Urban Life Experience Book Discussion Series

    Assata Shakur was accused of murdering a New Jersey State Trooper on May 2, 1973. Assata, herself, was shot in that incident, yet she was handcuffed to her hospital bed and questioned and threatened by local, state and federal police. She was vilified in the press, accused of robbing banks, accused of kidnapping, and all other kinds of crimes. All those trials were either dismissed or she was acquitted. The one conviction, supposedly for the murder of the New Jersey State Trooper occurred in 1977. For four years she had been sent from prison to prison, many times in solitary confinement, once the only female in an all-male prison. In 1979 she escaped from prison and has been living in Cuba.  Assata Shakur tells her story in Assata: An Autobiography . Assata starts her story from the events of May 2, 1973, but then goes back to her childhood, spent between her mother up north and her grandparents down in North Carolina. Assata was restless as a teenager; she even ran away from