Afeni Shakur was carted off to the women’s house of detention in Greenwich Village in 1971, patting her very pregnant belly. She told anyone who would listen that she was carrying a prince whose destiny was to save the black nation. She was one of 21 Black Panthers on trial for an alleged bomb plot. The jury freed all 21 defendants.
Afeni walked out of that courtroom a month and three days before her son was born on June 16th, 1971. The baby’s father had already split. Afeni changed the boy’s name from Lesane Parish Crooks to Tupac Amaru Shakur. Tupac Amaru, she said, meant shining royal serpent.
Shakur meant thankful to God. She raised him to believe he was a Black prince. Tupac’s stepfather, Mutulu Shakur, was a Panther leader who became the closest thing the boy had to a father. Tupac sat in on meetings as a toddler, listening to adults plan revolutions while other kids played.
He fell asleep in the corner, and when Mutulu asked if he was ready to leave, Tupac always said the same thing. “No, I want to stay. ”
He learned to speak by watching people argue about justice. He learned to listen by watching his mother and her friends plan for a better world while the police watched them right back.
His childhood was a procession of men in uniform kicking down doors. When Tupac was two, his uncle Zed was killed in a shootout with a New Jersey state trooper. His aunt Assata was convicted in that death and later escaped from prison, fleeing to Cuba. His godfather, Geronimo Pratt, was sent to prison for a murder he always swore he didn’t commit.
The FBI had sabotaged his defense. He was freed 25 years later, but the damage was already done. Tupac learned the smell of tear gas before he learned to ride a bike. His mother moved them constantly—from the Bronx to Harlem to a string of homeless shelters.
She was usually broke. When Tupac misbehaved, she made him read the entire New York Times from front to back. She hoped the words would save him. The words did save him, but not in the way she expected.
He started writing poetry in journals, love songs and angry verses, filling page after page with everything he couldn’t say out loud. He wrote that he was going to be famous. He wrote that he was going to be the greatest of all time. His cousins on his mother’s side tormented him.
They put hot sauce in his nose while he slept. Once, they made him jump out of a 12-foot window into a six-foot pool. He felt like he didn’t fit in anywhere. He didn’t know who his real father was, and the mystery ate at him.
When his cousins teased him that his face looked girlish, it hurt him deeply. He was five years old when he first met his biological father, Billy Garland. They never had a relationship that mattered. When he was 15, his stepfather Mutulu went underground after being indicted for robbing banks to finance a militant organization, a robbery that left two New York policemen and a Brinks guard dead.
The FBI put Mutulu on the Ten Most Wanted list. The family moved again, this time to Baltimore, to a dangerous, derelict neighborhood on Greenmount Avenue. At school, Tupac had a weird name and shabby clothes. Some kids called him a girl.
He was skinny and awkward, and he got his head kicked in for looking at people the wrong way. But his friend Darien remembered the first time he saw Tupac perform at a school talent show. He blew the entire crowd away. His teachers noticed he was gifted, but he hid his love of literature from his peers to try to fit in.
It didn’t help. They dissed him anyway. So his mother enrolled him at the Baltimore School for the Arts. There, Tupac learned a few things he never expected to learn.
He discovered he could trust some white people. He studied acting and ballet. He read books on Eastern religions and entire sets of encyclopedias. He made friends, including a bright, intense young woman named Jada Pinkett, who became his muse and his closest confidante.
He fell into Baltimore’s rap scene, where his New York street reputation earned him respect. He wrote his first rap song under the name MC New York, an anti-gun track inspired by the fatal shooting of one of his close friends. But his mother’s drug addiction made it impossible for her to hold down a job. Before he could finish high school, the family fled again—this time to Marin City, California, a place nicknamed the Jungle, not far from Oakland.
Tupac later described that move as where I got off track. His family life was in chaos. He drifted into the street gang life, selling drugs, running with the wrong people. By the time he was twenty, he had been arrested eight times.
But he kept rapping. With some friends, he started a group called Strictly Dope. They performed locally and got some attention. In 1991, Digital Underground heard the buzz and brought Tupac on the road as a dancer and a rapper.
It was while touring with Digital Underground that he learned his mother was on crack. He kept moving. He made his recording debut on Digital Underground’s hit song Same Song. Then he went solo.
His first album, 2Pacalypse Now, tackled police brutality, poverty, teen pregnancy, and crack addiction. Critics called it violent gangster rap. Shortly after it dropped, a nineteen-year-old kid shot a Texas trooper and claimed the album incited him. The defense attorney said the tape in the car’s deck was to blame.
Former Vice President Dan Quayle publicly denounced the album. The controversy hounded him, but the album eventually went gold. In October of 1991, two Oakland officers stopped Tupac for jaywalking. Pac responded by saying, “Fuck y’all.
”
The police choked him, beat him, and slammed his head on the pavement. He sued the Oakland Police Department for ten million dollars and settled for forty-two thousand. That same year, an old acquaintance back in Marin City got into a gunfight that left a six-year-old bystander dead from a head wound. Tupac’s half-brother was arrested in connection with the incident but released for lack of evidence.
The public saw a thug. But then he landed a role in the film Juice, playing a charismatic, unhinged character named Bishop. Reviewers noticed his talent. Rolling Stone called him the film’s most magnetic figure.
His second album, Strictly 4 My N. I. G. G.
A. Z. , went platinum. He turned the slur into an acronym: Never Ignorant, Getting Goals Accomplished.
The song Keep Ya Head Up, a tender homage to black women, became a signature moment in his career. In 1993, he starred opposite Janet Jackson in John Singleton’s film Poetic Justice. On set, he was wined and dined, but Janet’s managers kept nagging him to take an AIDS test before doing any love scenes. “If I were really going to make love to Janet Jackson, sure, I’d take an AIDS test,” Tupac said.
“But come on, we were just acting. ”
In October of 1993, Tupac got into a fight with two off-duty Atlanta cops who were harassing a black motorist. He shot both officers, one in the leg and one in the butt. The charges were dismissed when the court discovered the officers were drunk and using weapons stolen from a police evidence locker.
Then came December 1993. A nineteen-year-old woman accused Tupac and his friends of sexually assaulting her in his hotel room. According to Tupac, she’d given him oral sex on the dance floor at Nells club and supposedly wanted to do more. He took her back to his hotel.
His friends got overexcited. He said he left the room to talk to his publicist and take a nap, leaving the girl to fend for herself. When he woke up, he said, the girl was fully dressed, crying hysterically, and his buddies were frantically trying to calm her down. The girl told a different story.
She accused him of pulling her hair, encouraging the men to accost her, and performing sodomy on her. Tupac was charged with rape. Columbia Pictures forced John Singleton to drop him from the cast of Higher Learning. In March of 1994, he was sentenced to 15 days in jail for punching out director Alan Hughes.
His legal bills mounted. His shows got cancelled. The negative press grew. On November 30th, 1994, Tupac was recording at Quad Studios in Times Square.
He needed money to pay his lawyers and support his family, so he agreed to record a song for Little Shawn’s upcoming album. He took a call from an acquaintance named Booker, a man he didn’t quite trust, but the offer was seven thousand dollars. He walked into the building with his close friend Stretch, his manager Freddie Moore, and one other friend. He noticed two men in fatigues who ignored him.
He assumed they were security for the Notorious B. I. G. , who he was still friendly with at the time.
By the time he turned around, he was staring at two identical 9-millimeter guns. The gunmen forced them to the floor. They focused on Tupac. He froze and refused to remove his jewelry, so one of the men searched him, took forty thousand dollars in jewelry, and stuck the gun into Pac’s stomach and pulled the trigger.
Tupac took five shots. One bullet passed through the skin of his testicles. Another grazed his head. His entourage dragged him onto an elevator and took him upstairs.
There, he found Biggie, Puffy, and Little Caesar, all wearing more jewelry than he did. None of them seemed surprised to see that he’d been shot. “Oh shit,” he said, “roll me some weed. ”
He realized in that moment that the men in the room had set him up.
Their shock was only surprise that he’d survived his own intended murder. He checked himself out of the hospital less than three hours after surgery and took shelter at a safe house. The case was never solved. Days later, he showed up for his verdict in the rape trial, determined not to look like he was skipping court.
The jury acquitted him of sodomy and weapons charges but found him guilty of sexual abuse. On February 14th, 1995, he was sentenced to four and a half years in prison and sent to Rikers Island. His album Me Against the World was released while he was locked up, making him the only artist ever to have a number-one album while serving a prison sentence. The track Dear Mama, a tribute to his mother, became his most beloved song.
In prison, Tupac read Niccolò Machiavelli. He wrote a screenplay called Live to Tell. He married his girlfriend, Keisha Morris, even though he later admitted it was a mistake. In an interview, he said the first two days of prison were the hardest.
Coming off the weed, he didn’t know himself. “It was like there were two people in the room,” he said, “evil and good. ” He did a thousand push-ups a day. He read whole books in a day.
He came to see his situation clearly. “I had a job to do and I never showed up. I was so scared of this responsibility that I was running away from it. ”
He also publicly implicated Biggie, Puffy, Andre Harrell, and his close friend Stretch in the Quad Studios ambush.
His friend Stretch was found murdered, execution-style, on the one-year anniversary of the shooting. Meanwhile, the East Coast–West Coast hip-hop rivalry was boiling over. When Tupac got out of prison on bond—engineered by Death Row Records’ Suge Knight for $1. 4 million—he went straight to the studio.
He suggested he’d been sleeping with Biggie’s wife, Faith Evans. She denied it. In February of 1996, he released All Eyez on Me, the first hip-hop double album. It topped both the R&B and pop charts and sold five million copies.
California Love, produced by Dr. Dre, was everywhere. The feud escalated. Tupac released Hit ‘Em Up, a blistering diss track aimed at Biggie, Bad Boy Records, and anyone else who had crossed him.
September 7th, 1996. Tupac attended the Mike Tyson fight at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. As he was leaving, he got into an altercation with an unidentified man. Security broke it up and let the man go.
Nobody got his name. That same night, Tupac was riding in Suge Knight’s car when a white Cadillac pulled up. Someone inside opened fire. Four bullets hit Tupac in the chest.
He underwent surgery that included the removal of his right lung. He spent six days in critical condition. At 4:03 p. m.
on September 13th, 1996, Tupac Amaru Shakur died. He was 25 years old. His mother had always feared this day. “I never believed he would live to adulthood,” she said.
“Every five years, I’d be amazed that he made it to five, made it to ten, made it to fifteen. I had a million miscarriages. This child stayed in my womb through the worst possible conditions. He really fought for his life.
”
After his death, a flood of unreleased work appeared. Three films came out. The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory was released under the alias Makaveli, topping the charts and spawning a thousand conspiracy theories. Fans found clues in his lyrics, pointing to Cuba, where his aunt Assata still lived.
His murder was never solved. Six months later, Biggie Smalls was gunned down in Los Angeles. Tupac’s half-brother Gaddafi, who was said to be willing to testify about Tupac’s murder, was found dead, execution-style, slumped against a wall in a New Jersey apartment building. He was 19 years old.
Tupac’s professional recording career spanned just five years. His posthumous albums sold millions. In 2002, Forbes ranked him the tenth richest deceased celebrity. Afeni Shakur sued Death Row Records for mismanagement of his royalties and won.
She published his poetry in the book The Rose That Grew from Concrete. She opened the Tupac Amaru Shakur Center for the Arts in Georgia, a $4 million facility mentoring high-risk youth. Tupac once said, “It always happens that all the niggas that change the world die violently. ”
He was someone who proudly stood up for his beliefs.
Like the rose that grew from concrete, he came up from impossible circumstances and inspired millions. In his own words: “In the event of my demise, when my heart can beat no more. I hope I die for a principle or a belief that I have lived for. I will die before my time because I feel the shadow’s depth.
So much I wanted to accomplish before I reached my death. I have come to grips with the possibility and wiped the last tear from my eyes. I loved all who were positive.
”
