Assata Shakur - Early Life

Early Life

Shakur was born in Jamaica, Queens, New York City, on July 16, 1947, where she lived for three years with her parents and grandparents, Lula and Frank Hill. After her parents divorced in 1950, she spent most of her childhood in Wilmington, North Carolina, with her grandmother until her family relocated to Queens when she was a teenager. For a time, she ran away from home and lived with strangers until she was taken in by her aunt, Evelyn Williams, later her lawyer. She dropped out of high school, but later earned a General Educational Development (GED) with her aunt's help. She attended Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC) and then the City College of New York (CCNY) in the mid-1960s, where she was involved in many political activities, protests, and sit-ins.

Shakur was arrested for the first time in 1967 with 100 other BMCC students, on charges of trespassing. The students had chained and locked the entrance to a college building to protest a curriculum deficient in black studies and a lack of black faculty. She married Louis Chesimard, a fellow student-activist at CCNY, in April 1967, divorcing him in December 1970. Shakur devotes only one paragraph of her autobiography to her marriage, attributing its termination to disagreements related to gender roles.

After graduation from CCNY at 23, Shakur became involved in the Black Panther Party (BPP), eventually becoming a leading member of the Harlem branch. Prior to joining the BPP, Shakur had met several of its members on a 1970 trip to Oakland, California. One of Shakur's main activities with the Panthers was coordinating a school breakfast program. However, she soon left the Party, charging macho behavior of males in these organizations, but did not go as far as other female Panthers like Regina Jennings who left the organization over sexual harassment. Instead, Shakur's main criticism of the Black Panther Party was its alleged lack of focus on black history:

"The basic problem stemmed from the fact that the BPP had no systematic approach to political education. They were reading the Red Book but didn't know who Harriet Tubman, Marcus Garvey, and Nat Turner were. They talked about intercommunalism but still really believed that the Civil War was fought to free the slaves. A whole lot of them barely understood any kind of history, Black, African or otherwise. That was the main reason many Party members, in my opinion, underestimated the need to unite with other Black organizations and to struggle around various community issues."

That same year she changed her name to Assata Shakur and joined the Black Liberation Army (BLA), "a politico-military organization, whose primary objective (was) to fight for the independence and self-determination of Afrikan people in the United States." In 1971, Shakur joined the Republic of New Afrika, an organization formed to create an independent black-majority nation composed of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.