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Zine: Freeing Assata

Making this zine started for me as a vague desire to know how Assata Shakur escaped from prison. I had enjoyed reading her autobiography “Assata” and I was left wanting to know more. One chapter ends with her declaring that she was done with being locked up, and the next begins with her living in Cuba if I remember correctly. I mostly moved on, focusing on other things. More recently a friend mentioned that they had heard of a book about the Shakur family that went into the details of the liberation. The book in question was An Amerikan Family: The Shakurs And The Nation They Created by Santi Elijah Holley. I sought out the book and found a text that not only went into the details of Assata’s liberation but provided context about who all took part, the social movements and underground networks they were a part of and a whole set of histories that intrigued me.

I decided to only reprint the parts that explicitly deal with the liberation of Assata Shakur from prison and her transit to Havana, Cuba. The rest is worth reading in my opinion, as well as Assata’s own autobiography which gives context to Assata’s life path and freedom struggle, and Russel Maroon Shoatz’s I Am Maroon which also documents prison escapes, life on the run, and life underground from a Black liberation perspective. The idea that prisons are impenetrable, inescapable is demonstrably false and these histories are proof of that (as are the escapes that continue to take place today)! This bootleg reprint is only a snippet of a larger history of experimentation in collective and individual liberation that I feel Black anarchists and other revolutionaries could benefit from familiarizing ourselves with and learning from.

In the wake of the genocide taking place in Palestine at the hands of the zionist entity numerous calls have gone out for escalation and also — though less well circulated — for (re)building the underground in today’s movements for decolonization and liberation. Today’s undergrounds will look different from those of the 1970s and 1980s, yet there is still much we can learn from them. We are already seeing waves of political repression attempting to capture, pacify, eject, and domesticate rebels from the George Floyd revolts, the struggles to stop the construction of cop city in Atlanta, and the struggles in solidarity with Palestinians fighting for liberation. Unfortunately we are already seeing a new generation of political prisoners and exiles. Of course it is inevitable that some will be locked up as long as liberation struggles haven’t destroyed the cages. By learning from the struggles that came before us we can be better equipped to make the state’s work as hard as possible. Some of my goals for reprinting and circulating this account of Assata Shakur’s liberation from prison are to exercise our collective imagination of what is possible and contribute to dialogues about escalation, building undergrounds, and facing state repression.

Another goal of spreading this story is a fear that many stories of this kind, especially the illegal ones, will be lost. Either buried with the aging revolutionaries who made them happen, locked behind tight lips to ensure the safety and anonymity of the guilty, or neatly entombed in academic or historical literature that few will have the patience and position to read. To me these histories are not meant to be left in the dirt or hidden away in sleepy archives accessible with a student ID, they are part of our struggles today, weapons to be used to free ourselves, and by freeing ourselves free the dead who wrote these histories with their own sweat and blood. We can remember and tell these stories as part of our own race toward liberation and freedom now.

More selfishly, I am exciting to be adding a little something to a growing tendency of Black anarchist struggles. Anecdotally it seems there are more Black anarchists than before and that more approaches to Black liberation are imagining freedom through an anti-authoritarian lens. The former Black Panthers and Black Liberation Army soldiers who advocated anarchic visions of freedom and struggle, during and after the decline of the Black Panther Party have paved the way for Black radicals to understand anarchy as a vision of freedom we can hold as our own. Russel ‘Maroon’ Shoatz, Kuwasi Balagoon, Ashanti Alston, Lorenzo Komboa Ervin, and Martin Sostre are coming up more in the anarchist space, as well as the dialogues of Black revolutionaries. The last decade has seen a number of anarchically oriented Black liberation groups and projects that explore the synchronicity between Black freedom and anarchy. Salish Sea Black Autonomists, Afro-Futurist Abolitionists of the Americas, various zines, a handful of small gatherings, dialogues across geographies, increased interest in anarchists in Africa generally.

The text below is part of a longer book that goes into the history of the Shakur family. While I do not agree with the author’s position that the Shakurs aimed to improve amerika I have found the information useful nonetheless. I have added a few of my own notes to the text and added complete names in brackets to give context to readers who may not be familiar with the history of the Black Liberation Army, Assata Shakur, or other aspects of the struggles taking place at the time of Assata’s escape from prison. Again I encourage readers to dig deeper, to learn about the Black liberation struggles, guerrilla groups, and social movements that the people involved in Assata’s liberation were part of.

Submitted anonymously.

REMEMBER 2020, 1968, 1878, 1791 — WE CAN WIN

Download PDF to print (front/back), cut in half, hand out:

For distribution at protests, festivals, sporting events, waiting rooms, cookouts, libraries, dining halls, courtrooms, traffic jams, emergency rooms, corner stores, public transportation, sideshows, recreation yards, or anywhere else you may encounter others who’ve had enough.

(Blackened/improved from a previous document shared early 2025.)

\\\\\\\\\\\\ FRONT & BACK TEXT BELOW \\\\\\\\\\\\

REMEMBER 2020, 1968, 1878, 1791 — WE CAN WIN

Thousands of years of kings, queens, emperors, presidents, & ministers demanding obedience. 500 years of crackers enslaving & colonizing this planet. 250 years of anglo/yankee domination.

Trump this, Musk that. Democrats, Republicans, Zionists, Confederates, Fascists, Conservatives, Liberals, Progressives. So many flavors of the same expired bullshit.

2020: Cops executed George Floyd. A police station was burnt down. For a brief moment, the world opened up.

1968: White power executed MLK. Black communities erupted into rebellion. For a brief moment, the world opened up.

1878: Indigenous peoples in the South Pacific rose up in arms against european colonizers attempting to exterminate their communities & hijack their homelands. For a moment, the world opened up.

1791: Enslaved Africans & their descendants began an uprising in the Caribbean, destroying property, profit, & slavery. For a long moment, the world opened up.

Whether a handful of friends or a massive crowd, we know that the footsoldiers of every regime can be defeated. The secret is to begin.

« In Memory Of Our Fallen; Let us turn their cities into funeral pyres.
In Memory Of Our Fighters; Let us honor your names with fire and gunpowder.
Peace By Piece
(A) »

NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE!
¡QUEREMOS UN MUNDO DONDE QUEPAN MUCHOS MUNDOS!

Look for those pushing and help them push harder.

Move together. Be water.

They can control a march of 10,000 — they can’t control 10 marches of 1000.

De-arrest. Don’t let people get grabbed.If they do, don’t let their cars or busses leave.

They only care about money, so causing monetary losses is your only vote.

On the inside, the demonstration is an organism of care and support.

On the outside, it is ferocious and uncontrollable.

Without their toys they are powerless.

No one is coming to save us.
Everything is at stake.

www.notrace.how

Submitted anonymously.

Thousands protest Donald Trump’s attempt to erase trans people from Stonewall Riots

Thousands of people gathered around near the Stonewall Monument in New York City’s Christopher Park this afternoon to protest the National Park Service (NPS) removing all mentions of transgender and queer people from the webpage for the monument commemorating the 1969 Stonewall Riots.

The NPS did this to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive order prohibiting any official recognition of transgender people within U.S. departments, agencies and workforces.

Many social media commenters were baffled when the NPS Service removed all mention of the initialism LGBTQ+ and replaced it with LGB, and removed all references to the transgender figures like Zazu Nova who is now being described on the website simply as a “black woman” instead of her previous designation as a “black transgender woman.”

The outrage from this action sparked a demonstration near the memorial scheduled for February 14 at 12 p.m. local time.

An estimated 1,000 protestors assembled at the Stonewall Monument at around noon with the crowd continuing to grow.

A quick history of the Stonewall Riots & its notable trans veterans

The Stonewall Riots were a series of protests in New York City from June 28 to July 3, 1969. At the time, homosexuality and gender nonconformity was illegal throughout the nation, and locations where LGBTQ+ people congregated were subjected to police raids.

One such meeting place was the Stonewall Inn, a gay tavern in Greenwich Village. During one of these raids, patrons decided they had enough of being harassed and criminalized by law enforcement and began to fight back sparking a six-day riot that became a turning point for LGBTQ+ rights and marked the start of the modern LGBTQ+ civil rights movement.

It is widely held believed that the two main participants of these riots were Marsha P. Johnson and Silvia Rivera, along with Zazu Nova who is believed by many to have thrown the legendary “first brick” — all three individuals are transgender women.

Found on mainstream news.

Like Mushrooms After a Rain: The Jewish Insurrectionary Anarchists of Bialystok

in the ‘jews who like to fight‘ piece yall posted a bit back, which i hugely appreciated, the author mentioned a group of fighting anarchist jews active in bialystok in the early 1900s. i went & wrote a zine discussing that history more thoroughly than i’ve seen done in english so far – here are [READ] & [PRINT] versions to share widely online, offline, wherever!

-some jewish anarchist

Submitted anonymously.

Another way out: The propaganda of violence

From Prism
December 10, 2024
by William C. Anderson

The UnitedHealthcare CEO’s assassination is a good time to observe the history of class warfare, grievance, and the classic anarchist militancy of “the propaganda of the deed”

“Who is it that provokes the violence? Who is it that makes it necessary and inescapable? The entire established social order is founded upon brute force harnessed for the purposes of a tiny minority that exploits and oppresses the vast majority.” – Errico Malatesta

“Once a person is a believer in violence, it is with him only a question of the most effective way of applying it, which can be determined only by a knowledge of conditions and means at his disposal.”  act– Voltairine de Cleyre

The killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on the morning of Dec. 4 may have shocked people for several reasons. A masked gunman committing a targeted killing with tactical precision before making an illusive escape stunned authorities and captured the imaginations of others, offering him instant celebrity status. Gunning down an insurance executive became a cathartic scene with all the trappings of cause célèbre. The initial reaction should be analyzed to understand what it communicates to us. This sort of violence holds a special place in the history of insurrectionary anarchism, which has not only theorized about it but actively practiced it to world-changing ends. A killing is not just a killing, and the popular reaction to the shooter can supply us with some important lessons just as police close in on a suspect. If the authorities are not careful with this case, they may end up uniting people behind common interests. Now is a good time to observe the history of class warfare, grievance, and the classic anarchist militancy of a form of direct action meant to catalyze revolution, known as “the propaganda of the deed.”

In 1885, the Chicago Tribune quoted the formerly enslaved Black anarchist Lucy Parsons saying something many wouldn’t dare say almost 150 years later: “Let every dirty, lousy tramp arm himself with a revolver or knife and lay in wait on the steps of the palaces of the rich and stab or shoot the owners as they come out. Let us kill them without mercy, and let it be a war of extermination and without pity.” Far beyond a mere call for sporadic violence, it’s essential to understand that the impulse to make such a confrontational statement was not so unconventional back then. Different factions of anarchists used calls for revolutionary violence toward different ends and influenced one another.

While some, like Parsons, worked with organizations like the International Working People’s Association (IWPA), doing pivotal work to transform labor conditions, others had individual motives based on self-organized immediate interventions. The historian Paul Avrich noted that the violent rhetoric of anarchists like Parsons attracted the “skilled and unskilled, employed and unemployed” based on the “​​hopes of immediate redemption.” However, some people took that mandate into their own hands, targeting some of the world’s most powerful elites.

Anarchists went after and often successfully assassinated multiple heads of state, politicians, businessmen, military figures, and police around the world under the proclamation of propaganda by the deed. The idea that killing reviled and oppressive authority figures would be a catalyst for revolution has long been debated. These ideas are not limited to just one faction of anarchists or only the anarchist segments of the historical socialist and communist movements. Furthermore, their effectiveness often produced unintended consequences that the purveyors couldn’t have necessarily predicted. For example, when a self-professed anarchist killed President William McKinley in 1901, it led to the creation of the FBI and a proto-“war on terror” that reshaped international policing and worldwide immigration policy and nearly destroyed anarchism. Understanding this in the context of Thompson’s killing in New York should let us know that the ruling class won’t simply accept this. The protectors of their interests and property, the police, will do their bidding to make an example of the killer (or a necessary scapegoat). Authorities will also be hard at work deciding what agencies, legislation, or punishment should be meted out to stop lethal direct action from becoming too popular. Just as it has been throughout anarchist history, quashing such jubilance and excitement about the collective awakening to the possibilities of violent resistance will be necessary.

Anarchist proponents of violence like Errico Malatesta, Johann Most, and Luigi Galleani saw attacks as a necessary response to the oppression of the working class, immigrants, poor people, and the enslaved. Even Alexander Berkman, who wrote about the anarchist movement’s departure from the propaganda of the deed, attempted to assassinate the industrialist oligarch Henry Clay Frick who turned guns on workers and was tyrannical in his business practices. Berkman once wrote, “You don’t question the right of the government to kill, to confiscate and imprison. If a private person should be guilty of the things the government is doing all the time, you’d brand him a murderer, thief and scoundrel. But as long as the violence committed is ‘lawful,’ you approve of it and submit to it. So it is not really violence that you object to, but to people using violence ‘unlawfully.’”

Berkman’s nearly 100-year-old perspective still holds, though what’s interesting now is seeing a murder bring people together. Anarchist history shows that sometimes it’s unexpectedly hard to find a prominent figure so universally reviled that nearly everyone celebrates their ending. Though many have prefaced their commentary on the current moment with the need to say they don’t “condone” violence, Berkman’s point bites back at inconsistency. The monopoly on violence known as “the state” conducts regular killing both directly and indirectly the world over daily to maintain itself. Also, do those who don’t condone the killing of a businessman by a vigilante announce they don’t “condone” violence before using their conflict mineral technologies with apps that use artificial intelligence powered by slave labor? Do they announce that they don’t condone violence when they pay taxes to fund a genocidal onslaught or militarism that destroys the planet? What about the violence on our plates in our food or in the “fast fashion” we wear? No, that inescapable violence is accepted as ordinary and not worth showy moralizing statements.

Those who denounce killing in response to the shooting of Thompson reinforce the imbalance that upholds oppression. Blood has different weights depending on where it spills from. Who has the power to kill as an acceptable norm versus who doesn’t is what tips the scale. The gravity given to those this society privileges, empowers, and prioritizes dictates how much we’re supposed to care about deaths. It also dictates what’s even considered violent. That’s why we are instructed to mindlessly condemn any and every act of violence that threatens the status quo of capitalism, imperialism, and class-based society. We should be able to respect those who choose not to practice violence while distancing ourselves from those who make false equivalencies out of it. Their “peace” comes at the expense of the most abused, whose screams are drowned out. This is the “peace of the pharaohs, the peace of the tsars, the peace of the Caesars,” as Ricardo Flores Magón once wrote and rightly concluded, “Let such a peace be damned!”

It would be helpful if more of us accepted the fact that we cannot indeed be anti-violence in a society where even our most passive actions are reinforcing the most deplorable crimes against oppressed people around the globe. This is why I’ve argued that we should identify the counterviolence we need in our politics. So, rather than projecting onto a mysterious shooter or endlessly looking for a hero to venerate, the questions of the utility of violence here are answered by past instruction. However, I do not invoke all this history and quotation to suggest it’s inherently instructive for mimicry. Instead, I think it helps us realize that there is something beneath the surface here that people yearn for. There’s a confrontation dying to be taken up by those who refuse to wait for more tragedy and endless pain. Such a clash isn’t expected to be neat, nice, or consistently nonviolent. If force is the tool used to shape our subjugation, then pushing that oppressive momentum back so that we can completely throw it off of us should be the standard.