Revolutionary warrior Assata Shakur, a New Jersey prison escapee, is dead at 78

The death rattle of the American Experiment echoed from a Havana sickbed this week, a final, mocking cough from a revolutionary ghost who cheated the electric chair and spat in the eye of the empire for nearly fifty years.

Born with the name Joanne Deborah Byron, the woman the state called Joanne Chesimard, the warrior who called herself Assata Shakur, is dead at 78.

The official Cuban line is that she succumbed to the mundane enemies of age and infirmity, a peaceful end that stands in stark, brutal contrast to the violent chaos that defined her life and the system she fought to destroy.

The news crackled across the wires, a static burst from a parallel universe where justice is not a blindfolded woman with a scale but a clenched fist holding a Molotov cocktail. In New Jersey, the aging ghosts of the state police no doubt raised a glass of cheap whiskey, their million-dollar bounties now as worthless as their honor. For them, she will always be the cop-killer who escaped, the one who got away. But the truth of what happened on that rain-slicked stretch of the New Jersey Turnpike on May 2, 1973, is buried deeper than Trooper Werner Foerster, entombed in the racist rot of a justice system that, then as now, sees black skin as sufficient evidence of guilt.

Let us be clear about the time and the place. This was New Jersey, just five years after the state tried to bury Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, a black boxer of immense talent, under a prison for a crime he did not commit.

This was an era when the legal system was not a pathway to justice but a weapon of control, a blunt instrument wielded by a white power structure terrified of black liberation.

To be black, radical, and accused in that courtroom was to be pre-convicted. The verdict was a foregone conclusion, a legal lynching with a gavel.

The sociologists can drone on with their studies—the numbers are clear: if you are black and caught in the gears of the machine, the outcome is pre-ordained. The system is not broken; it is functioning with savage, racist precision.

So when the state’s medical evidence suggested Shakur was shot with her hands in the air, her arm paralyzed, physically incapable of firing the weapon she was convicted of using, the system simply shrugged.

Facts were irrelevant. The only fact that mattered was that a state trooper was dead and a black radical was in the cage. They needed a body, and hers would do.

They created a myth, a “mother hen” of the Black Liberation Army, a super-criminal to be blamed for every unsolved bank robbery and shooting from Manhattan to Chattanooga.

The FBI’s COINTELPRO machinery, a vile and unconstitutional pestilence, had already marked her for destruction, tying her name to every case file in a desperate attempt to build a legend of terror around a woman whose greatest crime was believing that black people had a right to fight back.

Her escape from the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women in 1979 was not just a jailbreak; it was a masterpiece of political theater, a middle finger raised to the entire American carceral state. And her asylum in Cuba was a permanent stain on the myth of American moral authority.

Even Barack Obama, the smiling, conciliatory tool of the parasite class, placed her on a terrorist list, proving that the face of the oppressor can be black, but the boot on the neck remains the same.

A million dollars from the FBI, another million from New Jersey—all that money, all that fury, could not touch her in the end.

She died free. She died a warrior, a godmother to a revolutionary hip-hop legacy, a grandmother to a struggle that continues to this day.

And as the hypocrites in Washington and Trenton sputter their posthumous condemnations, remember this: the chains she spoke of were not metaphorical.

They were the chains of a system built on a foundation of slave bones, a system that devalues African-American life as a matter of constitutional compromise. Assata Shakur broke those chains. She got away. And in her final breath, in the humid Cuban air, she won.