After ten days, i was discharged from the hospital over the objections of my doctor, brought to the middlesex county jail for men, and kept in solita… - Assata Shakur

When someone asked me what communism was, i opened my mouth to answer, then realized i didn’t have the faintest idea. My image of a communist came from a cartoon. It was a spy with a black trench coat and a black hat pulled down over his face, slinking around corners. In school, we were taught that communists worked in salt mines, that they weren’t free, that everybody wore the same clothes, and that no one owned anything.

from Assata's time cooking at the free breakfast program for kids:

One little girl came over to me and tapped me on the back.

'There's something wrong with your pancakes.'

'What's wrong with them?'

'They don't taste good.

You better shut your big blubber lips.”
We would call each other “jungle bunnies” and “bush boogies.” We would talk about each other’s ugly, big lips and flat noses. We would call each other pickaninnies and nappy-haired so-and-so’s.
“Act your age, not your color,” we would tell each other.
“You gon thank me when I’m through with you, Ima beat you so bad, I’m gon beat the black offa you.”
Black made any insult worse. When you called somebody a “bastard,” that was bad. But when you called somebody a “Black bastard,” now that was terrible. In fact, when i was growing up, being called “Black,” period, was grounds for fighting.
“Who you callin’ Black?” we would say. We had never heard the words “Black is beautiful” and the idea had never occurred to most of us.