The Bumpy Flight That Led Diane Keaton to Adopt a Child at 50

"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."

"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 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 was labeled one of the world's most-wanted terrorists by the U.S. government and described herself as a 20th-century escaped slave. She used the runaway-slave metaphor to align with Black freedom fighters and to take liberation into her own hands. Shakur became an icon in rap. The mythology around her obscured costs: exile required giving up raising her only child and never returning home to bury her mother or see grandchildren. Born JoAnne Deborah Byron in 1947 in Queens, she spent time with grandparents in segregated Wilmington, N.C., changed her name in 1971, and was radicalized amid Northern segregation and police brutality while joining the Black Panther Party targeted by COINTELPRO.

Read at www.nytimes.com