"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. Shakur was lionized in rap songs and taught in college classes, and her likeness could be found in classrooms and community centers in Black neighborhoods across the nation. But the lore of Assata Shakur, as lores often do, obscured more complicated truths."
"(She changed her birth name in 1971, rejecting it as a slave name.) Her grandparents in the segregated South imbued Shakur with an unshakable pride and dignity in being Black. In her 1987 autobiography, Assata, Shakur describes being forbidden from acting subservient around white people: Hold your head up high, look white people in the eye, don't you respect nobody that don't respect you."
Assata Shakur framed herself as a 20th-century escaped slave, invoking historical Black freedom fighters to justify self-liberation. Her image became celebrated in rap, classrooms, and community centers across Black neighborhoods. That reverence obscured painful personal consequences: fleeing meant surrendering her ability to raise her only child and permanent exile from home, family burials, grandchildren, and her own burial. Born JoAnne Byron in 1947, she split time between Queens and segregated Wilmington, where grandparents taught pride and dignity. Northern segregation, poverty, and police brutality radicalized her. She joined the Black Panther Party amid COINTELPRO surveillance as its leadership faced imprisonment and discrediting.
Read at www.nytimes.com
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