Black True Crime Podcast · iHeartPodcasts

Assata Shakur (Episode 217)

·43 min·2 clips

On the New Jersey Turnpike, a stop over a broken taillight ended with Zaid Malik Shakur dead and Trooper Werner Forster dead.

1. Black True Crime Podcast centers this episode on Assata Shakur, also identified as Joanne Deborah Byron. 2. Kayla and Nikki host the episode, and they matter because they frame Assata’s life as Black history, political struggle, and criminal-justice conflict. 3. The episode asks what Assata Shakur represented to Black political movements, prison systems, and the U.S. government. 4. Assata was born July 16, 1947, in Brooklyn, New York, then moved at age three to Wilmington, North Carolina, to live with Lula and Frank Hill. 5. The hosts describe Lula and Frank Hill as restaurant owners who built savings during the years after the Great Depression. 6. Assata later said her grandmother gave her "the inner strength" to think about "overcoming the tremendous odds" against her. 7. After returning to New York around age nine, Assata faced a harder life, dropped out of high school at 17, earned a GED, and attended Borough of Manhattan Community College and the City College of New York. 8. She said, "Nobody is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them," and the episode uses that line to explain her political development. 9. The hosts list the Society of Golden Drums, the Nation of Islam, the Organization of Afro-American Unity, the Republic of New Africa, the Black Panther Party, and the Black Liberation Army as groups she joined. 10. They also note her concern that women in civil-rights spaces still had to fight misogyny inside the movement. 11. Assata wrote, "Theory without practice is just as incomplete as practice without theory," and the hosts connect that belief to her organizing. 12. In 1967, she was arrested with about 100 other students for trespassing after they barricaded themselves inside a school entrance to protest the lack of Black curriculum and Black faculty. 13. The episode says she was shot in the stomach on April 5, 1971 while trying to set up a known drug dealer connected to the Black Liberation Army’s work against Black drug dealers. 14. On May 2, 1973, she was pulled over on the New Jersey Turnpike by Trooper James Harper, with backup from Robert Palenchar and Werner Forster. 15. The roadside shooting left Zaid Malik Shakur dead, Werner Forster dead, and Assata wounded in the shoulder and back. 16. Assata later claimed Harper shot her while her hands were in the air, and the hosts say no gunshot residue was found on her hands. 17. During her 1976 burglary trial, Assata represented herself and described the Black Liberation Army as a response to poverty, poor housing, unemployment, poor medical care, and inferior education in Black communities. 18. The episode says she was convicted in March 1977 by an all-white jury and sentenced to life plus 65 years in prison. 19. Kayla and Nikki describe the tone as conversational, political, and reactive, with family banter mixed into detailed historical narration. 20. People interested in Black political history and prison cases will likely want this episode, while listeners wanting a light or apolitical summary may skip it.

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Black True Crime Podcast