Assata: An Autobiography

by Assata Shakur

  I spent my first month at the middlesex county workhouse writing. Evelyn had brought some newspaper clippings and it was obvious the press was trying to railroad me, to make me seem like a monster. According to them i was a common criminal, just going around shooting down cops for the hell of it. I had to make a statement. I had to talk to my people and let them know what i was about, where i was really coming from. The statement seemed to take forever to write. I wanted to make a tape of it and enlisted Evelyn's help. As my lawyer, she was dead set against it and advised me not to make the tape. But as a Black woman living in amerika, Evelyn understood why it was important and necessary. When the prosecutor found out about the tape he tried to get her thrown off the case. She was ordered by the court never to bring a tape recorder again when she visited me.

  I made the tape of "To My People" on July 4, 1973, and it was broadcast on many radio stations. Here is what I said:

  Black brothers, Black sisters, i want you to know that i love you and i hope that somewhere in your hearts you have love for me. My name is Assata Shakur (slave name joanne chesimard), and i am a revolutionary. A Black revolutionary. By that i mean that i have declared war on all forces that have raped our women, castrated our men, and kept our babies empty-bellied.

  I have declared war on the rich who prosper on our poverty, the politicians who lie to us with smiling faces, and all the mindless, heartless robots who protect them and their property.

  I am a Black revolutionary, and, as such, i am a victim of all the wrath, hatred, and slander that amerika is capable of. Like all other Black revolutionaries, amerika is trying to lynch me.

  I am a Black revolutionary woman, and because of this i have been charged with and accused of every alleged crime in which a woman was believed to have participated. The alleged crimes in which only men were supposedly involved, i have been accused of planning. They have plastered pictures alleged to be me in post offices, airports, hotels, police cars, subways, banks, television, and newspapers. They have offered over fifty thousand dollars in rewards for my capture and they have issued orders to shoot on sight and shoot to kill.

  I am a Black revolutionary, and, by definition, that makes me a part of the Black Liberation Army. The pigs have used their news papers and TVs to paint the Black Liberation Army as vicious, brutal, mad-dog criminals. They have called us gangsters and gun molls and have compared us to such characters as john dillinger and ma barker. It should be clear, it must be clear to anyone who can think, see, or hear, that we are the victims. The victims and not the criminals.

  It should also be clear to us by now who the real criminals are. Nixon and his crime partners have murdered hundreds of Third World brothers and sisters in Vietnam, Cambodia, Mozambique, Angola, and South Africa. As was proved by Watergate, the top law enforcement officials in this country are a lying bunch of criminals. The president, two attorney generals, the head of the fbi, the head of the cia, and half the white house staff have been implicated in the Watergate crimes.

  They call us murderers, but we did not murder over two hundred fifty unarmed Black men, women, and children, or wound thousands of others in the riots they provoked during the sixties. The rulers of this country have always considered their property more important than our lives. They call us murderers, but we were not responsible for the twenty-eight brother inmates and nine hostages murdered at attica. They call us murderers, but we did not murder and wound over thirty unarmed Black students at Jackson State-or Southern State, either.

  They call us murderers, but we did not murder Martin Luther King, Jr., Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, George Jackson, Nat Turner, James Chaney, and countless others. We did not murder, by shooting in the back, sixteen-year-old Rita Lloyd, eleven-year-old Rickie Bodden, or ten-year-old Clifford Glover. They call us murderers, but we do not control or enforce a system of racism and oppression that systematically murders Black and Third World people. Although Black people supposedly comprise about fifteen per cent of the total amerikkkan population, at least sixty percent of murder victims are Black. For every pig that is killed in the so-called line of duty, there are at least fifty Black people murdered by the police.

  Black life expectancy is much lower than white and they do their best to kill us before we are even born. We are burned alive in fire-trap tenements. Our brothers and sisters OD daily from heroin and methadone. Our babies die from lead poisoning. Millions of Black people have died as a result of indecent medical care. This is murder. But they have got the gall to call us murderers.

  They call us kidnappers, yet Brother Clark Squire (who is accused, along with me, of murdering a new jersey state trooper) was kidnapped on April 2, 1969, from our Black community and held on one million dollars' ransom in the New York Panther 21 conspiracy case. He was acquitted on May 13, 1971, along with all the others, of 156 counts of conspiracy by a jury that took less than two hours to deliberate. Brother Squire was innocent.Yet he was kidnapped from his community and family. Over two years of his life was stolen, but they call us kidnappers. We did not kidnap the thousands of Brothers and Sisters held captive in amerika's concentration camps. Ninety percent of the prison population in this country are Black and Third World people who can afford neither bail nor lawyers.

  They call us thieves and bandits. They say we steal. But it was not we who stole millions of Black people from the continent of Africa. We were robbed of our language, of our Gods, of our culture, of our human dignity, of our labor, and of our lives.They call us thieves, yet it is not we who rip off billions of dollars every year through tax evasions, illegal price fixing, embezzlement, consumer fraud, bribes, kickbacks, and swindles. They call us bandits, yet every time most Black people pick up our paychecks we are being robbed. Every time we walk into a store in our neighborhood we are being held up. And every time we pay our rent the landlord sticks a gun into our ribs.

  They call us thieves, but we did not rob and murder millions of Indians by ripping off their homeland, then call ourselves pioneers. They call us bandits, but it is not we who are robbing Africa, Asia, and Latin America of their natural resources and freedom while the people who live there are sick and starving. The rulers of this country and their flunkies have committed some of the most brutal, vicious crimes in history. They are the bandits. They are the murderers. And they should be treated as such. These maniacs are not fit to judge me, Clark, or any other Black person on trial in amerika. Black people should and, inevitably, must determine our destinies.

  Every revolution in history has been accomplished by actions, although words are necessary. We must create shields that protect us and spears that penetrate our enemies. Black people must learn how to struggle by struggling. We must learn by our mistakes.

  I want to apologize to you, my Black brothers and sisters, for being on the new jersey turnpike. I should have known better. The turnpike is a checkpoint where Black people are stopped, searched, harassed, and assaulted. Revolutionaries must never be in too much of a hurry or make careless decisions. He who runs when the sun is sleeping will stumble many times.

  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. The pigs also try to give the impression that five or ten guerrillas are responsible for every revolutionary action carried out in amerika. That is nonsense. That is absurd. Black revolutionaries do not drop from the moon. We are created by our conditions. Shaped by our oppression. We are being manufactured in droves in the ghetto streets, places like attica, san quentin, bedford hills, leavenworth, and sing sing. They are turning out thousands of us. Many jobless Black veterans and welfare mothers are joining our ranks. Brothers and sisters from all walks of life, who are tired of suffering passively, make up the BLA.

  There is, and always will be, until every Black man, woman, and child is free, a Black Liberation Army. The main function of the Black Liberation Army at this time is to create
good examples, to struggle for Black freedom, and to prepare for the future. We must defend ourselves and let no one disrespect us. We must gain our liberation by any means necessary.

  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:

  In the spirit of:

  Ronald Carter

  William Christmas

  Mark Clark

  Mark Essex

  Frank "Heavy" Fields

  Woodie Changa Olugbala Green Fred Hampton

  Lil' Bobby Hutton

  George Jackson

  Jonathan Jackson

  James McClain

  Harold Russell

  Zayd Malik Shakur

  Anthony Kumu Olugbala White

  We must fight on.

  The workhouse had a whole heap of rules, most of them stupid. No newspapers or magazines were permitted. When i asked why we couldn't read newspapers, they told me that newspapers were "inflammatory." Obviously, if a person read in the paper that his or her sister had been raped, he would wait until the rapist came to jail and then do him bodily harm.

  "But," i protested, "the other inmates watch television and listen to the radio (i wasn't allowed either). They could receive the same information that way or from a visit from home."

  "In that case," the warden told me, "we don't let you read newspapers because they are a fire hazard."

  One of the saddest rules prohibited children from visiting their mothers in jail. I could see the children waiting outside, looking up at that ugly old building with sad, frustrated faces. Their mothers would run to the only window that faced the parking lot just to get a glimpse of their children. Yelling out of the window was a no-no, but once in a while somebody would get carried away. Sometimes their frantic screams went unheard.

  Gradually, i began to know the women. They were all very kind to me and treated me like a sister. They laughed like hell when i told them that i was supposedly being protected from them. Those first days, before i had really learned to maneuver with one hand, they did whatever they could to make things easier for me. They volunteered to iron my uniforms and sneak them into the laundry to be washed more than once a week. When they told me their charges and the time they were doing, i couldn't believe it. Quite a few of them were doing time for the numbers, either six months or a year. In New York, doing time for number running was practically unheard of, and it certainly didn't get six months or a year. Everybody in the world knows that the numbers business keeps the cops fat. These women hadn't hurt anybody or stolen anything, yet they were sitting in jail, probably busted by the same cops that they paid off. Their only crime was competing with the state lottery. Most of them had already been sentenced. If the sentence was less than a year, time was served in the county jail rather than in the state penitentiary.

  If i had expected to find so-called hardened criminals or big-time female gangsters or gun molls in the workhouse, i would have been sadly disappointed. The rest of the women who weren't doing time for the numbers were in for some form of petty theft, like shoplifting or passing bad checks. Most of those sisters were on welfare and all of them had been barely able to make ends meet. The courts had shown them no mercy. They brought in this sister shortly after i arrived who was eight months pregnant and had been sentenced to a month for shoplifting something that cost less than twenty dollars.

  Later a middle-aged sister began coming to the workhouse on weekends. She worked during the week and served her six-month sentence for drunken driving on weekends. Knowing that white women with the same charges would never have received such a sentence, i thought it was harsh. But i didn't realize how harsh until she told me that she had been arrested for drunken driving in the driveway of her own house. She hadn't even been on a public road. She also told me that the cops had arrested her because they didn't like the way she talked to them.

  In that jail it was nothing to see a woman brought in all beat up. In some cases, the only charge was "resisting arrest." A Puerto Rican sister was brought in one night. She had been so badly beaten by the police that the matron on duty didn't want to admit her. "I don't want her dying on my shift," she kept saying. It was days before this sister was able to get out of bed.

  In spite of it all, those sisters kept the place jumping. They told all kinds of funny stories about their lives, things they had seen and experienced. Some had a natural knack for comedy. What amazed me was the way they told the saddest stories in the world and made everybody laugh about them.

  Girl, that nigga was always in my pocketbook stealing my money. And all he did with it was blow it at the racetracks. Girl, that man spent so much money on the racetracks, he made me wish i was a horse. One day i fixed his ass, though. I was sick and tired of his mess. Betcha he won't go in nobody's pocketbook no time soon. I put a mousetrap in that sucker. Girl, you should have heard that nigga howl.

  My husband and me, we used to fight like cats and dogs. And he was jealous as the day is long. Chile, we went to the bar this night and the nigga got all high, and started thinkin' i was messing around with some dude at the bar. As soon as we got outside, boy, he jumped on me like a gorilla jumps on a banana. Don't you know that man hit me so hard he knocked my teeth straight out of my mouth. "Now, hold on a minute!" i told that fool. "We can fight later. I ain't got no 'nother four hundred dollars to spend on no false teeth." Chile, we was drunk as skunks, down on our knees for 'bout an hour looking for those teeth. And when that fool found them, he said the teeth jumped up and tried to bite him. Lord, chile, that man is a fool.

  I could listen to these stories only when the outside door was open. During the day they had a female "sheriff's officer" posted outside my cell. When she was there, the door usually stayed open.

  The whole time i was at that jail i saw very few white women. The few who did come were there only a few hours or a day or so before they were bailed out. There was one white woman who was busted on the turnpike with fifty pounds of reefer. Everyone waited to see what her bail would be. Then we found out she had been released on her own recognizance (that is, without bond). To be released on recognizance in the state of new jersey, one of the requirements is jersey residence. The woman lived in Vermont. But nobody was really shocked. She was white.

  I was going crazy in that little cell. The only time they let me out was for visits and to see the so-called doctor. I have always been an active and restless person, and being locked up in that little cage all day drove me wild. I needed to stretch my legs. I started to run around the cell. I would run in this tiny circle until i was exhausted. Two or three days after i started, the warden, Miss Bitch, accompanied by some male guards, visited me.

  "We hear that you are running around your cell," she said. "You will have to stop this activity at once."

  "What? Why?”

  "Because you are disturbing the people downstairs.”

  "What people?”

  "There is an office underneath you and you are disturbing the workers. “

  "Are you crazy? They'll just have to be disturbed. I don't run for that long anyhow. If you let me go out into the yard to exercise with the other women, i'll stop running around my cell."

  "I order you to stop running around your room."

  "I don't remember joining your army," i said. "When i join your army, then you can order me around."

  She left in a huff and i kept on running. That was the end of that. I have to thank her, though. If she hadn't come and harassed me, i would have probably given up running around that tiny space in a few days.

  The food in the workhouse was horrible. Actually, it was disgusting. The food there is worse than the food in any jail that i have been in since, and that is quite an accomplishment. I would sit and wait for lunch or dinner, hungry as hell, and they would bring me some greenish-brown iridescent chunks floating around in a watery liquid (liver stew, they called
it) or some lamb fat floating around in some water which was supposed to be lamb stew. And that nasty-looking, foul-smelling stuff tasted much worse than it looked. The place was infested with flies and so was the food. The only thing edible was eggs, when they had them, and mashed potatoes. I lived off the nuts and candy i bought from the commissary and the fruit my family brought on visits.

  Every single day for one whole week they brought us this nasty stuff that was supposed to be ravioli. Well, that was the last straw. We all decided to go on a food strike. I wrote a petition which everybody signed and we sent it down to the warden's office. Later, the warden agreed to discuss making the food more edible, but he refused to talk to me. He said the fact that i had referred to the food as "slop" showed i was unreasonable. The food was better for a few days, and then it reverted to the same old nasty slop.

  The woman sheriff's officer who guarded me had to be the oldest "dumb" blonde alive. She played the part to a bust. She was nosy and was the world's biggest gossip. Every time she saw me she smiled and pretended to be oh so friendly. One day some workmen were drilling a big hole in the wall to install new electrical circuits. Of course, as soon as she came in, the nosy sheriff's officer began her questions.

  "What are they building?"

  I said, "Haven't you heard? Well, you know, they passed a special law and they're going to execute me. They're building the gas chamber now."

  "Well!" she said indignantly. "Well! Nobody told me about it." And she rushed off to find out why no one had informed her. The lights were turned off every night at ten. I was lucky because there was a night switch that i controlled in the bathroom adjacent to my cell. I would move the cot so that i was in as much light as possible and i would read way into the night. When i tired of reading, i'd turn off the light and look out the window. Outside, police patrolled the area. A lot of times there were two police on foot who seemed to be standing around near the parking lot. They carried rifles and shotguns. One night, in my usual condition of boredom, while standing at the window and feeling mischievous, i cried out a birdlike sound in the shrillest voice i could muster: "Eeeeenk, eeeenk, eeeeenk, eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeenk." The pigs started looking around like crazy. They jerked this way and that way as if they thought someone was behind them. Again i cried, "Eeeeeeenk, eeeeeeeeenk, eeeeeeeeewa, eeeeeeeeeeeewa." This time they really jumped around. You would have thought it was World War II and the Japanese were two feet away. I waited awhile. When they calmed down, in a voice even shriller than before, i cried, "Naaaaaaeeeeee, naaaaeeeeeee, naaaaaaeeeeeeeeeeee." They pointed their guns and actually walked backward, prepared to fire at anything moving. Then, quite by accident, my metal cup fell to the floor. Well, in a second they were down on the ground, crawl ing, holding their rifles. When i saw these fools crawling around on the ground like that, i just couldn't take it anymore. I laughed until i was sick. Great, big, bad police, crawling around scared of their own shadows. Every once in a while i tried it again with different police and usually the results were similar, but it was never as good as that first night.