User:Bbygurlsata2/sandbox

This is Assata Olugubla Shakur. She is also Tupac Shakur's Godmother. She became involved in political activism at Borough of Manhattan Community College and City College of New York. After graduation, she began using the name Assata Shakur, and briefly joined the Black Panther Party, which engaged in an armed struggle against the US government through tactics such as robbing banks and killing police officers and drug dealers.

Assata Shakur was born Joanne Deborah Byron, in Flushing, Queens, New York City, on July 16, 1947. She lived for three years with her mother, school teacher Doris E. Johnson, and retired grandparents, Lula and Frank Hill. In 1950, Shakur's parents divorced and she moved with her grandparents to Wilmington, North Carolina. After elementary school, Shakur moved back to Queens to live with her mother and stepfather (her mother had remarried); she attended Parsons Junior High School. Shakur still frequently visited her grandparents in the south. Her family struggled financially and argued frequently; Shakur spent little time at home. She often ran away, staying with strangers and working for short periods of time, until she was taken in by her mother's sister Evelyn A. Williams, a civil rights worker who lived in Manhattan. Shakur has said that her aunt was the heroine of her childhood, as she was constantly introducing her to new things. She said that her aunt was "very sophisticated and knew all kinds of things. She was right up an alley because she was forever asking all kinds of questions. She wanted to know everything." Williams ( Her aunty) often took her to museums, theaters, and art galleries.

Shakur converted to Roman Catholicism as a child and attended the all-girls Cathedral High School, for six months before transferring to public high school. She attended for a while before dropping out. Shakur is no longer Catholic. Her aunt helped her to later earn a General Educational Development (GED) degree. Often there were few or no other black students in her Catholic high school class. Shakur later wrote that teachers seemed surprised when she answered a question in class, as if not expecting black people to be intelligent and engaged. She said she was taught a sugar-coated version of history that ignored the oppression suffered by people of color, especially in the United States. In her autobiography, she wrote: "I didn’t know what a fool they had made out of me until I grew up and started to read real history".

Shakur attended Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC) and then the City College of New York (CCNY) in the mid-1960s, where she became involved in many political activities, civil rights protests, and sit-ins.[13] She was arrested for the first time—with 100 other BMCC students—in 1967, on charges of trespassing. The students had chained and locked the entrance to a college building to protest the low numbers of black faculty and the lack of a black studies program. On April 1967, she married Louis Chesimard, a fellow student-activist at CCNY. Their married life ended within a year; they divorced in December 1970. In her 320-page memoir, Shakur gave one paragraph to her marriage, saying that it ended over their differing views of gender roles.

After graduation from CCNY, Shakur moved to Oakland, California, where she joined the Black Panther Party (BPP).In Oakland, Shakur worked with the BPP to organize protests and community education programs. After returning to New York City, Shakur led the BPP chapter in Harlem, coordinating the Free Breakfast Program for children, free clinics, and community outreach.[17] But she soon left the party, disliking the macho behavior of the men and believing that the BPP members and leaders lacked knowledge and understanding of United States black history. Shakur joined the Black Liberation Army (BLA), an offshoot whose members were inspired by the Vietcong and the Algerian independence fighters of the Battle of Algiers. They mounted a campaign of guerilla activities against the U.S. government, using such tactics as planting bombs, holding up banks, and murdering drug dealers and police

She began using the name Assata Olugbal Shakur in 1971, rejecting Joanne Chesimard as a "slave name". Assata is a West African name (one of a kind ), derived from the Arabic name Aisha, said to mean "she who struggles", while Shakur means "thankful one" in Arabic. Olugbal means "savior" in Yoruba. She identified as an African and felt her old name no longer fit: "It sounded so strange when people called me Joanne. It really had nothing to do with me. I didn’t feel like no Joanne or no negro, or no Amerikan. I felt like an African woman".

Numerous musicians have composed and recorded songs about her or dedicated to her: Common recorded "A Song for Assata" on his album Like Water for Chocolate (2000) after traveling to Havana to meet with Shakur personally. Paris ("Assata's Song", in Sleeping with the Enemy (1992), Public Enemy ("Rebel Without A Pause" in It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back(1988), 2Pac ("Words of Wisdom" in 2Pacalypse Now (1991), Digital Underground ("Heartbeat Props" in Sons of the P, 1991), The Roots ("The Adventures in Wonderland" in Illadelph Halflife, 1996), Piebald ("If Marcus Garvey Dies, Then Marcus Garvey Lives" in If It Weren't for Venetian Blinds, It Would Be Curtains for Us All, 1999), Asian Dub Foundation ("Committed to Life" in Community Music, 2000), Saul Williams ("Black Stacey" in Saul Williams, 2004), Rebel Diaz ("Which Side Are You On?" in Otro Guerrillero Mixtape Vol. 2, 2008), Lowkey ("Something Wonderful" in Soundtrack to the Struggle, 2011), Murs ("Tale of Two Cities" in The Final Adventure, 2012), Jay Z ("Open Letter Part II" in 2013), Digable Planets, The Underachievers and X-Clan have also recorded songs about Shakur. Shakur has been described as a "rap music legend" and a "minor cause celebre".

On December 12, 2006, the Chancellor of the City University of New York, Matthew Goldstein, directed City College's president, Gregory H. Williams, to remove the "unauthorized and inappropriate" designation of the "Guillermo Morales/Assata Shakur Community and Student Center," which was named by students in 1989. A student group won the right to use the lounge after a campus shutdown over proposed tuition increases.[228] CUNY was sued by student and alumni groups after removing the plaque. As of April 7, 2010, the presiding judge has ruled that the issues of students' free speech and administrators' immunity from suit "deserve a trial".

Following controversy, in 1995, Borough of Manhattan Community College renamed a scholarship that had previously been named for Shakur.In 2008, a Bucknell University professor included Shakur in a course on "African-American heroes"—along with figures such as Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, John Henry, Malcolm X, and Angela Davis. Her autobiography is studied together with those of Angela Davis and Elaine Brown, the only women activists of the Black Power movement who have published book-length autobiographies. Rutgers University professor H. Bruce Franklin, who excerpts Shakur's book in a class on 'Crime and Punishment in American Literature,' describes her as a "revolutionary fighter against imperialism". Black NJ State Trooper Anthony Reed (who has left the force) sued the police force because, among other things, persons had hung posters of Shakur, altered to include Reed's badge number, in a Newark barracks. He felt it was intended to insult him, as she had killed an officer, and was "racist in nature". According to Dylan Rodriguez, to many "U.S. radicals and revolutionaries" Shakur represents a "venerated (if sometimes fetishized) signification of liberatory desire and possibility".

The largely Internet-based "Hands Off Assata!" campaign is coordinated by Chicago-area Black Radical Congress activists.In 2015, New Jersey's Kean University dropped hip-hop artist Common as a commencement speaker because of police complaints. Members of the State Troopers Fraternal Association of New Jersey expressed their anger over Common's "A Song For Assata". In 2015, Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza writes: "When I use Assata’s powerful demand in my organizing work, I always begin by sharing where it comes from, sharing about Assata’s significance to the Black Liberation Movement, what its political purpose and message is, and why it’s important in our context."

The Chicago Black activist group Assata's Daughters is named in her honor. In April 2017, former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick's foundation donated $25,000 to the group. On July 2017, the Women's March official Twitter feed celebrated Shakur's birthday, leading to criticism from some right-wing media outlets. On April 2018, a North Carolina court ordered that payment of $15,000 be made to Shakur's representative, her sister Beverly Goins, as part of a land deal.