Hearing Assata Shakur's Call

Hearing Assata Shakur's Call:A Black Feminist Reflection on "To My People" Charlene A. Carruthers (bio) Assata Shakur is a freedom fighter who teaches me how to fight. She is a living, breathing, and enduring testament to what is possible when Black people struggle for liberation. Each generation of Black people living under the heels of colonialism, chattel slavery, racial capitalism, and patriarchy has taken up a responsibility to carry this work forward. It is a long, protracted struggle. Our collective struggle does not fit in a neat box of policy priorities, campaigns, or projects. There is no single solution or pathway. Our liberation is not bound up in a single leader or organization. Our struggle has no geographic borders or specific timeline—it is for our ancestors, the living and future generations. In "To My People" (1973), Assata writes a love letter and invitation to this struggle that strikes at the hearts of people on the front lines of today's movement so much so that it has become our rallying cry. It is our duty to fight for our freedom.It is our duty to win.We must love each other and support each other.WE HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT OUR CHAINS. I first heard these words at a Young People for Leadership development conference in 2010. The staff and participants repeated the stanza three times as part of a ritual to close the conference. It wasn't until 2013 that I began to hear more people using Assata's words as a call to action. By then, I'd read Assata's biography and developed a clearer analysis of anti-Blackness. [End Page 222] A year later, I joined a small group of protestors and led the chant during the Ferguson Uprising in August 2014. We collectively shouted the words in preparation to join the masses taking action on West Florissant Avenue. At the time, I didn't understand the weight of what it meant to declare a commitment to fighting, winning, loving, and protecting one another. I believe that Assata understood each of these well when she wrote "To My People." I suspected for some time that the use of these powerful words held a lineage beyond my introduction. As a result, I conducted an unscientific survey on my Facebook page and asked if anyone remembered when people began to incorporate Assata's words in the social-justice-movement toolbox. Dr. Imani Perry commented that Karl Marx originally wrote it and Assata modified it for Black liberation purposes. Many people responded that media-justice organizer and leader Malkia Cyril introduced the chant to the San Francisco Bay Area movement community in 2003. Since then, this chant has spread to various communities connected to progressive and Black radical political movements. These words are nearly synonymous with today's Movement for Black Lives (also called the Black Lives Matter movement) due to organizations and individuals reviving Assata's words through direct action and protest. People have put their bodies on the line while invoking Assata's words and call to revolutionary action. However, despite the popularity of her story and words, Shakur's politics, philosophy, and the breath of her work have not traveled as widely. Rarely is there rigorous discussion or explanation of who she is, or her commitment to the Black Liberation Army and the Republic of New Africa in mass mobilizations. Our movements should be in deeper discussion about her imprisonment, and why she is branded an enemy of the state and why she lives in exile to this day. She is a full human being who, like other freedom fighters, greets many of us in pithy quotes. Assata deserves more. For those who only know her words through protest chants, Assata Shakur has become a part of movement mythology. The story of her escape and those who have managed to lay eyes on her over the years is the stuff of legend. But what has been the cost of this on Assata's life? Her daughter's life? The lives of her family and comrades? As Assata ages and the tentacles of state repression entrench themselves across the world, the struggle to

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• To My People

  Assata Shakur•Women's studies quarterly•2018

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