Nothing to Lose but Our Chains: Assata Shakur and Life as Resistance

Havana, 2025. The news ripples through the streets: Assata Shakur is dead. Western headlines call her “Tupac’s godmother” or “New Jersey’s most wanted fugitive.” But in Havana’s neighbourhoods, in activist circles from Oakland to Johannesburg, she is remembered as something else entirely: a revolutionary, a poet, a woman who lived her life in defiance of the world’s most powerful government. At 78 years old, Joanne Deborah Chesimard (aka Assata Shakur) died in exile—but free.

Her story is one of survival and symbolism, of bullets on a highway, a prison break, and a Caribbean exile that turned into a new life. It is also the story of how a Black woman became a spectre haunting the American state, a woman whose name the FBI still spat with venom nearly half a century after her escape. She had nothing to lose but her chains, and she never stopped reminding us of that truth.

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A 77 Year Old Woman on the FBI’s Most Wanted

In 2013, the FBI added Assata Shakur to its Most Wanted Terrorists list—the first woman ever to appear there. Her photograph, decades old, looked out from posters beside a $2 million bounty. To law enforcement, she was a cop-killer, a terrorist who had escaped justice. To her supporters, the image was absurd: an aging grandmother in Havana, branded a terrorist by the behemoth of the U.S. state. But the designation was also revealing. Nearly 40 years after her prison break, this woman—frail in body but unbowed in spirit—was still considered a threat. Symbolism can be more dangerous than guns.

“My name is Assata Shakur, and I am a 20th century escaped slave,” she once wrote from exile. “Because of government persecution, I was left with no other choice than to flee… I am not a criminal, nor have I ever been one.” To her, the government’s fury was proof of her righteousness. If her name still stirred their fear, she must still be doing something right.

Who Was Assata Shakur?

Birth name: Joanne Deborah Chesimard

Born: July 16, 1947, Queens, New York

Died: September 26, 2025, Havana, Cuba (aged 78)

Role: Black Liberation Army (BLA) member, activist, writer, and the first woman ever placed on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list.

Blood on the Turnpike

But to understand Assata’s power, we must return to May 2, 1973. A broken taillight on the New Jersey Turnpike. Two cars pulled over. Inside one: Assata Shakur, Zayd Malik Shakur, and Sundiata Acoli, members of the Black Liberation Army. Behind them, the flashing lights of Troopers Werner Foerster and James Harper.

The stop spiralled into chaos. Shots rang out in the night. When the smoke cleared, Zayd Shakur and Trooper Foerster were dead. Assata was slumped on the asphalt, bleeding from critical wounds. She would later testify: “I was shot with my arms in the air. My wounds could not have happened unless my arms were in the air… It is medically impossible for that to happen if my arms were down.”

Even Trooper Harper admitted on the stand that his early testimony had been “untruthful.” Still, in 1977, an all-white jury convicted Assata of Foerster’s murder under New Jersey’s felony-murder law. She called it “a legal lynching.” The grief of that night haunted her forever. “Never in my life have I felt such grief,” she wrote of Zayd’s death. “He had lost his life trying to protect both me and Sundiata.”

Prison Walls

Prison became another battlefield. Isolated in men’s facilities, placed under 24-hour surveillance, and denied proper medical care, she was treated with a severity that her attorney Lennox Hinds described as unprecedented: “In the history of New Jersey, no woman pretrial detainee or prisoner has ever been treated as she was.”

Assata endured solitary confinement and a system designed to break her spirit. But she continued to write, to study, to remind herself that resistance was not always carried out with bullets. Sometimes it was the sheer act of survival. Yet she also knew survival alone was not enough. If she remained behind bars, she believed she would eventually be killed.

The Great Escape

On November 2, 1979, comrades of the Black Liberation Army stormed the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women. Guards were taken hostage. A prison van was hijacked. Within hours, Assata Shakur had vanished into the underground.

She would later explain: “I saw this as a necessary step, not only because I was innocent of the charges against me, but because I knew that in the racist legal system of the United States I would receive no justice. I was also afraid that I would be murdered in prison.”

The escape enraged U.S. authorities. For years, her whereabouts were a mystery, until she resurfaced in Cuba in 1984. Fidel Castro’s government granted her political asylum, calling her a victim of racial persecution. To New Jersey law enforcement, it was a national humiliation. To her supporters, it was a victory—proof that even the might of the United States could be defied.

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Cuba: Exile and Healing

Cuba became her refuge, but also her new home. “When I came to Cuba, I expected everyone to look like Fidel,” she joked. Instead, she found a society multiracial, complex, and—most strikingly—free of the constant fear she had known in America. “People in America are afraid to walk the streets; it’s not like that here,” she observed.

Exile was not without its costs. “Living in exile is hard. I miss my family and friends. I miss the culture, the music, how people talk… I miss the look of recognition Black women give each other,” she admitted. She could not attend her mother’s funeral. She was separated from her daughter for years. Yet Cuba allowed her to heal. “I realized that I had some healing to do. I didn’t know the extent of my wounds until I came to Cuba.”

Cuban officials stood firm against U.S. demands for extradition. “Cuando aceptamos a una persona como refugiada política… es algo que no está sujeto a ningún debate,” one official declared. When the U.S. sought to make normalized relations conditional on her return, Cuba refused. To them, she was not a terrorist, but a persecuted activist—a heroica mujer negra.

Symbol and Sister

Angela Davis, in the foreword to Assata: An Autobiography, reminded readers of the personal cost of Assata’s defiance: “I urge you to reflect on what it must mean for her to have been unable to attend her mother’s funeral or to visit with her new grandchild. As you follow her life story, you will discover a compassionate human being with an unswerving commitment to justice that travels easily across racial and ethnic lines.”

To activists across generations, she became a symbol. At rallies, crowds chanted her words: “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.” The mantra became known simply as Assata’s Chant. It lives on in Black Lives Matter marches, on t-shirts that proclaim “Assata Taught Me,” and in whispered affirmations among organizers who see her as proof that the struggle continues.

She herself never shied from the weight of symbolism. “Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them,” she said. Resistance, she insisted, was the only path to freedom.

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Death in Defiance

Assata Shakur died in Cuba in September 2025. To U.S. authorities, it was the death of a fugitive who had evaded justice. To those she inspired, it was the passing of a freedom fighter who had lived on her own terms. Black Lives Matter organizers mourned her as a guiding spirit: “May her courage, wisdom, and deep, abiding love permeate through every dimension and guide us… May our work be righteous and brave as we fight in her honor and memory.”

She left behind more than controversy. She left a blueprint. Her life insists that a woman’s place is not only in the home or in history’s footnotes—it is in the resistance itself. In every courtroom, every prison cell, every street march, her story is invoked as a reminder that freedom is never given. It is seized.

Assata’s body is gone, but her words remain, echoing across oceans and decades:

“We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

References

• Assata Shakur, Open Letter from Cuba (2013)hoodcommunist.orghoodcommunist.orghoodcommunist.org; Democracy Now! interview/letter (1998/2016)democracynow.org; Assata: An Autobiography (1987)finalcall.comhoodcommunist.org.
• Assata Shakur interview with Final Call (2001)finalcall.comfinalcall.comfinalcall.comfinalcall.com.
• Angela Davis, Foreword to Assata: An Autobiographyarchive.bookstr.com. Lennox S. Hinds, Black Scholar interview (1973)archive.bookstr.com.
• Kenia Serrano (Cuban official), interview in Workers World (2015)workers.org. Cuba’s Josefina Vidal to AP (2014)cbsnews.com.
• Black Catholic Messenger (E. Menny) on Shakur’s Pope letter (2023)blackcatholicmessenger.orgblackcatholicmessenger.org. Black Lives Matter Grassroots statement (2025)ksbw.com.
• AP News report (P. Marcelo) on Assata Shakur’s death (2025)ksbw.com. BET News (Y. Callahan) “Living in Assata’s Words” (2025)bet.combet.com.
• Workers World (Cheryl LaBash), “Solidaridad de Cuba con Assata” (2015)workers.orgworkers.org.

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