On a warm afternoon in 1970, Cleo Silvers, then a young member of the Black Panther Party, boarded the subway from the Bronx to Harlem. COINTELPRO was at its height. Fred Hampton had recently been assassinated by police in Chicago. Huey Newton was imprisoned on false charges. She was still on the subway when police stopped her.

“I told them, ‘I’m going to the Black Panther office, and you better leave me alone,’” recalled Silvers, now 78. And they did. By the time she got to the Panther headquarters on Seventh Avenue, she breathed a sigh of relief, and continued with her work: within a few months, she’d be helping to take over a hospital.

Silvers recounted this day recently, sitting at her kitchen table, bedecked in a mauve headwrap and gold jewelry. Anyone looking in the window would see just another Tennessee academic, the rooms she shares with her husband, Ron, overflowing with books on racial justice and radical organizing. But Silvers’s life has been one of boldness: as a Young Lord in the South Bronx in 1970, she took part in the Lincoln Hospital Takeover, when activists demanded better care for patients, supported by Assata Shakur and other Panthers. After the takeover, Silvers helped run a door-to-door program with the Young Lords, testing people for tuberculosis and lead.