She Lived, and Yes, She Loved Us: A Fugitive Benediction Between bell and Assata

Listen it is Libra season and we are officially 3 days from my 34th Earthday. And I am in convinced that there are no coincidences, only portals. Assata Shakur died on bell hooks’ birthday. September 25th 2025. Assata died free.

Assata Shakur died on the birthday of bell hooks. I sit with that coincidence as more than accident; it feels like a philosophical hinge, a ritual reminder of what it means for Black women to carry worlds within and against captivity. Two lives, differently lived, but tethered by refusal: refusal of domination, refusal of silence, refusal of a world that insists Black women be anything but free. I feel the ancestral choreography gearing up. You know the kind. The kind only the Black feminine knows how to orchestrate. The kind that turns flight into gospel and grief into pedagogy. 4 full years ago, I gained my great Grandma Babe as an ancestor on September 21st 2021. Her Aunt Getrude's birthday. She was called on home during fall and the eve of my 30th birthday as a woman and a mother.

As a Black woman, as a single mother, as a daughter of incarceration and bipolar inheritance, as one raised by Grandma Babe , who died on her own terms, I know this pattern too well. The moment life leaves, another lineage is born. The moment the body is buried, the breath becomes a curriculum if we pay attention. Assata and bell lived that. Assata died in exile. bell lived in return. And both offered us a grammar of refusal that teaches us how to survive, softly, powerfully, and out loud.

I think about my own breath work. How I teach ESL kids in Queens by day, dream write my dissertation on ancestral education / death and descent by night, and try to mother my daughter, Sage Ali, into something freer than I ever was and could be. Isn't that something else? I think about the way bell loved words like they were living things. I am starting to feel that. And how Assata turned hers into weapon and witness.  I am starting to feel that too. One told us love is an action. The other reminded us that revolution is a right. And everyday I feel guided and strengthened by both.

hooks taught us that love is a political ethic, that care is not sentimental but insurgent. Shakur showed us what it means to turn that ethic into action, to risk the body itself in the name of liberation. One wrote prolifically about beloved community, the other embodied fugitive community, one seated at the university, the other hunted by the state. Yet they converge: both knew that the Black feminine was never simply body or symbol but always praxis, an unrelenting demand that life be otherwise. I would not be pursuing my PhD if it was not for lived waymaking of Black feminist theorists and activists. Together, they name my pedagogy.

This isn’t just about their deaths or their birthdays. It’s about what it means for two Black women—one in exile, one in theory—to be bound together by a date. September 25 is no longer just a dayvthat marks us settling into Libra season, one of my favorites of course . It’s a cipher and a loop. A return to the love that will never leave us. A scar that now becomes the syllabus, when the living flesh is the archive. And maybe that’s the point.

To mark hooks’ birthday with Shakur’s death is to feel the dialectic of theory and practice closing in on itself. It is to ask: what is philosophy if not the weaving of these threads, breath and bullet, tenderness and exile, classroom and underground? My own work sits in this paradox as a Black woman in Philosophy and Education.

I am always trying to articulate a philosophy that does not betray the flesh, a pedagogy that does not erase the scars. I think of my grandmother’s breath, my mother’s ache, my daughter’s laugh, and I understand why hooks insists on love as method and why Assata insists on escape as method. Each speaks to survival, but more than survival, to becoming.

Freedom doesn’t always look like escape. Love doesn’t always look like marriage or softness. Teaching doesn’t always happen in a classroom. Sometimes it happens in the belly of the beast, or the back of a police car in an embodied transformation, or in the margins of a battered book. Sometimes it happens when you name your child with your whole mouth and refuse to let this world mispronounce her possibility. So yes, I am the teacher that wants you to make me say your whole entire name, the way your Ancestors meant you to come to be.

As a Black feminist philosopher, I cannot separate the fugitive from the scholar. The archive is in my skin, as much as in my syllabus, I have talked about this and worked with this philosophy, exclusively with Blyssom by Shapel. The classroom is a space of risk and possibility, as much as the street or the cell. Assata and bell, together in this strange symmetry of dates, remind me that liberation is not abstract. It is mothering and exile,theory and breath, refusal and tenderness in equal measure.

Assata died on bell’s birthday so we wouldn’t forget that revolution and love are not opposites. They are twin flames. That breathing as a Black woman under racial capitalism is a philosophical act. That to write in the language of the fugitive is to educate without apology. And what of me?

I am the daughter of both women. Not by blood but by epistemology. I am what happens when someone believes Black women’s love is enough to build a world around. I write because I can’t not. I resist because to comply is to disappear.. My philosophy cries out from the womb.

So let me say it plainly:

Assata’s death on bell’s birthday was not an ending. It was a beginning again. A fugitive benediction.

A reminder that we are not free until we love each other like it’s revolutionary. That our classrooms, our kitchen tables, our healing rituals, our daughter’s laughter—all of it—is the site of the insurgency. Their crossing calls me back to my own commitments: to raise my daughter with uncompromising clarity, to write with the ferocity of one who knows words are sacred, to live with the joy of one who knows freedom is not promised but must be practiced daily. This coincidence is not simply history; it is pedagogy. It teaches us that liberation work is intergenerational, intertextual, and deeply embodied. That the work of hooks and the work of Shakur are not parallel lines but spirals, converging, diverging, and returning again to remind us: we must love, and we must fight.

That Grandma Babe was right: you hold on to what loves you back, and you bury the rest in song.

I’m still learning how.

Works Cited

hooks, bell. All About Love: New Visions. William Morrow, 2000.

hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge, 1994.

hooks, bell. Belonging: A Culture of Place. Routledge, 2009.

Shakur, Assata. Assata: An Autobiography. Lawrence Hill Books, 1987.

Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. W.W. Norton & Company, 2019.

Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. Dub: Finding Ceremony. Duke University Press, 2020.

Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press, 1984.

Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Routledge, 2000.

Moten, Fred. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Minor Compositions, 2013.

Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom.” The New Centennial Review, vol. 3, no. 3, 2003, pp. 257–337.