Newark Activist Lawrence Hamm Reflects on Assata Shakur’s Revolutionary Legacy

As a teenager in the late 1960s, growing conscious of his place as a young Black person in Newark, Lawrence Hamm was acutely aware of Assata Shakur and the Black Panther Party’s rise to popularity.

The 1967 Newark Rebellion had radicalized a generation of young activists like Hamm, during a time he describes as a period of “profound struggle” for Black communities across the nation. During the Civil Rights era, Hamm said the Black power movement took root in New Jersey.

Shakur’s path from the segregated South through the anti-war movement led her to become a leader in Harlem’s Black Panther Party and later the Black Liberation Army. Organizations that would face systematic targeting by the FBI’s counterintelligence program, Hamm told New Jersey Urban News.

Her connection to New Jersey became permanent when she was captured, tried, and imprisoned in the state, experiences that Hamm and other activists view through the lens of institutional racism within the criminal legal system.

Hamm followed the story when Shakur and Black Liberation Army members Zayd Malik and Sundiata Acoli were stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike on May 2, 1973. While Zayd Shakur and State Trooper Werner Foerster were killed in the police shootout, Assata Shakur, Acoli, and Trooper James Harper were left wounded.

In 1977, Shakur was convicted of the murder of Foerster and sentenced to life in prison plus 33 years, despite maintaining that she did not shoot the trooper. Hamm believes she was wrongly convicted, pointing to medical evidence showing she couldn’t have lifted her arm after being shot. Acoli was also sentenced to life in prison and was only granted parole at age 85 in 2022 after the New Jersey Supreme Court found the parole board had repeatedly violated the law.

Shakur escaped from her life sentence at the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women in New Jersey in 1979. She was granted political asylum into Cuba, where she died on September 25, 2025. While the FBI kept Shakur on a wanted list of terrorists, with New Jersey authorities offering a $1 million reward for her capture, many others were inspired by her revolutionary acts of dissent.

Some 60 years since Assata Shakur first entered the political landscape, and just two weeks after she died at 78 years old, organizers and friends across New Jersey continue to mourn and honor the Black activist’s legacy.

Hamm is one of many that grew up with the story of Assata Shakur. In this Q&A, he speaks with NJ Urban News about what she represented as a symbol of liberation in Newark and beyond.

Editor’s note: The following interview has been trimmed for brevity and clarity.

NJUN: How do you connect what happened to Assata Shakur during that traffic stop to the broader patterns of discriminatory policing in New Jersey?

Hamm: There was Assata Shakur, that’s one type of case. But what about the four young basketball players that were shot by state troopers? The New Jersey state troopers have a history, a long history, of racism in this state, a long history of racism and racial profiling.

If we were to do the research, we would find multiple cases of racial profiling and brutality on the part of the New Jersey State Police, but that’s certainly one connection to Jersey. She was kept captured in New Jersey, tried in New Jersey, went to jail in New Jersey, and she was in Clinton prison. And I think this is what really brought her to my attention and the attention of others in my generation, was her spectacular liberation from Clinton prison in New Jersey. I mean, that’s the stuff that legends are made of. 

And I need to say this because I’ve seen things in the papers since her passing. People talk about “she broke the law. She was a criminal, she was this, she was that.” But, you know, white folks have a whole lot of heroes that broke the law. 

All during the history of white people in this country and in Europe, there were people who broke the law and were here. The most recent example being the people that attacked the capital of the United States, caused the deaths of police officers, injured hundreds of police officers. What do they get? They get pardoned. What do they get after they get pardoned? They get jobs in ICE. A lot of “J-6s” are now working as agents for ICE. They’re all heroes. They’re all celebrated. So we have our heroes, too. I mean, if we went by the law, Black people would have never overcome slavery, because slavery was the law of the land. It was the law. It wasn’t a practice, it wasn’t a custom, it was the law.

NJUN: When Assata died in September, Gov. Murphy denounced her as “shameful and depraved” while activists honored her as a freedom fighter. As someone who has worked both in electoral politics and grassroots organizing, how do you navigate these competing narratives?

Hamm: Oh, I don’t navigate them. I’m not trying to reconcile those who hold that position with mine. I have my position. They have their position. I join with those who see Assata Shakur as a hero, as a partisan in the Black liberation struggle and she died free. There’s so much outrage on the part of those who hold the opposing position because they wanted her to die and die in captivity.

Gov. Murphy said that her body shouldn’t be allowed to be repatriated to New Jersey and I disagree. I think if her family wants her to be buried in this country, she was a U.S. citizen, she should be buried. There’s no law that says she should not be buried. There’s no law. You can’t justify it. It’s vindictive, it’s extreme, it’s inhumane, not to permit her body to be interred here, if, in fact, that’s what her family wants. I think we have to put the wishes of the family primary. If they want her to be buried in Cuba, she should be buried in Cuba. If they want her to be buried in Africa, she should be buried in Africa. They want her to be buried here in the United States, the country of her birth, she should be buried here. 

Even in war, where we are fighting a declared enemy…the opposing sides permit the return of remains of those who were either killed in battle or or those who were prisoners of war to be returned to their country. To deny her that, I think, is really extreme. In addition to being extreme and vindictive and inhumane, it’s also rather Trumpian. 

NJUN: What does the official response tell us about the challenges that the movement is facing in New Jersey today?

Hamm: We still face racism in this country, in fact, we see the intensification of racism and racist repression. Look at what Trump is doing now. He’s declaring all of his opposition to be jailed, to be charged, be tried, to be convicted. He literally spoke to generals in the United States Army the other day and said that the focus of the military efforts now should be on the war within, and that the city should be training grounds for the military. And now he’s trying to merge the military with ICE. He’s calling up National Guard soldiers to assist with ICE … They employed the same tactics on people living in an apartment building in Chicago that they have used in foreign wars.

So when we actually talk about the challenges that the Black liberation movement faces, or Black people face, I think racism is more intense now than it was, let’s say when Assata Shakur was caught – and it was pretty intense then. But I think it’s worse now, because we have this openly racist, fascist government in power now.

They have control of all three legislative branches now and we see the rollback of the gains of the Civil Rights Movement. This is what makes them fascist, and not just racist. If they were just racist, they would just be going after those things that benefit Black people, but they’re going after those things that benefit everybody. That’s what makes them fascist. Trump didn’t just declare Black and brown people to be his enemy. Now he’s declared Democrats to be his enemy. And Democrats are red, Black, white, yellow, and brown. 

So, we face an even more dangerous situation, if that’s imaginable, because it was pretty dangerous in the 70s. It was pretty dangerous in the 60s. But if you can imagine, it’s even more dangerous now. We’re moving to a point where people are asking the question, are we even going to have elections next year? Are we going to have a presidential election in 2028? Whereas, we were campaigning against police brutality – it’s bigger than that now, now we’re campaigning against a police state. 

NJUN: How are organizers and writers and grassroots workers trying to carry forward Assata’s legacy?

Hamm: Well, first of all, we have to do everything we can to free the remaining political prisoners, and there are certainly a number of them. The names we know best are Mumia Abu Jamal and Imam Jamil al Amin, also known as H. Rap Brown. We have to free the political prisoners. We have to not let them be forgotten, not let them just sit and rot in prison. We have to get them out because many of them are aging and they are suffering. They have health conditions, and in many cases, the prison authorities aren’t giving them the medical attention that they need. 

We have to certainly struggle, but we have to continue to struggle for what she was struggling for. She was struggling for the liberation of Black people, and Black people are still oppressed in this country, and we’re facing an intensification of oppression that almost matches what we were experiencing in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s.

So those of us who are activists and writers and scholars and intellectuals and organizers and mobilizers, the thing we got to do is we got to get together. We have to become parts of organizations that are fighting for liberation. And if we’re already in those organizations, we have to get those organizations to form a united front. We need a united front against this racist, fascist movement in this country.

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Readers can find out more about Hamm’s political career and what brought him into the liberation struggle in his biography, “Lawrence Hamm: A Life in the Struggle.”