HAVANA — Assata Shakur, a Black liberation activist who spent more than four decades living in Cuba after escaping a U.S. prison, has died at 77, Cuban officials and her family announced Friday.
Born Joanne Deborah Chesimard in New York City, Shakur was convicted in 1977 of murder and armed robbery for the killing of New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster during a 1973 shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike. She was sentenced to life in prison but escaped two years later with the help of armed members of the Black Liberation Army, who stormed Clinton Correctional Facility for women in New Jersey, took hostages, and used a prison van to secure her release.
She surfaced in Cuba in 1984, where then-leader Fidel Castro granted her political asylum, framing her cause as part of the island’s broader support for revolutionary struggles against U.S. power. Cuba’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said she died Thursday in Havana from health complications linked to her age. Her daughter, Kakuya Shakur, confirmed the death in a Facebook post.
Shakur, a onetime member of both the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army, became one of the most polarizing figures in the history of U.S. radical movements. To supporters, she was a freedom fighter targeted by an oppressive state. To critics and law enforcement, she was a convicted cop killer who evaded justice. The FBI placed her on its “Most Wanted Terrorists” list, and successive U.S. administrations, including President Donald Trump’s during his first term, demanded her extradition from Cuba.
New Jersey leaders renewed their anger Friday. Gov. Phil Murphy and State Police Superintendent Patrick Callahan issued a joint statement calling her crimes “heinous” and pledging to oppose any effort to repatriate her remains to the United States. Assemblyman Michael Inganamort, who previously sponsored legislation demanding her return, said “justice was never served” for Trooper Foerster’s death.
Shakur consistently denied firing a weapon during the 1973 shootout, insisting in her autobiography and later writings that her hands were raised when she was shot and wounded. Her 1988 book Assata: An Autobiography became a touchstone for later generations of activists and resonated during the Black Lives Matter movement, with her call to “fight for our freedom” widely cited as a rallying cry.
Her influence reached into music and popular culture. She was regarded as a godmother figure by rapper Tupac Shakur’s family and was name-checked in politically charged songs by Public Enemy and Common. The latter’s 2000 track “A Song for Assata” prompted controversy years later when Common was invited to perform at the White House under President Barack Obama.
Black Lives Matter Grassroots Inc. paid tribute in a statement Friday, honoring Shakur’s “courage, wisdom, and deep, abiding love,” and pledging to continue the struggle she symbolized.
Her death closes one of the longest-running chapters in the political and cultural standoff between the United States and Cuba, where Shakur lived in exile as both a symbol of resistance and a fugitive from American justice.
