On May 30, 2026, a Celebration of the Life and Legacy of Assata Shakur was held at the Riverside Church in New York City. Dhoruba Bin Wahad, co-founder of the Black Liberation Army, wrote these words of tribute for the event.
Solidarity and Greetings to all gathered to commemorate and reflect on the Life and legacy of Assata Shakur.
I am indeed appreciative of this opportunity to address this momentous gathering of comrades, friends, and family of my comrade Assata.
I know that many of you gathered here today may not have known Assata, but are instilled with, and inspired by, her lifelong resistance and revolutionary struggle against the white supremacist settler construct that is the United States of America.
I also appreciate that some of you gathered here today actually knew Assata, aided and supported her during her long exile in Cuba, and to these comrades I salute you and express my profound gratitude.
Finally, to those gathered in this iconic Riverside Church in Harlem, who in their own way have struggled for the liberation of African people, oppressed people, the downtrodden, the disregarded “Wretched of the Earth”, I salute all of you.
We may seem as strangers to one another, but we are only comrades who have never met.
I’d like to take this opportunity to tell the unvarnished truth about my Comrade Assata. It was during the early 1970s when our retaliatory resistance against the armed agents of racist state terrorism assumed organized intensity. Police murder of Black youth, accompanied by the plague of heroin addiction, informed the legacy and legend of Assata, you now pay homage to.
Few of you gathered here today would have ever heard of Assata were it not for the emergence of the Black Liberation Army (BLA).
I say this because, despite scholarly deceitfulness surrounding the BLA, Assata Shakur was a soldier in the centuries-old war against African peoples, a war that began with the North Atlantic Slave Trade, a racist war that continues to this very moment by violent and non-violent means.
The scholarly deceit I speak of lies in the denial of this war, and the deception that Black people fought for Civil Rights, rather than for Human Rights, and that Human Rights can be granted by the inhumane, rather than appropriated by those criminalized and defamed.
This fact is important. Because Assata was not an innocent victim of police repression, shot wantonly with her hands raised in submission. She was a revolutionary, and revolutionaries are never victims of injustice. How many freedom fighters were wantonly killed in the struggle for the liberation of their people? Medgar Evers, Amilcar Cabral, Che Guevara, some murdered even while surrendering?
Facts speak louder than fiction: In 1971, Assata wasn’t a designated FBI COINTELPRO target. She was a medical cadre of the National Committee to Combat Fascism in Washington Heights, Harlem, New York. NCCF chapters were formations of the original Black Panther Party.
Indeed, by 1972, COINTELPRO had already achieved some of its most significant achievements with the assassination of Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King, and the breakup of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
Earlier in late 1971, COINTELPRO was reconfigured as NEWKILL and CHESIROB. Both were acronyms for FBI repressive campaigns authorized by the Nixon White House specifically targeting the emergence of the BLA and its clandestine leadership, one of whom was Joanne Chesimard, hence the acronym CHESIROB for Chesimard Robberies.
I choose to remind everyone of these historical facts, rather than repeat historical fantasies of Assata’s victimhood. Why? Because Assata was a warrior in the tradition of Harriet Tubman, in the tradition of Denmark Vesey, and our ancestors who resisted the brutality, murder, and enslavement of African People for over 300 years.
In the struggle for freedom, revolutionaries are never victims, or innocents. Assata was not an unfortunate victim like George Floyd – or Clifford Glover - she was a conscious, committed, and revolutionary Freedom Fighter!
In this historical moment, we should be mindful that White Supremacy and the American Empire are in decline.
Besieged by the Global South’s emerging Unity, White America has become increasingly lawless. And like a rabid dog backed into a corner, capitalist White supremacist state violence knows no limits.
The land that gave Assata refuge, Cuba, now faces imminent attack by the U.S. in its attempt to reassert the Monroe Doctrine of the 19th century in the Western Hemisphere.
The People of Iran are under attack by the U.S. and its Zionist White Supremacist cohort, Israel. We must demand peace in Western Asia and an end to Zionist settler expansionism.
My beloved comrades and friends, we should not merely eulogize Assata, we should live like her. In this historical moment, Revolutionary resistance to the racist, imperialistic, and violent enemies of humanity requires nothing less.
Long Live the Spirit of Assata Shakur!
Long Live the Independence of the Cuban People!
Dhoruba bin-Wahad is a former member of the Black Panther Party (BPP) and the Black Liberation Army (BLA). He was a leading member of the New York chapter of the BPP, a Field Secretary of the BPP responsible for organizing chapters throughout the East Coast, and a member of the Panther 21.
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