It sometimes seems that people in the states are so accustomed to watching death on “Eyewitness News,” watching people starve to death in Africa, being tortured to death in Latin America or shot down on Asian streets, that, somehow, for them, people across the ocean — people “up there” or “down there” or “over there” — are not real.
American activist who was a member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army
Assata Shakur (born JoAnne Deborah Byron, July 16, 1947) is an activist who was found guilty in the 1973 murder of New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster. Shakur was incarcerated in several prisons in the 70s. She escaped from U.S. prison in 1979 and has been living in Cuba in political asylum since 1984. Shakur is the step-aunt/godmother of the late Tupac Shakur.
From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Birth Name:
JoAnne Deborah Byron
Alternative Names:
Joanne Deborah Byron
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Joanne Deborah Chesimard
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Assata Olugbala Shakur
From Wikidata (CC0)
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When George Washington was fighting for freedom in the Revolutionary War, he was fighting for the freedom of "whites only." Rich whites, at that. After the so-called Revolution, you couldn't vote unless you were a white man and you owned a plot of land. The Revolutionary War was led by some rich white boys who got tired of paying heavy taxes to the king. It didn't have anything at all to do with freedom, justice, and equality for all.
Black life expectancy is much lower than white and they do their best to kill us before we are even born. We are burned alive in fire-trap tenements. Our brothers and sisters OD daily from heroin and methadone. Our babies die from lead poisoning. Millions of Black people have died as a result of indecent medical care. This is murder. But they have got the gall to call us murderers.
Abraham Lincoln was in no way whatsoever a friend of Black people. He had little concern for our plight. In his famous reply to editor Horace Greeley in August, 1862, he openly stated: My paramount objective in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it and if i could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.