ER: As you point out in your book, the end isn’t quite the end. BLM harks back to the Panthers and to Assata.
DM: The Black Lives Matter movement, and the broader Movement for Black Lives, chose Assata as the primary icon of their movement. They chose her image, but most importantly, they chose her words. They use a poem that was published in Cuba while she was in exile to open all of their meetings. “It is our duty to fight for freedom. / It is our duty to win. / We must love and protect each other. / We have nothing to lose but our chains.” That refrain is used in many kinds of meetings. They chose Assata for several reasons. Assata was a Black Panther Party member, but she was not from California. She was from New York, and she was a Southern migrant who came out of the Carolinas. She was also part of the New York party, which was purged from the larger national organization. The state repression against the Panthers was always terrible, but it was significantly worse in the largest cities in the United States. In New York City, there’s [the incarceration of] the Panther 21. In Chicago, there’s the assassination of Fred Hampton. And in Los Angeles, there’s an attack on the Los Angeles chapter in 1969, which destroyed most of the aboveground party infrastructure.
It’s significant that the historical memory that they tapped into was through Assata Shakur. She emerges in part because she wrote an autobiography that allowed for broad dissemination when it was first published in 1987. And her autobiography, much more so than some of the other Panther autobiographies, is largely a story about incarceration. So much of it is descriptions of what it means to be a woman who was incarcerated. That really resonates, especially for younger generations: all the effects of these domestic Wars on Crime, on Drugs, on Gangs. But she is broken out of federal prison, becomes a fugitive, and then becomes an exile in Cuba. This is a story of liberation. Assata does the impossible. It is her history as fugitive and as exile that also lends a sense of hope and possibility for people who are fighting something very, very difficult: the American police state.