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Black liberation activist and American fugitive Assata Shakur, who escaped to Cuba more than 45 years ago after she was convicted of killing a New Jersey state trooper, died in Havana, the government announced Friday. She was 78. Shakur, who changed her name from Joanne Chesimard, died Thursday from health ailments and advanced age, according to a short statement released by the Cuban Foreign Ministry. “Words cannot describe the depth of loss that I am feeling at this time. I want to thank you for your loving prayers,” her daughter Kakuya Shakur wrote in a Facebook post. Shakur was involved in a shootout during a traffic stop on the New Jersey Turnpike in 1973. State Trooper Werner Foerster, 34, was killed and another officer was critically wounded. Shakur was also injured in the shootout and the person she was traveling with was killed. Shakur denied shooting Foerster and, to supporters, she was an activist jailed for crimes she did not commit. Joanne Deborah Byron was born in Queens, New York, on July 16, 1947. After what she described in her autobiography as a troubled childhood, she became involved in political activism at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and City College of New York. She was a member of the revolutionary Black Liberation Army, as well as the Black Panther Party. At 21, she married a man named Louis Chesimard, though their marriage only lasted a year. Shakur was serving a life sentence at the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women in New Jersey after her 1977 conviction. She had also been implicated in armed robbery and other crimes. She escaped from prison Nov. 2, 1979, with the help of members of the Black Liberation Army who posed as visitors. She turned up in Cuba several years later in the 1980s where the island’s leader at the time, Fidel Castro, granted her political asylum. She published an autobiography in 1987. Because Cuba repeatedly refused to extradite her to the U.S., Shakur and other fugitives living in Cuba became a major sticking point in negotiations between the U.S. and the communist-run island after President Barack Obama re-established diplomatic relations between the two countries during his administration. Then-New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said Shakur should be returned to New Jersey after the the ceremonial reopening of the U.S. Embassy in Cuba in 2015. Shakur became the first woman on the FBI’s list of most wanted terrorists in 2013. She was added to the list on the anniversary of Foerster’s death. There was a $2 million reward for information leading to her arrest. Supporters of Shakur believed she was a target of law enforcement for her involvement with the Black Liberation Army. During a 1998 interview with NBC New York in Havana, Shakur said she never killed anyone and was found guilty in an “unfair trial” by an all-white jury. “I was shot with my arms in the air, then shot again in the back and left on the ground to die,” she said. “Next thing I knew, they were coming by me and saying, ‘Is she dead yet, is she dead yet?’” She said she was later taken to a hospital where she was beaten and tortured by state troopers who she said would stick their hands in her wounds and ask if it hurts. “American racism has done to another black person what it has done to black people down through the years,” Shakur’s defense attorney William Kunstler said in 1977. “The reality is, this beautiful young black woman never had a chance, but we, like liberal fools, still had hopes.”
