What I Am Reading: "Assata: An Autobiography" by Assata Shakur

I wanted to read a Black history book a bit different from the pile of Caribbean slave uprising histories I have accumulated, and this autobiography of Black revolutionary and wanted fugitive Assata Shakur topped a lot of reading lists that I found. The book is a double-narrative of her youth, education, and increasing political activism and membership in '60s radical groups like the Black Panther Party; and of her time in prison and on trial for various crimes, including the shooting of a New Jersey State Trooper in 1973. She served time in prison and underwent several trials, but escape to Havana in 1979.

The book is interesting for a few different reasons. Shakur was a left-wing cause célèbre for a time in the '70s, and it is claimed that her trial was heavily biased against her. After her capture, she was charged with several other crimes (bank robberies, kidnappings) stemming from her time with the Black Liberation Army, a militant offshoot of the Black Panther Party; but all of these charges were dismissed or resulted in an acquittal in their various New York / New Jersey / federal jurisdictions. So, for one thing, the book has a lot of interesting legal sessions for anyone interested in courtroom drama, with some rollicking circus trial acquittals and some sullen acquittals in the face of legal hostility. Another reason is Shakur's narrative of growing up Black and female in the '50s and '60s, and eventually becoming politically conscious and radicalized as a result of her exposure to different strands of Black liberation thought and militant movements active at the time. To even get that far, however, she had to survive long enough to go to college, find her way through menial office jobs where she learned to express her opinions on then-contemporary issues to her white coworkers, and generally overcome the ingrained sense of inferiority imparted to her by a racist society and education system. This itself is an interesting story simply of Growing Up Black, something that it is always useful to recount.

These elements, as well as Shakur's narratives of her time in various prisons, come together well and are entertainingly and deftly told, and the double-narrative structure with (mostly) alternating chapters keeps things moving along nicely. The chapters on her radical activities, however, are more of a mixed bag. On one hand, there are a couple of chapters dedicated to her time as a young-ish activist in the Black Panthers: the opinions of a normal participant on how the group undertook a lot of beneficial activities (she was especially involved in children’s' education and free breakfast programs); but also how the Party did not have very thorough or useful political education for members, and how it was largely arrayed in groupthink support of Huey Newton's increasing grandiosity. Shakur doesn't choke the book with theory, but does state several times that militancy needs to be accompanied and superseded by a coherent, positive political program. On the other hand, her subsequent involvement with the Black Liberation Army is mostly alluded to and glossed over, and the impression is given that she just woke up one day to read in the newspaper that she was accused of various crimes. I went to Wikipedia for more basic details on this, and there is a considerable about of information that doesn't get any treatment in the book. Her dramatic escape, for example, where a group of her comrades infiltrated the prison under pseudonyms, pulled guns, and took prison guards hostage, goes almost entirely unmentioned. Obviously, there are also alternative opinions on her guilt in the turnpike shooting, and history just screams out for the appeal that was being prepared when she escaped.

Her writing style is quick and funny, if a bit oversimplified at times. She expresses ideology through the text itself, writing America as "amerika," court as "kourt," and declining to capitalize the names of locations or institutions she is in opposition to. She describes in harrowing detail mistreatment at the hands of police and prison officials, especially when she is in medically vulnerable positions such as her hospitalization after the turnpike shootout (when she had first been taken into custody) or when she becomes pregnant in prison. Her time under guard in the hospital provides a dramatic opening to the book.

I can see why this is an important book to a lot of activists. Shakur's political awakening is linear and follows familiar beats: after experiencing racism and witnessing the oppression of Black people in her everyday life, she goes to college in New York and has her eyes opened to systems of imperialism and oppression, then she goes to Berkeley and has them opened even more. She expands her activism from being student focused to outward-facing, as popular support for revolutionary causes is needed. This evolution is more interesting when it is complicated by her disagreements with the Black Panthers, or her efforts to make connections with other revolutionary causes (and willingness to paint herself in an embarrassing light, such as a time in California when she was too high to respond to police harassment happening right in front of her). The book provides a first-hand experience of the ‘60s radical scene; this context bleeds in tie dye from every page, helped along by the slang both in the narrative and in quotations.

Beyond being a work of history by a participant, the book sets out to provide a counter-narrative to the official, legal version of events. Obviously, a book by an accused criminal who perceives herself as a political prisoner is going to assert innocence. However, I think that it is begging to be read within a larger context, as it leaves so many gaps and allusions in the story. Shakur's comrades and fellow-defendants come in and out of the story with little introduction, as if she thinks that the reader would already familiar with them and their importance to the story. As someone who of course did not live through the events in question, these references and references to more minor incidents of the era occasionally perplexed me; but there was always another trial or example of prison abuse on the next page to keep the story moving along. It is these incidents that are where the story really shines, and the condemnation of the racism inherent in the U.S. criminal justice system is the real point, from the police to the courts to the prisons. Regardless of Shakur’s innocence or guilt, in the years since her heyday, the criminal justice system has earned more and more skepticism and been the subject of more and more activism, making this autobiography more relevant now than ever.