She became infamous for her involvement in acts of political violence. Then she found her way out of the abyss.

Kathy Boudin, the teacher, organizer, and revolutionary, died on May 1st, after a seven-year battle with cancer. She’d been in hospice care at a friend’s apartment in New York City. More than one person close to her, including her son, Chesa, the San Francisco district attorney, remarked to me that it felt appropriate that she had died on May Day, the annual occasion that marks the struggle for workers’ rights.

Boudin was an iconic character in the American imagination. From the late nineteen-sixties through the early nineteen-eighties, she became prominent for her association with several infamous acts of radical political violence, most notably the 1981 robbery of a Brink’s money truck, which resulted in the murder of one security guard and two police officers. Boudin, an accomplice to the robbery, served twenty-two years in prison and expressed remorse for her actions. She was sensationalized in the press and inspired caricatures of zealous, wayward militants in Philip Roth’s novel “American Pastoral” and David Mamet’s play “The Anarchist.” These representations make the error of conflating a remarkable person with the worst things she ever did. They also miss the more instructive story of an organizer and activist who ultimately found a productive way to live her principles.

My mother-in-law, Lucy Friedman, met Boudin in 1961, when they were freshmen at Bryn Mawr College. Both young women had grown up in privileged, progressive families in New York; Lucy’s father had recognized Kathy’s last name on the incoming-class list and told his daughter to look out for her during orientation. Boudin arrived at college with an already well-developed sense of justice and worldliness. Angela Davis joined her high-school class in the eleventh grade. “I think that our classmates, most of whom had already attended the school for many years, would agree that she was one of our acknowledged political and intellectual leaders,” Davis wrote to me in an e-mail. “I don’t think I would have developed an awareness of the Cuban Revolution if not for the fact that Kathy had a way of making it absolutely relevant to the conditions of our lives at that time.”

In college, Boudin was “really one of the most charismatic people I’ve ever known,” Friedman said. She was an excellent student and an avid organizer of conferences and student actions, feverishly involved in bringing the politics of the moment to campus. Boudin spent her senior year in Russia and Friedman spent hers at Brandeis University, where she’d transferred after marrying my father-in-law. After that, the two women lost touch for a few decades.

The next few years of Boudin’s life are the ones that have become the stuff of legend: she joined the leftist activist group Students for a Democratic Society (S.D.S.), and then the Weather Underground, its radical splinter faction. In 1970, she survived the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion that killed three of her comrades. Boudin was caught in the middle of a shower upstairs when the bomb went off in the basement. She managed to get away, naked, taking refuge at the home of a woman who lived down the block—before disappearing. She remained underground for the next eleven years. In 1980, she gave birth to Chesa and started to emerge from hiding. She also became involved with the Black Liberation Army, a well-armed spinoff of the Black Panthers. It was in support of the B.L.A. that Boudin participated in the Brink’s truck heist, in October, 1981. The gunmen killed a security guard, Peter Paige, during the robbery, while Boudin was stationed close by in a U-Haul which the robbers intended to use as a getaway vehicle. When the U-Haul was stopped by police, Boudin surrendered with her hands up, but the gunmen in the back of the truck jumped out and shot and killed Sergeant Edward J. O’Grady and Officer Waverly L. Brown of the Nyack Police Department. Boudin was arrested the day of the incident, and ultimately convicted of first-degree robbery and second-degree murder.

She would later describe her actions during this era as “flawed and wrong,” informed by a “greater and greater” sense of guilt, and a distorted sense of self and the world while underground. In a 2001 Profile for The New Yorker, by Elizabeth Kolbert, she spoke of her involvement with the B.L.A. as an act of self-erasure in service of a better world. “The less I would know and the more I would give up total self, the better—the more committed and the more moral I was,” she said.

One reads this and imagines a person who was brainwashed, maybe, or at least very unsure of what she believed. This was not true of Boudin, however. The Brink’s truck incident and her arrest provoked crisis and transformation, but not total disavowal of her central commitments. “The lesson she learned wasn’t ‘I shouldn’t dedicate my life to the struggle,’ ” Chesa told me. “The lesson she learned, definitively and through tragedy, was ‘Violence is not productive.’ ”

In 1984, Boudin was transferred to Bedford Hills, the women’s prison in upstate New York, where she met friends and future comrades including Roslyn Smith. Smith had been struggling with depression prior to meeting Boudin, whom she calls the most influential person in her life. “When I came to prison, I was operating with the belief that I didn’t matter. Kathy changed that for me through her friendship,” Smith told me. “She helped me to understand the harm that I caused, to tear it apart and take responsibility for it, but she also helped me believe that it didn’t define me, that it wasn’t my whole identity.”

Smith told me about programs that Boudin built while at Bedford, including an AIDS-education and peer-support initiative; a program for mothers who had been separated from their children; and an effort to bring college programming to the prison after Pell Grants were suspended, in the nineteen-nineties. She became most animated describing how Boudin once organized her housing unit to hold a Thanksgiving dinner. Boudin suggested that the women make a “tree of life” on the common-room wall, on which they hung family photos. Then they met beneath the collage and shared the holiday meal. “To this day, that is a tradition for the women at Bedford Hills,” Smith said. “A lot of women don’t know where that tradition came from, even, but it came from Kathy.”

I worry that repeating a story like this makes Bedford Hills sound like a place where warm and pleasant scenes are easily orchestrated. It is not; like all prisons, Bedford is a deeply alienating place, characterized by oppression, mistrust, and indifference. Boudin made Thanksgiving in a place like that possible because she had a genius for connection. “She was deeply anti-transactional,” the activist Laura Whitehorn, who first met Boudin in 1969, told me. “Kathy had a fierce and unbending commitment to principle, and an ability to manifest principle by building community. She connected with people and saw each person for who they were. And that was her political statement, not a personality quirk.”

Boudin became the first woman to earn a master’s degree while behind bars in the New York State prison system. In 1994, during Mario Cuomo’s last days as governor, she applied for clemency. In a version of her application statement, Boudin wrote that she had “come to accept a more realistic role” and felt “satisfaction in the immediate ways that people found strength in their own abilities.” This was how Boudin would turn her gift for friendship into political praxis: by illuminating the specific potential of the person in front of her.

The clemency bid failed. Friedman, who had started visiting Boudin in jail in previous years, received a group letter shortly after in which Boudin wrote about how the process had led her to a deeper reckoning with her choices. “I have felt for a long time that to explain what brought me there that day it would be necessary to put together a very complex truth, one perhaps describable only in a novel: a truth that involves political commitments and psychological drives; human strengths and human flaws; commitment and ambivalence, social history and political history, energy and frailty,” she wrote. People in abolitionist circles speak about the critical distinction between guilt and accountability. Boudin may have felt the first, but she sought the latter by struggling to understand, not excuse, her worst mistakes.

As part of her attempt to make amends, Boudin met with people who had lost loved ones to violent crime. In the late nineties, Friedman travelled to see her at Bedford with a friend, a retired police officer, whose son had been murdered. Friedman describes the meeting, during which Boudin and the father exchanged stories and shared in each other’s grief, as “the most electric of my life.” It affected Boudin, too. “Although I have thought a lot about the damage I did and about what it meant for the lives of each person, it is still different to hear directly,” she wrote, in a letter to Friedman afterward.

Boudin was freed in 2003. The decision to release her was so controversial, in part owing to opposition voiced by some of the victims’ family members, that two parole-board members who voted in favor of her release lost their jobs in the aftermath. Chesa was in upstate New York visiting his father, David Gilbert, who was also incarcerated for his participation in the Brink’s heist, on the day that she came home, and he flew to meet her in New York City. He found his mother waiting for him at LaGuardia Airport with a flower and a smoothie; she knew that he loved smoothies because they’d made them together in the visit trailer when he made trips to Bedford in the years before.

It’s hard to imagine what reëntering society is like for people who’ve been behind bars for more than two decades. Boudin was the first person I ever met who had done it. I first got to know her through visits with my in-laws, shortly after she got out, and came to love her very much. I remember her describing terrible nausea when she rode in cars during her first weeks back: after decades of remaining stationary on the ground, her body had trouble adjusting to the propulsion of sitting in a car. Prison had recalibrated her sense of balance.

Boudin continued to operate in the free world much as she had at Bedford: she forged connections with everyone she met, and created communities that blossomed under her leadership. She lived on the Upper West Side and was exactingly rule-bound for the years she was on parole, terrified of committing any violation that might send her back to prison. She scrupulously refused to jaywalk. She spent time with my parents-in-law at their home on Fire Island, and visited the house nearby where her family had spent summers when she was a child. It seemed as if she was working in three dimensions: reclaiming a lost past from before she went underground, forging a new identity as a free person in the present, and helping others to picture the future she wanted for the world. Following her release, she completed a doctorate in education at Columbia and co-founded multiple organizations and programs, including Release Aging People in Prison, an advocacy initiative that works on behalf of incarcerated elders.

One of Boudin’s most important collaborators was Cheryl Wilkins, who had been incarcerated with her at Bedford. Together, they helped co-found the Center for Justice at Columbia University, which created, with the Osborne Association, the Longtermers Responsibility Project—a program to help people serving decades-long sentences to reckon with their histories. Boudin wrote the curriculum for the program. “We knew that people could go through a long sentence and not address the thing that had brought you there in the first place,” Wilkins said. “We also knew that this work had to happen for people to be able to carry on with their lives.”

I became a doctor on Rikers Island in 2016, and Boudin and I spoke regularly about my work. She was incredible on the phone. I could hear her brain lighting up as she talked, but also, somehow, as she listened; she was audibly concentrating and learning. I often hung up feeling both reassured and invigorated. “Talking to her always felt like you had been to school, but also like you’d been to the beauty salon,” Reverend Sharon White-Harrigan, who met Boudin while incarcerated in Bedford Hills and is now the executive director of the Women’s Community Justice Association, said. “She gave you not a spark but a surge of energy.”

Boudin was this way up until the week of her death, when she slipped in and out of awareness with friends and family sitting at her bedside. Her energy for her work, her energy for her people, and her energy for the people all emanated from the same core of idealism, which remained intact even as it was recast through experience and sorrow. Boudin did not cower from herself or the world: she understood both to be fallible and capable of harm, and believed that both, through work and compassion, could be made better.