Few memoirs arrive with as much built-in controversy as “Assata: An Autobiography,” and few authors have lived a life that makes the controversy almost beside the point. First published in 1987 and written from political asylum in Cuba, the book has found a new generation of readers this year following Assata Shakur’s death in September 2025 at age 78 — a passing that sent the decades-old memoir climbing bestseller and bookstore-recommendation lists all over again.
The book traces Shakur’s life from a childhood split between Queens and North Carolina through her years as JoAnne Chesimard, a student radicalized by the civil rights and Black Power movements, into her membership first in the Black Panther Party and later the Black Liberation Army. The back half of the book covers the event that defines her public legacy: the 1973 New Jersey Turnpike shootout that left a state trooper dead, Shakur’s conviction for his murder, her escape from prison in 1979, and her eventual asylum in Cuba in 1984 — a status she held, amid ongoing extradition demands and a spot on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list, until her death. Shakur has always maintained her innocence in the trooper’s killing, a claim disputed by law enforcement and by the trooper’s family and colleagues; the book itself is unambiguously her side of that record, not a neutral account, and readers should approach it as such.
What makes the memoir more than a legal argument is its structure: chapters alternate between the linear story of Shakur’s life and lyrical, often furious interludes on race, policing, poverty, and womanhood in America. That braided format, unusual for a political memoir of its era, is probably its most enduring literary contribution — it reads less like a legal brief and more like an extended prose-poem argument for her own humanity, written by someone who knew she might never set foot in the country she was writing about again.
Reception over the decades has tracked almost exactly along the same lines as reaction to Shakur herself. Admirers, particularly in academic and activist circles, have long treated the book as essential reading on the Black radical tradition and the machinery of state surveillance and prosecution that targeted movements like the Black Panthers; the memoir has been assigned in college classrooms for years and cited by later generations of activists, including as the source of a rallying chant that outlived the book itself. Critics, meanwhile, including law enforcement organizations and some historians, have pushed back hard on the book’s framing of the 1973 shooting and its portrait of Shakur as a victim of persecution rather than a convicted cop killer who fled justice. That fight over how to characterize Shakur has not softened with time, and this book sits directly in the middle of it.
Whatever a reader’s position on that debate, “Assata: An Autobiography” remains a document worth engaging with on its own terms: a first-person account, forcefully written, of one of the most polarizing figures to emerge from the Black Power era, now being read anew in the wake of her death.
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