"Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them."

Assata Shakur, "Assata: An Autobiography"

“Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.”

- Assata Shakur

“Before going back to college, i knew i didn't want to be an intellectual, spending my life in books and libraries without knowing what the hell is going on in the streets. Theory without practice is just as incomplete as practice without theory. The two have to go together.”

Assata Shakur

Photographs from the Black Panther Party series by Stephen Shames (1970s)

Assata Shakur

Jean Weisinger spent much of the 1990s capturing intimate portraits of revolutionary Black women — Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Angela Davis, and Assata Shakur among them — and impromptu photographs of people she met in her travels across the United States. ⁠ ⁠ Almost none of the artist’s work made its way into museum collections or gallery exhibitions, but from the tiny Alice Austen House in Staten Island, Executive Director Victoria Munro has spent the past two and a half years developing Weisinger’s unrevealed photographs and meticulously documenting the histories behind each one of them.⁠

“Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.”

~ Assata Shakur

Assata Shakur

I think of Debbie Africa, who gave birth secretly in prison, how the other women prisoners used sounds to shield her birth process. They protected the two of them from guards so that she and the baby were able to share precious time together, undetected for days. I think of Assata Shakur too, impossibly conceiving and giving birth to her daughter while being a political prisoner, mostly in solitary confinement. And how she listened to her angry daughter, and the dreams of her grandmother when they told her she could be free. They could be together.

from Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

I hear this quote all the time but didn't know that it came from The Autobiography of Assata Shakur (2001, 139). A political prisoner for over half a century, Assata knows better than anyone the fruitlessness of moral suasion to a white supremacist state.

Assata Shakur – Free All Black Liberation Fighters, Assata Shakur Defense Committee, Jackrabbit Press, Eugene, OR, ca. 1973 [Roz Payne Sixties Archive, Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE]