Dear Assata Shakur,

Please know that composing this letter is an act of solidarity, not a claim to the ownership of your ideas herein. I recognize our lived experience is profoundly different, especially due to my white privilege, and I hope my letter reflects this truth. This is my flawed but honest interpretation of your political autobiography — a book that belongs in every middle school library — how it ties to the injustices of today, and its tenets of revolutionary action.

Scholar Margo Perkins defines political autobiography as being an extension of activism.¹ Not only does Assata: An Autobiography trace your activism, it is a clear act of revolt. I am inspired by how you’ve modeled leveraging language through nonlinear storytelling and poetry to challenge dominant culture, and your form of political orthography (kourt, amerikkka, u.s., etc.) that exposes the white supremacy embedded in state institutions. You tell of your lived experience that weaves around political and historical contexts, gives voice to the voiceless, amends historical record, and unmasks repressive state tactics — all of which define this undervalued genre that Perkins illuminates. I presented these aspects of your book to my English graduate seminar, but I cannot fit them here.

I am grateful that your powerful words, story, and correction of histories in Assata has reached me coincidentally as the U.S. government rapidly descends into authoritarianism, and fascism flagrantly trends in style among the status quo. I am not grateful for the abuses, torments and losses you have endured time and time again, nor the present era’s anti-humanitarianism that visibly rules the white house,² but I do find the timing of my discovery of your book almost 40 years after its publication quite auspicious. Your timeless insight is still needed today.

I do not pretend to fully grasp the hells you encountered not only since being targeted by the FBI’s counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) in the 1970s, but throughout your whole life navigating racism and perpetual police brutality. After acknowledging that, please allow me to express that I feel indebted to you for sharing your story of such hells with the world so there is a record for those capable of confronting it. Along with the work of Eugenia Ginzburgh — author of Journey into the Whirlwind who was a political prisoner of the former U.S.S.R.³ — your work has inspired me to bear witness through writing during the most crucial time of my 44 years on this planet. You wrote, “[t]he rulers of this country and their flunkies have committed some of the most brutal, vicious crimes in history.”⁴ Not only is that true of the past, it is true in the present. And for that reason, I refuse to keep my head down. How can I when federal agents mistake a woman and her children for undocumented immigrants, humiliating them in public and stealing their life-savings? After the U.S. government vanishes hundreds of Venezuelan men into a foreign gulag? Or when Newark Mayor Ras Baraka is arrested for visiting Democratic Congress members who intended to audit an immigration jail? To ignore any of these horrors is to uphold the state violence that vows to obliterate the human spirit. 

Frankly, you said it best: “…if you know what’s happening and you don’t do anything but sit on your ass, then you’re nothing but a punk.”⁵ I believe in what you have stood up for countless times: the freedom of all people. It is not surprising and gravely distressing that freedom for all people is still a hope and not yet a reality in the dis-United States. And this is why I am writing you this open letter, so as not to sit on my ass and do nothing about our eroding freedoms, and instead do what I do best: write for autonomy. I have the fortune to do so from the aboveground. But for how long? After all, the Sedition Act is linked to the Alien Enemies Act that Donald Trump, not my president, keeps evoking to justify mass deportations.⁶ The Sedition Act states that to “write, print, utter or publish” any commentary “against the government of the United States…or the President of the United States” shall be punishable by two years in prison and a fine up to $2,000.⁷ Online inflation calculators estimate today’s equivalent would be around $50,000. But considering how trigger happy the Trump cult is about deportations, the likely outcome would be renditioning U.S. citizens to mega prisons abroad.

Many people here in the U.S. do not behave as if they understand what is truly at stake. But maybe they’d prepare right now if they read your book, because it warns state violence can, and does, happen overnight:

“At the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies, it seemed like people were going underground left and right. Every other week I was hearing about someone disappearing. Police repression had come down so hard on the Black movement that it had seemed as if the entire Black community was on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. The repression had come down so fast that many people had no chance whatsoever to organize.”⁸

In the present day, immigrants have had no chance whatsoever to organize ahead of aggressive U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and deportation without legal justification. In April, the U.S. sent 238 migrants to the nefarious Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) in El Salvador. According to The New Republic, the white house said it has paid Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, $6 million to disappear these people.⁹ The New Republic also reported that after Democratic Senator Christopher Van Hollen visited Kilmar Abrego Garcia in El Salvador, he “believes the deal is closer to $15 million.”¹⁰ What else could this money have been spent on? To one of your points in the book: basic needs would be good.

Garcia’s case is in the public spotlight because he was illegally deported due to what the Trump administration admitted to be an “administrative error.” The latest spectacle around this disturbing power-abuse is how Trump insisted to ABC correspondent Terry Moran that the MS-13 typeface clearly added digitally to Garcia’s hand tattoos in a photo was in fact real, real! REAL.¹¹ In true Trump fashion, he insulted Moran repeatedly on live television while doing so.¹² Violation of due process, political gaslighting, and outright bullying are sadly not unique to the Garcia situation. These are consistent tactics Trump and his cronies are imposing on the public, journalists, university administrators, and even Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.

I wish more people understood the clear and present danger all U.S. citizens now face as due process becomes a thing of the past. But the lack of due process is not actually new, as you well know after having been subjected to such harrowing injustices that tragically forced you into exile in Cuba decades ago. 

The American public has allowed the slippage of due process for too long, and it’s possible that soon everyone will pay the price, not just the marginalized people in the country. And in some ways, I cannot help but to think: it’s about damn time. Because it seems to me that cruel and bigoted people only learn to change when they lose something meaningful to them. I think it’s safe to say that their own civil rights are on that list. I say all of this because National Public Radio just reported that Trump said he will target U.S. citizens for deportation next.¹³ Additionally, Forbes reported that Tom Homan, director of ICE, recently publicized threats to arrest and charge anyone protecting immigrants in sanctuary cities, specifically targeting Tony Evers, the governor of Wisconsin.¹⁴ The audacity of these soulless sadists is out of control and must be stopped! But how? When, as journalist Chris Hedges has pointed out, the U.S. government has been taken over by oligarchs.¹⁵ Something that you have known all along if we turn to your 1973 speech To My People that lays bare the country’s racist rich ruling class: “who prosper on our poverty, the politicians who lie to us with smiling faces, and all the mindless, heartless robots who protect them and their property.”¹⁶ At this juncture, they have plenty of robots, most of whom are the one percent who hold at least 30% of the nation’s wealth ($38.7 trillion), which is “more than the combined wealth of the middle class,” according to USA Today’s reading of a federal economics report in 2023.¹⁷ You spoke on similar economic disparities in your opening statement at the trial that resulted in your acquittal in 1975: 

“While big corporations make huge, tax-free profits, taxes for the everyday working person skyrocket. While politicians take free trips around the world, those same politicians cut back food stamps for the poor. While politicians increase their salaries, millions of people are being laid off…I do not understand a government so willing to spend millions of dollars on arms, to explore outer space, even the planet Jupiter, and at the same time close down day care centers and fire stations.”¹⁸

It is true that NASA began exploring Jupiter in the 1970s, and in 2025 Space X’s Elon Musk, who is obsessed with colonizing Mars, became an unofficial federal employee and de facto lead henchman at the Department of Government (in)Efficiency. He systematically took a metaphorical chainsaw to social and civil services programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, U.S. Agency for International Development, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, Federal Aviation Administration, and more.¹⁹ Trump also gave Musk access to government-collected confidential data on U.S. citizens before his tenure at DOGE was up. As stated in the report from Democratic Senate investigators, “Musk and his companies stand to gain a competitive advantage unrivaled by the worst insider trading.”²⁰ The Democratic Senate report also shows a breakdown of Musk’s companies under fire for “at least 65 ‘actual or potential’ regulatory or enforcement actions from 11 federal agencies” as reported by CNBC.²¹ The senate report states that potential liability costs for Musk are around $2.37 billion.²² This means one man’s corporate empire has become insulated with public power that exempts him from accountability while weaponizing sensitive information of U.S. citizens concerning their financial history and medical treatments.²³ I cannot help but to read between the lies and wonder: Does this mean that Elon Musk intimidated the agencies with regulatory actions against him, implying they need to back down or else, while making an example of the agencies he/DOGE did cut? Just as Trump made an example of Garcia, Andry Hernandez Romero, and all recent deportees?

This blatant capitalist power grab through data surveillance and state-sanctioned control demands resistance through revolutionary action and solidarity at every level. On April 5, the Hands Off movement, a grassroots effort to unite U.S. citizens against the Trump administration’s billionaire takeover,²⁴ organized protests attended by an estimated 3 to 5 million people in cities across the country. Additionally, there were approximately 1,110 International Workers May Day protests nationwide on May 1, which were organized by a similar group called 50501.²⁵

Some resistance even comes from the senate, such as when Democratic Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey broke the record with his marathon speech during his resistance filibuster. He relentlessly criticized how the Trump administration undermines democracy; threatens social security and education; and has already mangled immigration policies, public safety and national security.²⁶ During his 25 hours and five minutes, Booker also condemned the current administration’s handling of the housing crisis, climate change and environmental impacts on farmers.²⁷ 

Some resistance even comes from the house, namely, from powerhouse Representative Jasmine Crockett who represents Texas’s 30th congressional district that includes parts of Dallas. Representative Crockett is a lawyer who has stood up in front of Congress and the public innumerable times since the Trump administration has been in the white house, and she continues to fight for the freedom of all people today. In the past, she defended Black Lives Matter protestors pro bono.²⁸And today, Rep. Crockett is known for calling out the Republican not-so good old party (GOP) and the MAGA cult on their misinterpretations and ignorance of the law and how their practices are utterly corrupt. Her acts of resistance are so vast it would require an entire book to cover her vital political work. I encourage all of my readers to follow her on all social media channels.

Here is a recent video of Rep. Crockett challenging the administration at an opening of the Judiciary Committee hearing, whereby “she exposes the GOP’s political theater, their silence on abuse, and their obsession with protecting Trump at any cost,” as the video description reads. She makes it well known how many laws the administration has broken. In the following video, she warns of the Trump administrations abuse of power, and uses the most recent incident of ICE arresting Mayor Baraka of Newark for trying to connect with members of Congress who were on site to audit an ICE jail. Currently, the administration is fighting to unleash criminal charges on LaMonica McIver, a Representative from New Jersey, for inspecting the ICE jail that was not setup through the required lawful process. Rep. Crockett says that her team investigated and this is the first time that a presidential administration has made attempts at charging members of Congress for dissent.

Locally in New Orleans where I live, there are many community action groups working together on social change. To name a few that I recently discovered: There is the Iron Rail anarchist literature archive that hosts events and archives political literature. Critical Mass is a cycling group that fights for access to public streets and keeping federal policies out of public transportation. Located in the ninth ward is the Fred Hampton Free Store, an event space that also provides free food, clothing, toiletries, books, and menstrual products to the community.

Moving underground here in New Orleans facilitates social, emotional, political, and physical survival. These underground movements are counterparts of the more aboveground mass movements happening nationally. I recently found out that many of these New Orleanian movements also include the same people who provided mutual aid during the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina when the government didn’t show up to help people in need.

I predict an escalation in activity at these, and all, local underground movements in the near future due to the ongoing erosion of civil rights the Trump administration is rapidly attempting to inflict on all of us. 

That brings us to the framework of resistance and hope I found in your book that is worth sharing within movements aboveground and underground. The book’s main takeaway for me can be summarized in 10 tenets of revolutionary action and solidarity:

1. Know your environment.
2. Question everything.
3. Educate yourself.
4. Be principled and dignified at all costs.
5. Find your people. Organize!
6. Have hope for the future.
7. Never give up, never surrender.
8. Accept help from others.
9. Learn from mistakes; invite feedback.
10. Stay humble.

I will do my best to take these tenets to heart and to share them within the movements I participate in. Your work has inspired me to keep hope that change is possible through solidarity and action. Again, thank you for sharing your words and story with the world in Assata. The fact it took me attending an English graduate class on revolution in literature to find such an incredibly important text reveals the silencing power of state institutions that needs to end.

With Gratitude,

Jaime Dunkle

For more information on Assata Shakur, please visit: assatashakur.org. You can also listen to her speeches at freedomarchives.org.

Endnotes

1. Perkins, Margo V. Autobiography As Activism: Three Black Women of the Sixties. University Press of Mississippi, 2000, p. 149. ↩︎
2. This political orthography is an act of solidarity. ↩︎
3. Ginzburg, Eugenia Semyonovna. Journey into the Whirlwind. New York, Mariner Books, 1995. ↩︎
4. Shakur, Assata. Assata: An Autobiography. Lawrence Hill Books, 1987, p. 51. ↩︎
5. Ibid, p. 207 ↩︎
6. As of right now, the Supreme Court has blocked Trump from using the wartime law to hastily deport Venezuelans without due process. VanSickle, Abbie. “The Supreme Court keeps a temporary block on using the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans,” The New York Times, 16 May 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/05/16/us/trump-news. Accessed 16 May 2025. ↩︎
7. Alien and Sedition Acts (1798). National Archives, http://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/alien-and-sedition-acts#:~:text=Passed%20in%20preparation%20for%20an,brink%20of%20war%20with%20France. Accessed 4 May 2025. ↩︎
8. Ibid, p. 234. ↩︎
9. Scotten, Marin. “Trump Fails to Answer Easy Question on Payments to El Salvador,” The New Republic, 25 April 2025, http://www.newrepublic.com/post/194430/trump-question-payment-el-salvador-deported-immigrants. Accessed 1 May 2025.
   ↩︎
10. Ibid. ↩︎
11. ABC News, “FULL TRANSCRIPT: Trump’s exclusive 100 days broadcast interview with ABC News,” ABC News, 29 April 2025, abcnews.go.com/US/full-transcript-trumps-exclusive-100-days-broadcast-interview/story?id=121291672. Accessed 30 April 2025. ↩︎
12. Ibid. ↩︎
13. Mann, Brian. “’Homegrowns are next’: Trump hopes to deport and jail U.S. citizens abroad,” National Public Radio, 16 April 2025, https://www.npr.org/2025/04/16/nx-s1-5366178/trump-deport-jail-u-s-citizens-homegrowns-el-salvador. Accessed 2 May 2025. ↩︎
14. “Tom Homan Gives Eyebrow-Raising Answer When Asked If Sanctuary City Leaders Could Soon Be Arrested,” YouTube, uploaded by Forbes Breaking News, 2 May 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3-RSRkIils. 2 May 2025. ↩︎
15. “Elon Musk and the Oligarchic Takeover of America: Chris Hedges,” YouTube, uploaded by Robinson’s Podcast Clips, 30 April 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jSl_-YKyao. Accessed 30 April 2025. ↩︎
16. Shakur, Assata. Assata: An Autobiography. Lawrence Hill Books, 1987, p. 50. ↩︎
17. De Visé, Daniel. “The top 1% of American earners now own more wealth than the entire middle class,” USA Today, 6 Dec. 2024, https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2023/12/06/top-1-american-earners-more-wealth-middle-class/71769832007/. Accessed 3 May 2025. ↩︎
18. Shakur, Assata. Assata: An Autobiography. Lawrence Hill Books, 1987, p. 169. ↩︎
19. This incomplete list includes info sourced from Laurence Darmiento at the LA Times: Darmiento, Laurence. “These departments investigating Elon Musk have been cut by DOGE and the Trump administration,” LA Times, 27 March 2025, http://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-03-27/elon-musk-trump-doge-conflicts-of-interest. Accessed 4 May 2024. And the Senate report: see citation 14 below. ↩︎
20. Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations Minority Staff. “Calculating Risk: Estimating the Legal Liability Elon Musk May Avoid Through His Government Takeover,” Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, 27 April 2025, http://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025-04-27-Minority-Staff-Memorandum-Elon-Musk-Conflicts.pdf. Accessed 30 April 2025. ↩︎
21. Doherty, Erin. “DOGE cuts could help Elon Musk companies avoid $2 billion in liabilities: Senate report,” CNBC, 28 April 2025, http://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/28/elon-musk-doge-trump-legal-liabilities-senate-democrats.html. Accessed 20 April 2025. ↩︎
22. Ibid. ↩︎
23. Wamsley, Laurel. “The government already knows a lot about you. DOGE is trying to access all of it,” National Public Radio, 11 March 2025, https://www.npr.org/2025/03/11/nx-s1-5305054/doge-elon-musk-security-data-information-privacy. Accessed 4 May 2025. ↩︎
24. Hands Off! About, 2025, https://handsoff2025.com/about. Accessed 1 May 2025. ↩︎
25. 50501. 2025. https://www.fiftyfifty.one. Accessed 1 May 2025. ↩︎
26. Ahmad, Manahil. “Breaking down what Cory Booker spoke about during his record-setting speech, and when,” NorthJersey.com, 2 April 2025, http://www.northjersey.com/story/news/politics/2025/04/02/cory-booker-speech-topics-by-hour-transcript/82773462007/. Accessed 4 May 2025. ↩︎
27. Ibid. ↩︎
28. Taylor, Stephanie. “Civil Rights Attorney Jasmine Crockett Is Making Waves as a Texas State Representative,” Darling, 21 Sept. 2021. Accessed 23 May 2025. https://darlingmagazine.org/interview-with-lawyer-jasmine-crockett/ ↩︎