An Autobiography

Assata Shakur     1987     303p     6.5 x 9.5

Black radical, former panther, BLA member and all-around badass, this is Assata’s own story up until the late 1980s. From the afterward:

“Through her eyes we have the chance to see so many social tensions at play. The obvious and expected ones of black and white, but the more subtle ones of rebellious youth and respectable grandparents; black working-class and black middle-class; adventurous black youth and the ultra-repressive South. As she grows up, tensions multiply: the differences and trade-off of the de-segregated New York City school system; the increase of sexual predators; her first encounters with the world of work (facing the brunt of racial, sexual and class hatred) and her experimentation with different hustles as a response; the allure, illusion, and her disgust with the upwardly-mobile black business class; her realization of how her body and self-image, her cultural identity and her motherhood are themselves grounds to struggle on individually but also socially; her interest but dissatisfaction with many political organizations, but her love of resistance on a social level; and eventually her path of armed struggle, fierce state repression and maroon escape to exile in Cuba.”

$7-20

Other works about armed struggle, segregation, black power, banditry, prison, race, prisoner writings, the south, cuba, 1950s, 1960s