(c) Alice Arnold

Assata Shakur, reluctant warrior

....The TFTT collaboration with Assata Shakur, which was recorded with her in Havana, Cuba appear on two tracks. The first is "I love the Future" with music by Spearhead's Michael Franti. It is possible to view the video for this track on this site. The second is the track "Reluctant Warrior" with special mixes by "Special Projects" and Asian Dub Foundation. Asian Dub Foundation remixed this track for their cd Community music where it appeared with a new title Committed to Life. Dead Prez has also remixed this track and it appeared on the soundtrack of the documentary on Mumia Abu Jamal by Tania Cuevas Martinez.

Assata: Her Story

....Assata Shakur became a political activist in the upsurge of the 1960's, participating in the student struggles, the anti-war movement, and especially the Black liberation movement. She eventually joined the Black Panther Party and became an active member.
....The Panthers were a key target of the FBI's Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) which carried out operations against Black liberation, American Indian and other revolutionary movements.
COINTELPRO's objective was the "neutralization" of activists by whatever means necessary including murder and false imprisonment. The FBI fed the internal struggles among Panthers and fostered the eventual division and destruction of the Party.
....Assata eventually associated herself with those like Sundiata Acoli who believed that organizing small, armed, underground groups was the way to carry on the struggle. They were part of a network of clandestine organizations known as the Black Liberation Army (BLA).
....On May 2, 1973, Assata and two other black activists--Zayd Shakur and Sundiata Acoli were stopped by state police on the New Jersy Turnpike. In the shootout that followed, Zayd Shakur and one state trooper were killed. Assata was shot once with her hands in the air, then shot in the back, and left on the ground to die. As Assata laid bleeding, other state troopers waited, coming back to her body impatiently, asking, "Is she dead yet?"
....Assata says: "Finally when it was obvious that I was not going to die right then, I was taken to a hospital, where I was chained to a bed. I was beaten, tortured, kept incommunicado for four or five days, and I was denied any rights to see a lawyer."
....Assata and Sundiata Acoli's trails were a blatant political railroad wrapped in manufactured hysteria.
....The two were denied access to the media, while the New Jersey police and the FBI fed daily lies to the press.
In 1977 Assata was convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to life plus 33 years in prison.
....Sundiatata was sentenced to life plus 30 years. Today he is 63 years-old and still remains a political prisoner.

....Assata spent a total of six years in prison. For more than two years she was held in solitary confinement inside a men's prison, under 24-hour surveillance of her most intimate functions, without exercise, an adequate diet or proper medical care.
....With the help of many people, Assata successfully escaped from prison and immediately went underground.
....Despite years of massive FBI and police efforts, Assata managed to reach Cuba and was granted political asylum.
....Now--like modern-day slave hunters--the New Jersey authorities have launched a public campain to put Assata back behind bars in the U.S. New Jersey's Republican governor, Christine todd Whitman, has recently declared that the U.S. government should never "normalize" relations with Cuba until Assata is surrendered.
....In 1994 Whitman appointed Col. Carl Williams as head of the state police. Williams immediately announced that the capture of Assata Shakur was a priority. In December 1997 the state police sent a letter to Pop John Paul II before his visit to Cuba, asking him to help in the attempt to bring Assata back to the U.S.
....Col. Williams has declared, "We would do everything we could to get her off the island of Cuba. And if that includes kidnapping, we would do it" Then in March of 1998, Whiteman wrote to U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno requesting federal help.
....Whitman also announced she was putting up a $50,000 reward for Assata Shakur's return. This bounty has been recently increased to $100,000 for anyone who returns Assata in chains.
....In a recent letter to Governor Whitman entitled "Keep Your Hands Off Assata!", Assata's supporters wrote:
...".Assata, in escaping the dungeons of New Jersy where your predecessors had hoped her to bury her for the remainder of her life, followed in the footsteps of Harriet Tubman, who instructed: "There was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive; I should fight for my liberty as long as my strength lasted..."
....In a recent letter, Assata described herself as a "20th century escaped slave" and said, "because of government persecution, I was left with no other choice than to flee from the political repression, racism and violence that dominate U.S. government policy."
....On the efforts to force her back to prison in the U.S., she said: "All I represent is just another slave that they want to bring back to the plantation. Well, I might be a slave, but I will go to my grave a rebellious slave. I am like a Maroon woman. I will never voluntarily accept the conditions of slavery, whether it's de facto or ipso facto, official or unofficial."
....Despite her years of imprisonment and exile, Assata retains a deeply spiritual and hopeful belief in humanity. In her own words, Assata states "One of the things that made me want to join the struggle was walking down the street and someone saying 'sister.
....It stopped me in my tracks. I wasn't used to it, because I had only heard it in my church before... But when I heard young people addressing each other as sister [or] brother and meaning it, trying to live that out, trying to make each of our homes a safe space for each other, then it inspired me to understand that life can be lived on another level.
We don't have to live in hell."

Reluctant Warrior (lyrics)
Il'l be honest with you, I hate war in all its forms:
physical, psychological, spiritual, emotional, environmental. I hate war and I hate having to struggle. I honestly do because I wish I had been born into a world where it was unnecessary. This context of struggle and being a warrior and being a struggler has been forced on me by oppression.
Otherwise, I would be a sculptor or a garderner, a capenter. I would be free to be so much more. I guess part of me, or part of who I am, and part of what I do is to be a warrior, a reluctant warrior, a reluctant struggler. But I do it because I'm committed to life. We can't avoid it. We can't run away from it because to do that is to be cowardly. To do that is to be subservient to the devils, subservient to evil. And so the only way to live on this planet, with any human dignity, at this time, is to struggle.