"The United States government called her one of the world's most-wanted terrorists. Assata Shakur called herself a 20th-century escaped slave. Claiming the runaway slave narrative proved a powerful and inspirational metaphor. Drawing on historical memory, Shakur placed herself in the pantheon of Black freedom fighters from Nat Turner to Harriet Tubman who, by any means necessary, took their liberation into their own hands."
"But the lore of Assata Shakur, as lores often do, obscured more complicated truths. Like many of those who ran before her, Shakur claimed her freedom only at a devastating cost: It meant relinquishing the ability to raise her only child; it meant she could never again return home, not to bury her mother, not to see her own grandchildren, not to be buried herself."
Born JoAnne Deborah Byron in 1947 into a family of strivers in Queens, she split her time between her mother's home in New York and her maternal grandparents' in Wilmington, N.C. She changed her birth name in 1971, rejecting it as a slave name. Her grandparents in the segregated South imbued her with an unshakable pride and dignity in being Black, forbidding subservient behavior around white people. Coming of age during the civil rights movement while witnessing Northern segregation, poverty, and police brutality radicalized her. She joined the Black Panther Party as COINTELPRO undermined and decimated Black movements and faced constant surveillance while party leadership was imprisoned and discredited.
Read at www.nytimes.com
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