Nikole Hannah-Jones writes that it’s what Assata Shakur paid for her freedom.
Commemorating Shakur’s death for the New York Times‘ annual feature on “The Lives They Lived,” Hannah-Jones:
— repeatedly notes that Shakur saw herself as an “escaped slave,”
— writes that after being convicted for involvement in the murder of a state trooper and then escaping prison, “Shakur had been hidden in the United States for several years by a sort of Underground Railroad before being smuggled into Cuba and granted asylum as a political prisoner,”
— describes Angela Davis merely as “an activist who was wrongly imprisoned during that same tumultuous period” and solicits her thoughts on the government’s “relentlessly targeting Shakur.”
— never names the state trooper who was killed: Werner Foerster.