Colin Sheridan: Assata Shakur’s death recalls life’s living struggles

Shakur’s death should remind us that the struggles of the 1970s are not relics. They are living, breathing, unfinished

Assata Shakur, one of the most consequential Black political revolutionaries and writers of her time and enemy of the US government until her last breath, died on September 25.

Last week, a woman many people have never heard of — Assata Shakur — died in Havana at the age of 78. Her death we know to be fact. The rest of her life was an argument.

She was born JoAnne Deborah Byron in Queens, 1947, long before the American dream was publicly acknowledged as the American nightmare. Like many before her, she rejected her “slave name,” choosing Assata Olugbala Shakur — “she who struggles, redeemed.” That was less reinvention than revelation. In the US of the 1960s and 70s, the Black Panthers were a lightning rod. Depending on your point of view, they were either a menace with Afros, berets and shotguns, or a civil rights vanguard feeding children and defending communities from the violence of the state.