Princess Diana was quoted as saying, "I'd like to be a queen of people's hearts." So it's no surprise that her most enduring nickname is The People's Princess. The moniker was first used in the early nineties, but to be honest, it was immortalized in a 1997 speech given by then Prime Minister Tony Blair.

I feel like everyone else in this country today, utterly devastated.

It was August 31st and news had just broken of Diana's shocking death.

You know how difficult things were for her from time to time. I'm sure we can only guess at, but the people everywhere, not just here in Britain, everywhere. They kept faith with Princess Diana. They liked her. They loved her. She was the People's Princess.

Diana often talked about the media's constant intrusion in her life as intolerable. But she found a way to take that same media attention and bring it to causes that needed it the most.

I went to Angola earlier this year in January with the British Red Cross, a country where there are 15 million landmines.

In January 1997, months before her tragic death, Princess Diana visited the country as part of her campaign against landmines. She stepped out onto an active minefield to demonstrate how dangerous living conditions were there. And she met with Angolans who had lost limbs or relatives to these dangerous devices.

I am not a political figure. And as I said at the time, and I would like to reiterate now, my interests are humanitarian.

It is now practically required that all modern celebrities endorse a cause or use their fame to raise awareness and money. This is a good thing, of course, but it can also feel empty and disingenuous sometimes. But with Diana, it never seemed that way. When she was doing her moonwalks or visiting AIDS patients, it genuinely felt like she was coming from an authentic place. Maybe because she helped invent the blueprints for this kind of modern philanthropy, but mostly my hunch is because it was actually heartfelt. You cannot fake this kind of humanity.

It's hard to know who she really was, except when you watch these video clips of her when she's interacting with regular people.

In the late eighties, this is a woman who is hugging a black child who has a disease that is not well understood or researched, and all she wanted to do was show them the love of a mother.

It's remarkable that for all the salacious details you know about Princess Diana, there are also equally powerful stories of her being kind and empathetic to ordinary people. Stories of her visiting homeless shelters without fanfare or taking her children to do rounds at hospitals. But why did she feel compelled to do this? And what made her gravitate towards people and communities that were overlooked, underserved and sometimes demonized? Whatever the answers are, and we'll get into them this episode, I know one thing for certain: she changed the face of the British monarchy forever, and that's why she's known as the People's Princess. I'm Aminatou Sow and this is When Diana Met...The People.

Business people are more in bed with class than they're willing to admit. It decides a lot of things like where you go to school, how you sound and how you viewed.

Alegria Adedeji is an award winning writer and filmmaker based in London. She wrote an article for Harper's Bazaar that caught my attention called "Why Princess Diana Meant So Much to My Black British Mother."

Usually if you are royalist, it's probably a class thing. But I think most of us, especially me being Black British, not particularly in any way bothered. So with that in mind, I think for a lot of people it gives them a sense of continuity because specifically English people, I think it's a subtle difference between British and English, which may not be mentioned much. So I am British because I'm Black British. And then you have people who are white English. There's a sort of subtle, distinct difference that I think for English people it's very much a heritage and how they feel secure in, I guess, their ideal of being British. You know, it's beer, the queen, and I guess football. And so for people like me who are from London and I think Londoners would agree with me, we're kind of very indifferent to it because the world that we see doesn't require royals in the same way.

This is one of the most defining things about Diana's relationship with the public. Everyone loved her. Even people who weren't the quote unquote usual English royalists. People took her into their lives and their homes in a way that was super familiar.

So Princess Diana died in 97, and I would've been about like five at the time. So my memories of her like very specific, but also there was was less of seeing her and more hearing about her, which I think is the difference. So our mums would always talk about her and about Charles or about her and her outfits, or because she was doing the whole like biker shorts and the like that trainers before we all did. So my parents, my mum, especially and her friends, we'd talk about Diana or whatever was happening. So in my mind I presumed that it was a friend of hers. I'd never seen this person. But you don't always see your mum's friends. And anyone who's black knows this, you have cousins who are not blood related and you have aunts also who are blood related. So I just thought she was one of the aunties who was like an auntie. And eventually I would meet her.

I can't begin to tell you how different this point of view is from the way people thought about royals before Diana came along. Here she was going to Michael Jackson concerts, hanging out with George Michael, working on her fitness, being a mom. She felt relatable and accessible. But can a princess be relatable and accessible? On one hand, Diana absolutely had the appearance of someone who would sit and chat with you for hours, but on the other hand, this is the kind of labor we ask women who are public figures to perform all the time. I wonder if my mom or Alegira's mom picked up on that, or if they were so hyperfocused on her kindness and gentleness that it didn't matter at all. I don't know. Another thing I don't know and remain unable to explain is why exactly this rich white woman is not all beloved or relatable to my or Alegria's mom.

My liking of Diana is not something that has logic to it. All of our moms spoke about Diana, so she was so common in every day, it's like, okay that's Diana. It's kind of like how, you know, Jamaicans feel about Celine Dion, or we may feel about Dolly Parton. There's some people who just-

Right, there's a canon of unproblematic white women that we inherit generation to generation. Absolutely.

Yeah. Yeah. There's a whole canon of people who kind of just exist in this space where they don't make sense. Because our mothers held this person so highly, we were raised doing the same. And so it's just something that's become part and parcel. And again, because she's not here with us anymore, she can't disprove anything that our mums said about her. She is faultless because that's what death does. When someone is admired and they die, they can't make mistakes. So it's unexplainable, really. Why do I like Diana? I don't know. She's just all Black British mum's best friends. That's really the answer to that question.

This idea of Diana as the People's Princess, there are multiple dimensions to that, and the dimension Alegria brings up is the intimacy and familiarity that regular people felt for her in daily life, that they had an ally in the royal family was something entirely new. The public considered her one of us in a way. People did not treat royals like this before. At least not at that level. And no Royal had ever treated the people quite the way Diana did.

My name is Ebone Macintosh Carrington. I was formerly the chief executive and the chief operating officer for New York City Health and Hospitals Harlem.

Hi, Ebone. Thank you so much for joining us today.

It's a pleasure.

Ebone has a very special relationship with this hospital going back to childhood. Her dad was a surgeon there and her mom ran the Women, Infants and Children's Program in the 1980s.

They have just fostered in me a sense of service, a sense of community, a sense of Afro centricity. And it's been able to carry forward into my career. And I think that's been such a blessing. So, yes, I grew up running the halls that I then ran literally or led literally. And it has been my my honor. It was the joy of my life to do so.

In 1989, Ebony was in grade school, developing all the important social and emotional skills that carry you into adulthood. Halfway across the world, Diana had been getting an education of her own, learning the royal ropes for eight years. She was given her biggest solo assignment to date three days representing the crown in New York City.

It's not cheap, rubbing elbows with a princess, a ticket for the opera and a gala dinner afterwards.

No husband, no kids, only business.

A day that ended in gliter had begun in a gritty New York City housing project. Princess Di toured a shelter of homeless mothers and plunged into a crowd...

Diana was coming to America.

Later, the princess toyed with reporters at a British toy expo at FAO Schwartz. She may not say much, Princess Di doesn't shy away from photographers.

She'd attend an opera, a gala, and would spend time with some of the people in New York who were struggling the most, like domestic violence survivors at the Henry Street Settlements and children on an AIDS ward at Harlem Hospital.

My mom was very excited about Diana's visit, and I happened to mention it in school, and my teacher just went like him. She was like, What? Diana's coming to Harlem, to New York. What do you guys have planned for her? What do you what are you going to do? And I said, I don't know. I don't think anything.

By the time Diana headed up to Harlem Hospital to visit the children's AIDS ward, Ebone's class had prepared a present for the princess.

The spirit of myself and of my school were present during her visit to Harlem Hospital because I went to a very small private school and my teacher was from Nova Scotia, and so she ran out and got this very large poster board and she made us, as a class, create a welcome sign for her. And, you know, I remember what I drew and I remember what I wrote and that sign or that poster was presented to Princess Diana from Harlem Hospital and it is a picture that lives on. So it's my mom and a few other administrators presenting her with the poster that my third grade class created to welcome her to the city.

It's true. Google it. Diana visits Harlem Hospital. You'll see Ebone's mom in a gray suit and glasses standing right there with the princess as she holds the kids poster. And because Ebone lived right across the street from the hospital, she also managed to see Diana out of the window when she arrived.

I was able to see when she got out of the car with her delegation and she had this red suit on. And obviously, you know, she's a white woman in a sea of black suits and black people. And so it was clear to see her. But she wasn't, she wasn't afraid. She wasn't looking around for security. There was there was a peace in her and like an elegance.

One of the most enduring photos of this trip was of Diana hugging a seven year old boy with AIDS at Harlem Hospital. The hug was seen and felt around the world. What do you think she brought to this experience that is so distinctly her own?

Kindness. I have a small child and there's a picture of her embracing a child in a hospital gown when she came to her visit to Harlem Hospital, she saw a child in need and she just picked them up and embraced them. And it was heartfelt. It was genuine. I feel myself welling up a little bit because I have a little boy and he loves human connection. He loves a hug. And these are kids who didn't have that at all. And she gave that to them. And she's a princess. She didn't have to do that. So I think kindness as an aspect of strength is something that she was able to demonstrate. And I think we as women can see that and emulate that because you don't have to be hard to be powerful.

How do you think that, you know, in that moment that you described earlier that she managed to subtly or maybe not so subtly change the way that we think about AIDS?

It wasn't just on the visit to Harlem Hospital. I think that there was a clip that I've seen of her shaking a very, very thin gay man's hand who was HIV positive or who had perhaps at the time, full blown AIDS. And the fact that she shook his hand similarly to hugging the child, I think it just shows, do not shun these people.

After the break here about how Princess Diana embraces the gay community.

It's hard to convey just how terrified people were of contracting HIV in the eighties. They had these misguided ideas of how they would come into contact with the virus, believing that maybe you could get it from a toilet seat or shaking hands, or that only gay people could get it. People were paranoid, and that paranoia, in addition to rampant homophobia, made them act cruelly towards HIV positive folks. Anyone sick was treated as a leper. But Diana didn't do that.

She sat with gay men and shook their hands and embraced them.

This is Eric Marcus. He's the founder and host of the Making Gay History podcast. Well, let's talk about this April 1987 visit when she she visits an HIV AIDS unit in the London Middlesex Hospital and she shakes the hand of a patient with AIDS. She doesn't wear gloves, which was pretty significant at the time, the patient is seated with his back to the camera so his face is not photographed. What do you think about when you when you think about that picture?

There was Princess Di doing something that no one of her stature or no one who could get the kind of attention she got. She took the hand in such a simple act, such a human act. And it's very hard to imagine that Queen Elizabeth would have done it. But Princess Di was somebody who was very comfortable with other people and had an enormous amount of compassion. And in rewatching the video clips, it's so clear it wasn't put on. It wasn't an act. She wasn't pretending, she was herself.

The uncharitable have found the AIDS issue fertile ground to air their prejudices. If their views were voiced to help fight the disease, that would be fine. However, too often their attitudes reveal only their own narrowness of mind and a sad lack of common humanity.

For someone like her to touch a person who had AIDS indicated to the public that if she could do it, they could do it, and it was assumed that she wouldn't put herself in any danger.

If I'm hearing you say this and I am and I'm struggling to think, I think in that era of another public figure, maybe who did something that was similar.

Well, how many princesses are there-

Well, there you go.

'-that we follow closely. She was such a public figure and had such high stature. There was Elizabeth Taylor who who was prominent here in in the AIDS crisis and making clear that that we shouldn't be afraid, but even though Elizabeth Taylor was a great star, she wasn't Princess Di.

Can you talk to me about that simple gesture of embracing the child in the AIDS wards? What made it so profound at the time? And did you have a personal reaction to the image when you saw it?

I always accused my sister of being the weepy one in the family. But that picture made me cry because these were children who were often abandoned, who were ill, who people were afraid to touch. She didn't hesitate. And you can just see in her action and I watched a video clip of this, it's not just the still photo. She just was so natural and unafraid. It was the the genuineness of the gesture that contrasted so sharply with so much of the sadness and terrible things that were going on at that time, the things that were said about people who had AIDS and even children who had AIDS. So it's against that backdrop that we have to consider the role that, that Lady Di played at that time in trying to strip away some of the stigma around AIDS and the false information.

What do you think is the larger impact of her involvement with the AIDS crisis?

Lady Di's impact on the AIDS crisis was to open a door for other people to behave in the same way that she did. Two reasons. One is she shamed people. If I can do it, you can do it. You know, shaming people in that way. And she also set a positive example for people who needed to see through her example that it was okay to hug someone who had AIDS. It was okay to hold their hand. You didn't have to abandon somebody. So it was both by shaming people and by setting a positive example that she, that was her- in those two ways she had an enormous impact on changing minds and hearts.

In this way, being a champion of people who are shunned or overlooked, and basically just being a walking manifestation of kindness, she became the People's Princess to millions. Through her charity work and through her decision to interact with the public differently than other royals, she became someone that the world embraced. So it's no wonder that when Diana died, people from all over the world were gutted. Very few of these people could actually attend her funeral, but countless people all over the world took to the streets to honor her memory. It was almost as if when she died, everyone wanted to show her that, just like she hadn't forgotten them, they would never forget her. Alegria Adedeji remembers this day vividly.

So her funeral, I remember the hearse. They obviously had the funeral in Westminster Abbey, I believe and they showed it on television, and everyone was watching it. It was nothing short of a national holiday.

We now continue watching the hearse bearing the coffin of Diana, Princess of Wales, in North London, as it proceeds rather briskly now passing the throngs along the roadway to the sound of heartfelt, genuinely heartfelt applause.

The hearse carrying Diana's coffin was driven slowly through the streets. All along the way, people came out of their homes and shops and offices to pay respects as she passed by one last time.

What happened is a lot of Londoners, realizing she was going to drive through London, worked out how to get there from their house and stood basically in the freeway, but leaving a path for that, the hearse to drive through. And so I remember one part of the procession was passing where my house was at the time. So my mum took me, my sister, put our coats on, and with a group of people like neighbors, people who we hadn't even spoken before, we all just walked en masse to the street and lined the street. People picked up flowers, wreaths, notes, teddy bears, everything. And we're just throwing it on the hearse as she drove past. At a certain point, because there were so many flowers on the front of the windshield, they actually stopped and the undertaker came out and cleared the windshield. But because I think he was aware of the gravity of what was happening, he kind of just stays sitting by the car for about 30 seconds and then drove off, that gave people that moment to grieve. And I remember that because I didn't have any flowers because I was like literally five, but I did have a packet of crisps or chips, as you would call them, so actually three days because I was like, I need to throw something, everyone is throwing something amazing. So I remember throwing those and I remember seeing my mom. And again, your parents, you very rarely see your parents cry, so you remember when it happens. I was looking at my mum and she was like just in tears and the person next to her was also in tears.

It's so remarkable hearing you, you know, recall these memories because I, I watched all of it on television, obviously, and my family, we were living in Lagos, in Nigeria at the time, and I remember like this is the era of 24/7 CNN International, you know, for anyone who grew up overseas, you know what I'm talking about. You know, and I remember watching on CNN just these images. But for I think about for us overseas and especially, I think those of us who are African overseas, it was so remarkable. It was the first time that we saw that Britain was multicultural. To me, I remember, even as a young person feeling like, Oh, I don't quite understand this country, and I think that something is changing and we are seeing the change, but I didn't know how to articulate that at the time.

Yeah, no. Britain changed indefinitely. So first of all, I think the world actually saw Britain as it was. So as you know, the image Britain that you see, a stiff upperlip, the royals that very prim and proper, very white, very well-bred. But in reality, London is one of the most multicultural cities on the planet. And I think as far as race relations go in that country, there's a very famous case, the death of Stephen Lawrence, where a young Black teenager was killed by white- five white teenagers. That would have occurred four or so years before.

So I think I always believe the things you see should always happen, always happen in context, nothing is in isolation. And so I think we have been a very divided country. It's not to say that we're completely unified, but we have been incredibly divided, and I think something about this death of Diana highlighted a sameness that we all felt towards this one, towards this one person and that kind of I think it just changed the whole fundamental, I think, about the way British people felt about being seen and the British people's expectations of the royal family, because if not for her and her making this cultural shift of like, oh, the royal family, you guys need to be available and you also need to answer to the people and you do need to reflect the people and you need to look like the people in some respects, that's changed the expectation of the royal family.

So going back to the first question, you ask me where you're saying, how do I feel about the royal family? I guess the more appropriate response for me to say is the royal family's job now is to appeal to me, not the other way around, and so I think the survival of the royal family's image, maybe not them themselves, lies on how Charles and the rest of his family decide to appeal to everyone else. They've never once had to care about how commoners see them, especially not a Black British commoner, and I think that's really the key to their survival in the long term.

No doubt if Diana were still alive, she would be connecting to people like Alegria and me and you because she was the People's Princess, after all, and still is. Diana really understood the immense power the royal family had to create change and make people feel welcomed and wanted in society. Because she was an outsider within that family, it's not hard to understand why she could empathize with anyone else who felt marginalized. Her behavior was so striking against the coldness of the royal family. She hugged and touched people without hesitation, without gloves, and without thought to protocol. She showed affection to her own children in public, and she exposed them to the realities of the world, hoping that they would step into a life of helping those in need when the time came for them to be in the limelight.

All of this advocacy also came at a cost, though she was a shy woman, now hounded by the media and the public, someone not afforded a shred of privacy. She made peace with the fact that her life would never be her own and chose to use the attention she generated to spotlight others who needed it more. Not only was she incredibly emotionally intelligent, she was a diplomatic and cultural asset to a family who didn't seem to understand that she was the one who could usher them into the modern era; a huge loss for us and a huge loss for them. It's hard to reconcile the tragedy of her life, but Ebone Carrington said something about it that I still think about.

You know, I'm a very spiritual person, and I just you know, they say God knows everything about you, every hair on your head before you're ever born. She was meant to be who she was. She was meant to have her entire life, like the sum total of all her experiences made her who she was, and so this was her destiny, to, to be the People's Princess. What makes so many people love her is just that she's real. You know, she came from a real place. She had real struggles. She was criticized very heavily, but still showed up with class and sophistication, and that's what we all pray to do every day is just to endure and to do it with grace. And so she was just that picture of courage. And most times that didn't show up in female form because there weren't a lot of female superheroes and you definitely wouldn't think that like a docile female would come across to so many as a superhero, but she did. And she still does to some.

When Diana Met is produced by CNN Audio and Pineapple Street Studios. It's hosted by me, Aminatou Sow. Our producers are Mary Knauf, Tamika Adams and Erin Kelly. Our associate producer is Marialexa Kavanaugh and our editor is Darby Maloney.

Mixed and original music by Hannis Brown. Our fact checker is Francis Carr. Additional support for the series comes from Ashley Lusk, Kira Boden-Gologorsky, Alexander McCall, Lisa Namerow, Robert Mathers and Molly Harrington.

Executive producers for Pineapple Street Studios are Bari Finkel, Jenna Weiss-Berman and Max Linsky. Megan Marcus is the executive producer for CNN Audio.