White America Will Never Forgive Assata Shakur For Dying Free

He swore he would never retire until he caught her.

In 1981, New Jersey state trooper Lt. Peter Coughlin sat for an interview about the one who got away. He admitted to reporters that night after night he curled up with “Assata Speaks,” a biography of Shakur, trying to consume on the page the woman he could never capture in flesh. For him, Shakur was more than a fugitive. She was an obsession, a career, a masculinity, and a nation’s myth of law and order all hanging on the fantasy of bringing one Black woman to heel. A Black woman who had slipped the bars of his world and left him gnawing on the insult of her freedom.

That obsession was never just his own. Coughlin’s futile hunt was a mirror of white America’s frustration. Assata’s life eluded not only one cop but the entire machinery of a racist state that branded her a terrorist, plastered her face on wanted posters, and fantasized about parading her in shackles.

In 1973, she was charged with the killing of a state trooper on the New Jersey Turnpike. She was wounded, dragged through the court system, and tortured in prison. Newspapers of the era declared her “the most wanted woman in New Jersey.” Headline after headline branded her a “cop killer,” “Black militant,” “fugitive.” One clipping from the Las Vegas Sun recounted how she stood impassive as an all-white jury convicted her on eight counts, only to declare to them: “I’m ashamed. Since the beginning you showed you were the racists that you are. I am ashamed that I have ever taken part in this trial. You should be ashamed.”

Those words were defiance and prophecy. She knew that the cage they placed her in was not about guilt or innocence, but about silencing a Black woman who dared to resist. And when she broke free in 1979, aided by comrades, she shattered that prophecy. She refused the cage.

For more than four decades, Assata lived beyond white America’s reach, teaching, writing, mothering, loving, breathing under Cuban skies. Her asylum in Cuba placed her inside a wider tradition of Black internationalism. She was not simply a U.S. radical in hiding; she became part of a global struggle against colonialism and empire. To live under Cuban skies was to stitch her story into the same fabric as African liberation movements and Caribbean anticolonial resistance. She was, as numerous articles described her, “a political exile” who turned her fugitive status into sanctuary.

This week, when she drew her last breath in Havana, she died as she had lived since her escape: unbroken, uncaptured, defiant. The satisfaction they longed for — the mugshot in chains, the body in a cell they never got. And now, with her passing, we face the truth that must sting white America most: Assata Shakur, a Black liberationist, died free.

Assata’s death is not just the end of a life. It is the reopening of a wound that white America never stopped scratching and Black America never stopped trying to heal. And the reactions, which are split so cleanly down the fault lines of race and power, tell us everything about where we are in this political moment.

Predictably, the white press wasted no ink mourning her humanity. For white America, Assata’s passing is another opportunity to recycle the language of “cop killer,” “terrorist,” “fugitive.” Just look at the headlines. These headlines are indictments meant to shore up the mythology of law and order. In their eyes, she will forever be the dangerous Black woman who pulled the trigger on the American dream.

ABC News stripped her life down to a rap sheet, branding her a “wanted Black Liberation Army member” as if her identity began and ended with a government list. That’s how whiteness does its work: it decides who gets remembered as a mother, an artist, a thinker and who is reduced to a file number in a state archive.

NPR, the gentler mask of empire, played its usual role of softening the blow while still toeing the line. They called her an “unrepentant cop-killer,” reminding their audience that even when public radio sounds balanced, it rarely strays from the narrative that Black defiance must always be tethered to guilt.

Fox News, of course, went for the jugular. They trumpeted her as a “convicted cop-killer sheltered by Cuba’s communist regime,” practically salivating at the chance to weave their favorite Cold War boogeyman into the story. For them, Assata is a stand-in for everything they hate: Black radicalism, internationalism, socialism, freedom itself.

NBC at least acknowledged her symbolic power in Black communities, noting the measures they took to shield her from capture. But even there the frame is careful: she is an “activist” only in the shadow of criminality, her community love portrayed as rebellion against law, not as recognition of justice.

And then there’s the Associated Press, the gray old wire service, whose report carried the clinical chill of the carceral state: “fugitive,” “convicted,” “cop-killer.” The AP’s power is in repetition. Their phrasing becomes everyone else’s phrasing. By reducing her life to those words, they ensure that history will echo back the language of the state, not the language of the people.

This is what white America is saying with its headlines: We never forgave her for slipping the cage. We never accepted her freedom as legitimate. And even in death, we will brand her criminal before we call her human.

What stings them most is not what they can print but what they can’t erase: she died beyond their reach, under Caribbean skies, unbroken, uncaptured, and free.

They cannot let go of her because to do so would mean confronting their own state violence: the COINTELPRO files, the assassinations of Panthers, the illegal surveillance of movements, the fact that the FBI operated as a domestic terror squad against Black liberation. To them, Assata is not a woman. They need her as a symbol, a warning, a justification for every bullet in a Black body that came after.

But in Black America, her death lands differently. To us, she was proof that survival itself could be a kind of victory. The archives paint a vivid picture of how Black America received Assata, and they give us rich material to show that her survival was more than personal. It was communal and a collective refusal to let the state have the last word.

When she slipped out of Clinton prison in 1979, it was more than a jailbreak. It was a signal to Black communities across the country that sometimes the impossible could be done, that cages were not inevitable, that captivity was not final. Reports from the time make clear that her escape was met not only with shock from the state, but with exhilaration in the streets. People whispered and shouted that she had made it out alive, that one of theirs had bested the system. For every Black leader who had been gunned down or buried behind bars, Assata’s survival felt like a breach in history’s cruel pattern.

The state knew this too.

That’s why, in the early 1980s, police admitted they held back from raiding suspected hideouts in Brooklyn because they feared sparking uprisings in Black neighborhoods. The risk was real: to move on Assata was to move on a whole community that saw in her their own dignity, their own defiance. Her freedom was protected not just by the walls of Havana but by the willingness of ordinary Black people in America to stand guard with their very presence. Signs went up on houses that read: “Assata Shakur is Welcome Here.” These weren’t just gestures of nostalgia or solidarity; they were declarations of ownership, reminders that she belonged to her people, not to the state that had tried to crush her.

Assata became a living reference point in rallies, celebrations, and rituals of resistance. At International Women’s Day events, her name was spoken in the same breath as Puerto Rican nationalist Lolita Lebrón. She was invoked as both symbol and sister, not as a fugitive but as a political prisoner whose defiance remained an inspiration. Even in exile, studying, writing, and raising her daughter in Havana, she was never absent from the political imagination of Black America.

For a people so accustomed to funerals, to obituaries written by bullets or prison walls, Assata’s continued survival was a triumph. Every year she lived outside their reach was another year the state’s hand had been denied. States imprison not only to punish but to erase, to strip a person of their political force. But Assata denied them that erasure. Her face lives on in murals, in songs, in chants. Her words are scripture: “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win.” She was a fugitive who refused to vanish, an exile who remained present.

And it is here, in the tension between these two archives, the yellowed newsprint of the past and the fresh ink of today’s headlines, that we see how Assata Shakur’s death splits the American story wide open.

In Black America, her survival has been cherished, guarded, and celebrated as a collective victory and proof that freedom could be wrestled from the jaws of a state that tried to erase her. But in white America, and especially in today’s white press, her life and death remain caged in the narrow frame of criminality. To them, she is forever a fugitive, forever a threat, forever a wound they believe never closed. Even in death, they reach for the shackles of law and order to bind her memory.

And yet her dying free disrupts the binary. For her enemies, she denied them the spectacle of surrender, refused them the closure they so long demanded. For her people, she became the living, breathing embodiment of refusal itself. This contrast is not new; it is the same fracture line that has always divided American memory. But it feels sharper now in this political moment where Black history is being banned from classrooms, where movements are criminalized, and where law-and-order rhetoric once again fills the air.

To die as a free Black woman in Cuba is not just a matter of geography or legal status. It is a statement, a punctuation mark, a profound spiritual assertion about sovereignty, dignity, and resistance. The fact that Assata Shakur passed from this world under political asylum in Havana reframes how we think about her life, her struggle, and the meaning of freedom itself.

But dying free in Cuba did not mean exile was easy. She carried the melancholy of separation, the loneliness of distance, the ache of being cut off from home soil. As one archive clipping noted, she herself admitted that life in Cuba was not without sadness. And yet, she turned that ache into purpose. She smuggled her autobiography into the world despite U.S. attempts to block her royalties. She taught. She mentored. She became a living legend in Havana, her very presence a reminder that the empire’s reach was not infinite.

That was her genius: to turn constraint into strategy, exile into platform. Even partial freedom, wrestled from the jaws of captivity, was enough for her to shape imaginations and fuel movements. In refusing to let her body or her story be caged, Assata transformed exile itself into a weapon of possibility.

For younger generations, the fact that Assata Shakur died free will become a mythic touchstone. In a world where Black people too often die in police custody, in prison cells, or under the boot of surveillance, her refusal to let the state cage her unto death is electric. It enlarges the imagination. It says: the state is not omnipotent.

So, what now?

Her passing, in this precarious moment, demands that we refuse the inevitability of cages. It demands that we remember exile not only as loss but as strategy, and solidarity not only as national but global. It demands that we carry forward Assata’s refusal. Not just her myth, but her practice.

We must refuse to let her memory be flattened into mugshots or FBI press releases. We must carry the full complexity of the woman who stood in court and told an all-white jury they were racists, the mother who raised a daughter under Cuban skies, and the revolutionary who wrote that freedom is a duty.

Assata Shakur’s death in Havana as a free Black woman is a final refusal. A refusal to let the state claim her body. A refusal to bow to the empire that hounded her across decades. Her death is not closure. It is a call. To live freer lives. To contest every cage. To keep alive the fire of refusal. To honor the lesson she left us: that some spirits cannot be shackled, that some lives outlast capture, that freedom is not bestowed but seized, lived, and carried defiantly to the final, quiet breath.

Dr. Stacey Patton is an award-winning journalist and author of “Spare The Kids: Why Whupping Children Won’t Save Black America” and the forthcoming “Strung Up: The Lynching of Black Children In Jim Crow America.” Read her Substack here.

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