"It is our duty to fight for our freedom" opens the four-line call from Assata: An Autobiography that has become one of the most widely chanted texts of the modern freedom movement. In a few short lines it moves from duty to victory, from victory to love and mutual support, and ends by echoing the Communist Manifesto's promise that the oppressed have nothing to lose but their chains. It condenses a revolutionary practice into a form that can be carried in the mouths of the many. Assata Shakur was born JoAnne Byron in Queens in 1947 and came to political consciousness through student activism at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and City College. She joined the Black Panther Party in Harlem, where she worked on its community survival programs.

As the FBI's COINTELPRO campaign set out to destroy the Party, she went underground with the Black Liberation Army. In 1973 she was shot and captured on the New Jersey Turnpike in a confrontation that left a state trooper and her comrade Zayd Malik Shakur dead. She maintained that her hands were raised when she was shot, and she was convicted in 1977 by an all-white jury. In November 1979, members of the Black Liberation Army freed her from the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women. She later received political asylum in revolutionary Cuba, where she lived until her death in Havana on September 25, 2025.

Her autobiography became a classic of the Black radical tradition and a guide for new generations of organizers. Each time those words are chanted in the streets, they call people to take up her demand: to fight, to win, to love and support one another, and to refuse the chains of a system built on our oppression.

• 1 print shipped in a rigid mailer (made from recycled cardstock)
• printed on acid-free, premium matte-photo paper

• paper weight + thickness: 250/m² / 66lbs 

*frame not included*