyer Florynce Kennedy. She cross-examined White personally and got him to admit he had once been in love with her. The defense attacked his credibility by pointing to eight months in a hospital for the criminally insane. White answered that he had faked insanity by claiming to be Allah in front of three psychiatrists. He and Rivers both said Shakur wore overalls, yet the person identified as her in a surveillance photograph wore a jacket. Both defendants were acquitted, and six jurors said they did not believe the two key witnesses.

  A kidnapping case came next. Prosecutors said Shakur and co-defendant Ronald Myers robbed a Brooklyn bar, took $50 from the register, and kidnapped the bartender, James E. Freeman. A note allegedly demanded a $20,000 ransom from the bar owner. After a three-month trial before Judge William Thompson, the jury deliberated for seven hours and acquitted both on the 19th of December 1975.

  The Queens bank case reached court in 1976. It concerned a $7,700 robbery of the Bankers Trust Company in August 1971. Shakur served as her own co-counsel. She told the jury she was not acting "because I have any illusions about my legal abilities." There were "things that I must say to you," she explained. One bank employee called her a robber, while three others were unsure. She was forcibly subdued and photographed by the FBI on the judge's order after she refused to cooperate. A later judge ruled the new photographs inadmissible. The jury concluded a widely circulated FBI photograph did not show her, and on the 16th of January 1976 she was acquitted. She was the only one of six suspects brought to trial.

  Other cases collapsed on their own. In November 1974, Justice Peter Farrell dismissed the Queens attempted-murder indictment for insufficient evidence. In October 1977, Justice John Starkey threw out murder and robbery charges over the death of Richard Nelson because the state had waited too long. "People have constitutional rights, and you can't shuffle them around," he said. The Statler Hilton robbery charge was dismissed in November 1977 without a trial.

  The turnpike case moved slowly. In 1973 Judge Leon Gerofsky moved the case from Middlesex County to Morris County. He said it was "almost impossible to obtain a jury here comprising people willing to accept the responsibility of impartiality." Morris County had a far smaller black population. Before jury selection finished, the court learned Shakur was pregnant. Fearing a miscarriage, prosecutors asked for a mistrial for her alone, and Acoli's trial went ahead without her.

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• 6. The 1977 Verdict

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  By the time of her 1977 retrial, Sundiata Acoli had already been convicted of shooting and murdering Werner Foerster. Prosecutors now argued that Shakur had fired the bullets that wounded Harper. The defense argued that the dead man, Zayd Shakur, had fired them. Under New Jersey law, presence at the scene could count as aiding and abetting. She could therefore be convicted of the murder even without pulling the trigger that killed him.

  Publicity was enormous. A total of 289 articles had run in the local press about the crimes attributed to her. She tried again to move the trial to federal court, and again she failed. Her request for an injunction against Friday sessions was denied as well. The nine-week trial was reported even by TASS, the Soviet news agency. Hundreds of civil rights campaigners demonstrated outside the Middlesex County courthouse every day.

  Jury selection questioned 408 potential jurors. All 15 who were seated were white, ten women and five men, and most were under thirty. Five had personal ties to state troopers. One prospective juror was dismissed for reading Target Blue, a book by Robert Daley that discussed Shakur. Judge Theodore Appleby also ordered her lawyers to take a copy of Roots by Alex Haley off the defense table, where jurors could see it.

  William Kunstler led her defense team. After the first assistant county prosecutor, Edward J. Barone, finished a 13-minute opening statement, Kunstler moved at once for a mistrial. Appleby denied it. The defense later asked him to subpoena FBI Director Clarence Kelley and Senator Frank Church. They were to testify about COINTELPRO, which the defense said was designed to disrupt black activist groups. That motion was denied too.

  Defending her carried a price. Until Kunstler obtained a court order, he had to strip naked and submit to a body search before each visit with Shakur. During those visits she was shackled to a bed by both ankles. Her lawyers said their offices were secretly recorded. A burglary of the defense office made half of her trial documents disappear, and Appleby refused to investigate. Lennox Hinds was held in contempt repeatedly, and his dispute with a New Jersey ethics committee reached the United States Supreme Court in 1982.

  Only four witnesses to the shooting survived: Acoli, Shakur, Harper, and a turnpike driver. Acoli said nothing, either to police or in court. The driver had seen a trooper struggling with a Black man beside a white car and a patrol car. Shakur took the stand on the 15th of March, for under 40 minutes of questioning by attorney Stuart Ball. She said Harper shot her after she raised her arms. A second bullet hit her in the back as she turned, and she crawled into the back seat. Harper's reports said she pulled a 9mm handgun from a red pocketbook and fired at Foerster. Asked point blank whether she had shot Foerster or Harper, she answered "No" both times.

  Barone's cross-examination, lasting under two hours, was harder on her. She could not explain how three magazines of ammunition and 16 live shells ended up in her shoulder bag. She admitted she had seen a gun sticking out of Acoli's pocket at a Howard Johnson's restaurant before the shooting. She also carried an identification card reading "Justine Henderson."

  Medical testimony formed the heart of the defense. A neurologist said the second bullet had severed the median nerve in her right arm, making it impossible for her to pull a trigger. Neurosurgeon Dr. Arthur Turner Davidson testified that her wounds could only have happened with both arms raised. Firing from a crouch, as Harper described, would be "anatomically impossible." When Barone suggested the impact spun her around, Davidson replied: "Impossible." Pathologist Dr. David Spain said there was "no conceivable way" the first bullet could have hit her collarbone with her arm down. Then Appleby cut off funds for more expert witnesses.

  Other evidence cut in her favor, according to Angela Davis. Neutron activation tests found no gunpowder residue on Shakur's fingers, and labs in Trenton and Washington found no fingerprints of hers on any weapon. Recordings made hours later showed that Harper never mentioned Foerster when he walked back to headquarters. Foerster's body was found beside his patrol car more than an hour afterward.

  On the second night of deliberation, the jurors asked to hear the instructions on the four assault charges again. Observers wondered whether they had already cleared her of murder. They had not. Shakur was convicted on all eight counts, two for murder and six for assault. In a barely audible voice she said she was ashamed to have taken part in the trial. She called the jury racist and said it had "convicted a woman with her hands up." When Appleby told attendants to "remove the prisoner," she answered: "The prisoner will walk away on her own feet."

  Kunstler blamed the verdict on racism, saying "the white element was there to destroy her." Barone said the outcome was decided "completely on the facts." At sentencing on the 25th of April, Appleby imposed 26 to 33 years, to run after her mandatory life term. He dismissed the second-degree murder count over Zayd Shakur because the state supreme court had narrowed that law. He added 30 days for contempt after she refused to rise when he entered. Parole would have required at least 25 years served.

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• 7. Behind Bars and Over the Wall

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  Rikers Island Correctional Institution for Women in New York City kept Shakur in solitary confinement for 21 months, after a brief stay at the Garden State Youth Correctional Facility in Yardville, New Jersey. Her only daughter, Kakuya Shakur, was conceived with Kamau Sadiki during the trials. Kakuya was born on the 11th of September 1974 in a fortified psychiatric ward at Elmhurst General Hospital. Shakur later wrote that large female officers beat and restrained her there after she refused a medical exam.

  At another point she was held in a special area of the Garden State facility staffed by women guards, where she was the only female inmate. When Kunstler first took her case, he called her basement cell "adequate," and the remark nearly cost him the job. On the 8th of April 1978 she was sent to the Alderson Federal Prison Camp in West Virginia. There she met Puerto Rican nationalist Lolita Lebrón and a Catholic nun named Mary Alice, who introduced her to liberation theology. The maximum security unit also held Aryan Sisterhood members and two followers of Charles Manson, Sandra Good and Lynette Fromme.

  Her lawyer Lennox Hinds said she "understates the awfulness of the condition in which she was incarcerated." Angela Davis had called her a political prisoner as early as the 8th of October 1973. Hinds invited an international panel of seven jurists to tour American prisons. They told the United Nations Commission on Human Rights that her solitary confinement was "totally unbefitting any prisoner." Amnesty International, however, did not regard her as a political prisoner.

  On the 20th of February 1979, after Alderson's maximum security unit closed, she went to the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women in New Jersey. Early that year a group of army members who called themselves "the Family" began planning her escape. They paid for it by stealing $105,000 from a Bamberger's store in Paramus, New Jersey.

  On the 2nd of November 1979, three army members visiting Shakur drew concealed .45-caliber pistols and a stick of dynamite. They seized two correction officers, took a van, and escaped with Shakur, helped by members of the May 19th Communist Organization. Nobody was hurt, and the officers were left in a parking lot. State officials later admitted they had run no identity checks on the visitors, who gave false identification and were not searched. Kunstler had just started preparing her appeal.

  According to later court testimony, Shakur lived in Pittsburgh until August 1980, then flew to the Bahamas. Several people were charged with helping her, including Mutulu Shakur, Silvia Baraldini, Sekou Odinga, and Marilyn Buck. On the 23rd of July 1982, Mutulu Shakur became the 380th addition to the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list, partly for his role. He stayed on it for four years until his capture in 1986, and he was convicted in 1988.

  Three days after the escape, more than 5,000 demonstrators in New York carried signs reading "Assata Shakur is Welcome Here." A statement from her circulated at the rally, condemning prison conditions and calling for an independent "New Afrikan" state. Investigators monitored her friends and relatives for years, even her daughter walking to school in upper Manhattan. A pre-dawn raid on the 20th of April 1980 hit 92 Morningside Avenue in Harlem. FBI agents with shotguns and machine guns searched the building for hours and kept residents inside. Many residents felt it had "racist overtones." She was also charged with unlawful flight to avoid imprisonment.

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• 8. Exile in Havana

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  By 1984, Shakur was in Cuba, having traveled from Mexico according to former FBI Assistant Director John Miller. Cuba granted her political asylum that year and paid about $13 a day toward her living expenses. In 1985 her daughter Kakuya, raised until then by Shakur's mother in New York, came to live with her. The world learned she was there in 1987, when she gave an interview to Newsday.

  She called Cuba "One of the Largest, Most Resistant and Most Courageous Palenques (Maroon Camps) that has ever existed on the Face of this Planet." That open letter also described Fidel Castro as a "hero of the oppressed" and herself as a "20th century escaped slave." She also worked as an English-language editor for Radio Havana Cuba.

  Assata: An Autobiography appeared in 1987, written in Cuba. It traces her youth in the South and New York but gives little detail about her time in the Black Liberation Army. Lawrence Hill and Company published it, yet the copyright sits with Zed Books of London because of "Son of Sam" laws that restrict who may profit from a book. Evelyn Williams made several trips to Cuba to serve as go-between with the publisher. A British edition followed in 2014, and BBC Radio 4 broadcast a dramatized version in July 2017. In 1993 she published Still Black, Still Strong with Dhoruba bin Wahad and Mumia Abu-Jamal.

  Pressure to bring her back never faded. In 1997 Carl Williams, superintendent of the New Jersey State Police, wrote to Pope John Paul II asking him to raise the matter with Castro. During the pope's 1998 visit she gave an interview to NBC journalist Ralph Penza. She later published a long critique of how it was edited. In March 1998, Governor Christine Todd Whitman asked Attorney General Janet Reno to do whatever it took to extradite her. That September, Congress passed House Concurrent Resolution 254, a non-binding request to Cuba, by 371-0 in the House and by unanimous consent in the Senate. Representative Maxine Waters later wrote to Castro that many Congressional Black Caucus members, herself included, had voted for it by mistake.

  On the 2nd of May 2005, the 32nd anniversary of the turnpike shooting, the FBI classified her as a domestic terrorist. It raised the reward to $1 million, the largest ever on an individual in New Jersey. State police superintendent Rick Fuentes said: "she is now 120 pounds of money." Reports said she then dropped out of sight, after having lived openly enough to list her phone number in the local directory. That month Castro called her a victim of racial persecution and said the terrorist label was "an infamous lie." The reward doubled to $2 million in 2013. In June 2017, President Donald Trump demanded the return of "the cop-killer Joanne Chesimard."

  Her influence outlasted the manhunt. She was widely described as the godmother of rapper Tupac Shakur. The Guardian called her "an icon of Black liberation" whose life and memoir "inspired racial justice movements for decades," and her writings have influenced the Black Lives Matter movement of the 2020s. The New York Times and Rolling Stone called her a folk hero in their obituaries. BBC News described her as a hero to many left-wing activists in the United States.

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