The Life and Ongoing Impact of Assata Shakur.

• Author: Tarala, Kassidy
• Position: Assata Taught Me: State Violence, Racial Capitalism, and the Movement for Black Lives

Assata Shakur, a former member of the Black Liberation Army, was convicted in 1977 for the murder of a state trooper during a shootout in New Jersey.

In 1979, she escaped from prison and made her way to Cuba, where she was granted political asylum and continues to live today. More than forty years after her conviction, Shakur, now seventy-four, remains on the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists list.

Shakur was in a vehicle with a couple of other Black Liberation Army members when troopers pulled them over for a "routine motor vehicle stop" on the New Jersey Turnpike in 1973. Shakur and the others in the vehicle then engaged in a shootout with the officers. But during Shakur's trial, she denied ever holding or firing a weapon at police, since she was shot by police with her hands up, leading to immediate paralysis of her right hand.

In Assata Taught Me: State Violence, Racial Capitalism, and the Movement for Black Lives, Donna Murch reflects on Shakur's years of work in civil rights activism. This includes organizing protests and education programs and coordinating free breakfast programs and clinics. She has served as an inspiration for today's Black Lives Matter movement, Black Youth Project 100 (BYP 100), Dream Defenders, and other organizations working toward racial and economic justice, immigrant rights, and anti-capitalism.

Murch, an associate professor of history at Rutgers University, compares Shakur to other Black women, including Ella Baker, Audre Lorde, and Barbara Smith, who created the queer, feminist, anti-capitalist framework that gives shape to today's Movement for Black Lives. The author does an excellent job of showing the reader how the visions and ideas of past Black women leaders have transformed into the action of Black youth today. She includes this quote from Shakur: "Dreams and reality are opposites if not synthesized by action."

Assata Taught Me spans Shakur's work with the Black Liberation Army in the 1970s to the Movement for Black Lives in the wake of the police killings of Michael Brown, Jamar Clark, Breonna Taylor, and, most...