She was known by two names that convey two very different identities. One depicted her as a revolutionary heroine, an innocent target of police repression. The other was the name of a merciless gun-toting cop killer who cleverly escaped justice.

This is the legacy of Joanne Chesimard, also known as Assata Shakur. It is also the heart of the continuing mystery about her.

Joanne Deborah Byron Chesimard is the legal name of the convicted killer of a New Jersey state trooper. Assata Olugbala Shakur was the alias of the leftist revolutionary who escaped from a New Jersey prison in 1979 and found political asylum five years later in Cuba. Her protected status under the Castro regime was viewed as a long-standing obstacle to full diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba.

Chesimard/Shakur died Sept. 25 in Cuba. Cuban authorities offered few details in announcing her death except to say that she succumbed to “health conditions and advanced age.” She was 78. 

So who was she really? And why does she still matter today?

In these fractious political times, we often default to the term “culture wars” to describe many of the political differences that ripple across the nation. Whether it’s abortion, gay marriage, immigration, school prayer, library censorship, gender identity or racial quotas, America has been immersed for much of the 21st century in a seemingly endless series of divisive political battles over what its people should embrace as accepted beliefs and law.

But our nation’s culture wars did not begin with the 21st century – or with our current set of Democratic and Republican leaders. In some ways, the best way to understand the dual identities that framed the life of Chesimard/Shakur is to turn back the pages of history to the 1960s and 1970s, when another set of divisive issues were at the heart of another kind of American political culture war.

That war could be defined as a battle between what progressives called government oppression and what conservatives described as basic respect for the law. In many towns, the battle was between "law and order" and the diffuse notion of "power to the people."

In that kind of culture war, the killing of a cop was seen by some progressives as a revolutionary act – a response to what was viewed by some of America’s most extreme leftists as a justifiable response to what they regarded as a history of police oppression. To the other side – conservatives and many moderates – cop killing was another form of cold-blooded murder, law breaking at its worst because the killers conveniently excused their violence by claiming they were acting as heroic political revolutionaries in the footsteps of the founders of America who fought against the oppression........

© USA TODAY