Quotes from Assata Shakur

When the judge learned i was sick and unable to come to kourt, he had a fit. He acted like i had gotten sick just to delay the trial.

Anybody, no matter who they were, could come right off the boat and get more rights and respect than amerikan-born Blacks.

That was one of the things that always happened to me after long periods of solitary confinement: i would forget how to talk.

It was plain to me that we couldn't look to the kourts for freedom and justice anymore than we could expect to gain our liberation by participating in the u.s. political system, and it was pure fantasy to think we could gain them by begging. The only alternative left was to fight for them, and we are going to have to fight like any other people who have fought for liberation.

Any Black person in amerika, if they are honest with themselves, have got to come to the conclusion that they don't know what it feels like to be free. We aren't free politically, economically, or socially. We have very little power over what happens in our lives. In fact, a Black person in amerika isn't even free to walk down the street. Walk down the wrong street, in the wrong neighborhood at night, and you know what happens.

Many of the sisters were Black and poor and from D.C., where every crime is a violation of a federal statute. They were beautiful sisters, serving outrageous sentences for minor offenses.

eventually became convinced that the Cuban government was completely committed to eliminating all forms of racism. There were no racist institutions, structures, or organizations, and i understood how the Cuban economic system undermined rather than fed racism.

Fidel, in a speech, had told the people, "We are all Afro-Cubans, from the very lightest to the very darkest.

At the time, Alcatraz had been taken over by Native Americans who were protesting against a long series of broken treaties, genocidal policies, and racist exploitation.

It wasn't until later, for instance, that i learned that scalping was an old European custom.

Any people seriously concerned with its own freedom has to be concerned about other people's freedom as well

Before the Civil War, the northern industrial economy was largely dependent on southern cotton. The slave economy of the South was a threat to northern capitalism. What if the slaveholders of the South decided to set up factories and process the cotton themselves? Northern capitalists could not possibly compete with slave labor, and their capitalist economy would be destroyed. To ensure that this didn't happen, the North went to war.

It was also clear to me that without a truly internationalist component nationalism was reactionary. There was nothing revolutionary about nationalism by itself—Hitler and Mussolini were nationalists. Any community seriously concerned with its own freedom has to be concerned about other peoples' freedom as well. The victory of oppressed people anywhere in the world is a victory for Black people.

When someone asked me what communism was, i opened my mouth to answer, then realized i didn't have the faintest idea. My image of a communist came from a cartoon. It was a spy with a black trench coat and a black hat pulled down over his face, slinking around corners. In school, we were taught that communists worked in salt mines, that they weren't free, that everybody wore the same clothes, and that no one owned anything.

The panel was selected from the voting rolls, and, since candidates running for office seldom represent the interests of Black and poor people, Blacks and the poor don't vote. But failing to vote means they don't sit on juries.

Angela Davis was running for her life. They had hooked her up with Jonathan Jackson, charged her with kidnapping and murder at the kourthouse, even though she was nowhere on the set.

But there is no place a defendant in a criminal trial can go to find "experts" in sciences commonly known as "police sciences." The police can virtually write up a report saying anything they want, and there is no way of refuting it. And there have been cases where "experts" have been double agents: working for a defendant while secretly working with the prosecutor.

When Angela Davis came to new jersey to do a speaking engagement on my behalf, the new jersey prosecutor's office ambushed her and her party, harassing them until the moment they left the state.

Every time we went to kourt the judge made a point of reading into the record that i had refused to stand up for him. He was one of those racist white dogs who really believed he was massa.

I was taken to Elmhurst Hospital in a motorcade. It looked to me like a million police cars buzzing around the vehicle in which i, a woman in labor, was riding. And they all followed. Into Elmhurst Hospital and up to the delivery room. They surrounded the hospital.

We found out later that a lone Black juror had refused to convict us. He had heard us.

The more i watched how boys and girls behaved, the more i read and the more i thought about it, the more convinced i became that this behavior could be traced directly back to the plantation, when slaves were encouraged to take the misery of their lives out on each other instead of on the master. The slavemasters taught us we were ugly, less than human, unintelligent, and many of us believed it. Black people became breeding animals: studs and mares.

It sometimes seems that people in the states are so accustomed to watching death on "Eyewitness News," watching people starve to death in Africa, being tortured to death in Latin America or shot down on Asian streets, that, somehow, for them, people across the ocean—people "up there" or "down there" or "over there"—are not real.

CULTURE i must confess that waltzes do not move me. i have no sympathy for symphonies. i guess i hummed the Blues too early, and spent too many midnights out wailing to the rain.