Afeni Shakur

Born on Jan. 10, 1947 in Lumberton, NC, Afeni Shakur was a socialist, revolutionary thinker and activist who fought for Black liberation and was a prominent member of the Black Panther Party, as well as the mother to rapper and actor Tupac. Writing for the Black Panther Party’s newsletter, Panther Post, Shakur also headed a successful campaign that led the FBI to believe the party was fading, led a section of the Harlem chapter, as well as worked as a mentor to new members. 

In 1958, Shakur moved to the Bronx with her mother and sister and attended Bronx High School of Science. Becoming interested in street life, she found kinship with the Disciple Debs in Harlem. Shakur then found another outlet for the community after hearing Black Panther Chairman Bobby Seale speak on a street corner in 1968. 

She joined the Panthers and then later that year married Lumumba Shakur in Nov. of 1968, converting to Islam as well as changing her name from Alice to Afeni, a Yoruba word meaning “lover of people”. In 1971, Shakur and Lumumba’s marriage began to fall apart when it was revealed that her son Lesane Parish Crooks (born on June 16, 1971, and who she renamed Tupac Amaru Shakur when he was a year old) was not Lumumba’s child, but rather the son of Bill Garland, who was also a Panther.  

Shakur was a vital member of the Panthers, waking up at 5 a.m. to help make the food for the free breakfast program for children, and then after heading out to do work on the ground. 

In Jan. 1969, a bomb exploded in a police station in the Bronx, and police targeted an associate of Shakur’s 19 year old, Joan Bird, as a suspect for being in a car across the street. On April 2, Shakur, Lumumba, and 19 other Black Panthers were arrested in mass raids across the city and charged with 196 felonies that had to do with the explosion at the police station and other conspiracies to blow up other stations. Shakur’s charge was 312 years in jail for her role, and she was sent to the Women’s House of Detention for almost a year before the $100,000 bail was raised by her supporters and she was released. 

In Feb. 1971, Shakur was pregnant with Tupac, and called back to court. She was forced to go back to prison, despite her pleas that the conditions were inhumane and not fit for a pregnant woman. She was later bailed out again by her supporters. 

When her trial came, Shakur represented herself and gave a passionate speech that would sway the jury during the closing arguments, as they took less than two hours to deliberate. 156 not-guilty verdicts were called, acquitting The Panther 21. Cheers of “Power to the people!” were heard throughout the courthouse. 

Following her acquittal, Shakur didn’t return to the Panthers. In 1975, Shakur married Black Liberation Army member Mutulu Shakur, brother of Assata Shakur. Shakur and Mutulu had a daughter, Sekyiwa, though they got divorced in 1982. Shakur then moved to Baltimore, Maryland in 1984, where she raised her children. 

Tupac, whose stage name was 2Pac, released a song called “Dear Mama” as a tribute to Shakur in 1995. Shakur’s revolutionary ideas, along with Assata Shakur and Fred Hampton, were influential in Tupac’s beliefs and music as he told BET in a 1992 interview that the three of them were his childhood role models. In 1996, her son Tupac was assassinated. Prior to his death, he had arranged for his mother to receive $16,000 a month and bought a house for her in Georgia. On the one-year anniversary of his death, Shakur founded the Tupac Amaru Shakur Foundation to provide art programs for young people, as well as a holding company for all his unreleased music called Amaru Entertainment. 

Her biography, Afeni Shakur: Evolution of a Revolutionary, was released in 2004, and in the same year she married Gust Davis Jr. Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, Shakur made several guest appearances, delivering speeches and lectures, including the keynote address for Vanderbilt University’s Commemoration for Black History Month. On May 2, 2016, Shakur passed away at 69 years old at a hospital in Greenbrae, California after going into cardiac arrest earlier in the evening.