Solidarity and Greetings to all gathered to commemorate and reflect on the Life and legacy of Assata Shakur.
I am indeed appreciative of this opportunity to address this momentous gathering of comrades, friends, and family of my comrade Assata.
I know that many of you gathered here today may not have known Assata, but are instilled with, and inspired by, her lifelong resistance and revolutionary struggle against the White Supremacist settler construct that is the United States of America.
I also appreciate that some you gathered here today actually knew Assata, aided and supported her during her long exile in Cuba, and to these comrades I salute you and express my profound gratitude.
Finally to those gathered in this iconic Riverside Church in Harlem, who in their own way have struggled for the Liberation of African People, oppressed people, the down trodden, the disregarded “Wretched of the Earth”, I salute all of you.
We may seem as strangers to one another but we are only Comrades who have never met.
I’d like to take this opportunity to tell the unvarnished truth about my Comrade Assata. It was during the early 70s when our retaliatory resistance against the armed agents of racist state terrorism assumed organized intensity. Police murder of Black youth, accompanied by the plague of Heroin addiction informed the legacy and legend of Assata you now pay homage too.
Few of you gathered here today would have ever heard of Assata were it not for the emergence of the Black Liberation Army.
I say this because despite scholarly deceitfulness surrounding the BLA, Assata Shakur was a soldier in the centuries old war against African peoples, a war that began with the North Atlantic Slave Trade, a racist war that continues to this very moment by violent and non-violent means.
The scholarly deceit I speak of lay in the denial of this War, and the deception that Black people fought for Civil Rights, rather for Human Rights and that Human Rights can be granted by the inhumane - rather than appropriated by those criminalized and defamed.
This fact is important. Because Assata was not an innocent victim of Police repression. Shot wantonly with her hands raised in submission, she was a revolutionary and revolutionaries are never victims of injustice.
How many Freedom fighters were wantonly killed in the struggle for liberation of their people? Medgar Evers, Amilcar Cabral, Che Guevara, some murdered even while surrendering?
Facts speak louder than fiction: In 1971 Assata wasn’t a designated FBI COINTELPRO target. She was a medical cadre of National Committee to Combat Fascism in Washington Heights, Harlem, New York. NCCF chapters were formations of the original Black Panther Party.
Indeed, by 1972 COINTELPRO had already achieved some its most significant achievements with the assassination of Malcolm X, and Dr. Martin Luther King, and the breakup of SNCC.
Earlier in late 71 COINTELPRO was reconfigured as NEWKILL, and CHESIROB. Both were acronyms for FBI repressive campaigns authorized by the Nixon Whitehouse specifically targeting the emergence of the BLA and its clandestine leadership, one of whom was Joanne Chesimard, hence the acronym CHESIROB for Chesimard Robberies.
I choose to remind everyone of these historical facts, rather than repeat historical fantasies of Assata’s victimhood. Why? Because Assata was a warrior in the tradition of Harriet Tubman, in the Tradition of Denmark Vesey, and our ancestors who resisted the brutality, murder, and enslavement of African People for over 300 years.
In the Struggle for Freedom, Revolutionaries are never victims, or innocents. Assata was not an unfortunate victim like George Floyd – or Clifford Glover - she was a conscious committed and revolutionary Freedom Fighter!
In this historical Moment we should be mindful that White Supremacy and the American Empire are in decline.
Besieged by the Global South’s emerging Unity, White America has become increasingly lawless. And like a rabid dog backed into a corner Capitalist White supremacist state violence know no limits.
The land that gave Assata refuge, Cuba, now face imminent attack by the U.S. in its attempt to reassert the Monroe Doctrine of the 19th century in the Western Hemisphere.
The People of Iran are under attack by the U.S. and its Zionist White Supremacist cohort Israel.
We must demand Peace in Western Asia and an end to Zionist settler expansionism.
My beloved Comrades and friends, we should not merely eulogize Assata, we should live like her. In this historical moment, Revolutionary resistance to the Racist, imperialistic, and violent enemies of humanity require nothing less.
Long Live the Spirit of Assata Shakur!
Long Live the Independence of the Cuban People!
