Assata Taught Me

“Donna Murch is one of the sharpest, most incisive, and elegant writers on racism, radicalism, and struggle today. In this collection of essays assessing the current contours of the contemporary movement against racism in the United States, Murch combines a historian’s rigor with a cultural critic’s insights and the passionate expression of someone deeply engaged with the politics, debates, and key questions confronting activists and organizers today. This is a smart and sophisticated book that should be read and studied by everyone in search of answers to the profound crises that continue to confront this country.” —Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation “Donna Murch is one of our most brilliant thinkers and a committed scholar activist. In Assata Taught Me, she offers powerful insights about the Black freedom movement and Black radical politics, past and present. I always learn and am inspired when I read her work. This book is essential reading for historians, organizers and people interested in making sense of this historical moment, and more importantly, in changing the world.” —Barbara Ransby, author of Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement “Assata Taught Me is a masterclass on the Black Radical Tradition. From the extractive structures of the world’s largest police state to the revolutionary resistance, Donna Murch meticulously traces the history and contours of the current Movement for Black Lives. This book is seminal like its namesake, Assata Shakur.” —Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist “To feel anything other than fatalistic about the moment in which we currently live, and to see the future as anything less than perilous, might seem utterly foolish—unless, that is, one has sat with Donna Murch’s latest. With her rigorous rescuing, remembering, and reckoning with past histories of trauma, struggle, and resistance that current pundits and progressives alike too easily forget, as well as her searing reminders of present-day possibilities for a better world, Murch, like Assata Shakur before her, teaches us much we desperately need to learn in this time of momentous upheaval.” —Heather Ann Thompson, author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 of 1971 and its Legacy “Assata Shakur was a prisoner of war. Donna Murch understands this profoundly, which is why she wrote a book about a half-century of overlapping domestic wars in the United States. Each essay forcefully drives home the point that to be Black in America—to be Black in the world—is to live in a state of war under a warfare state. She writes history with fire, burning through decades of liberal obfuscation to reveal a world, not of ‘activists’ and ‘interest groups,’ but of combatants, collateral damage, refugees, and POWs. Assata has taught all of us, and her key lessons are found in these pages.” —Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination “In this essential collection of essays, Donna Murch sheds new light on the relationship between the Movement for Black Lives and the earlier practices and ideals of Black Power. She shows how the emergence of the largest police state with its spectacular and mundane violence in the intervening years has shaped the demands, organizations, and futures etched under the banner of Black Lives Matter. Written with verve and clarity, this is a book for our times.” —Adom Getachew, author of Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination “Donna Murch is one of the most astute, fearless, and brilliant US historians working today. These essays are necessary to understand who we are now and how we got here.” —Jason Stanley, author of How Fascism Works