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I had grown up at a time when people were being lynched, being attacked with water hoses. Becoming active and learning a different way of viewing my life was a healthy reaction to what I was seeing every day.

Assata Shakur

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Assata Shakur
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: July 14
Activist
Jamaica
Queens
Joanne Deborah Byron
People
Learning
Viewing
Seeing
Attacked
Water
Reaction
Different
Reactions
Every
Grown
Way
Active
Time
Healthy
Hoses
Life
Becoming
Lynched

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I think anybody who is honestly struggling against racism must struggle against imperialism and vice versa.
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This planet is a wonderful place, but a vulnerable place.
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There's something about approaching 50 that's very liberating. Political struggle has always been a 24-hour-a-day job for me. I felt I could never take time out for myself. Now I feel I owe it to myself to develop in ways I've been putting off all my life.
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When you go through all your life processing and abusing your hair so it will look like the hair of another race of people then you are making a statement and the statement is clear
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In the long run, the people are our only appeal. The only ones who can free us are ourselves.
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I think that any time anybody gets rid of oppression, intervention, exploitation, cruelty - that's positive.
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I'm truly blessed, because many of my friends come to Cuba. They like it here-they can relax and not worry about drive-by shootings or getting raped.
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I believe in life. And I have seen the death parade
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Before going back to college, i knew i didn't want to be an intellectual, spending my life in books and libraries without knowing what the hell is going on in the streets. Theory without practice is just as incomplete as practice without theory. The two have to go together.
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Dreams and reality are opposites. Action synthesizes them.
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We're living in a very tricky world, and unless we become analytical and expose the tricknology, people will become sucked into that. It is very easy, it is very, very easy.
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I think it's really hard to plan if you don't believe you can implement those plans.
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Black Revolutionaries do not drop from the moon. We are created by our conditions. We are shaped by our oppression. We are being manufactured in droves in the ghetto streets, places like attica, san quetin, bedford hills, leavenworth, and sing sing. They are turning out thousands of us.
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My fantasy of Cuba was that everybody was going to be going around looking like Fidel, with green uniforms - and it was very different from my vision of how Cuba was going to be.
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People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.
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We had to learn that we're beautiful. We had to relearn something forcefully taken from us. We had to learn about Black power. People have power if we unite. We learned the importance of coming together and being active
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What most impressed me about Cuba was the optimism.
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