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Lifestyle of a Rapper The Life of Tupac Shakur

Lifestyle of a Rapper: The Life of Tupac Shakur

Tupac has always been the person who's made up the game-always," says Afeni Shakur, Tupac's 47-year-old mother, a week after his New York arraignment and a day after a hearing in Atlanta. A tiny, dark-complexioned woman with close-cropped hair and deeply etched dimples, Afeni lives in a modest apartment in Decatur, Georgia, an Atlanta suburb, and speaks with an urgency that, she says, comes from her lifelong political activism. "He would have make-believe singing groups," she continues, "and he would be Prince, or Ralph in New Edition. He was always the lead." But life wasn't quite that simple for Tupac Amaru Shakur.

Named after an Inca chief, Tupac Amaru means "shining serpent," referring to wisdom and courage. Shakur is Arabic for "thankful to God." Although he was shaped by many of the problems of inner-city youths growing up in post-civil-rights America-poverty, fatherlessness, constant relocation-Tupac's story began even before he was born. Afeni Shakur (born Alice Faye Williams in North Carolina), was "like everyone else in the early '60s and watched the civil rights movement on television." A member of the notorious Disciples gang as a teenager, Afeni points to two primary factors that channeled her frustrations in a political direction: The historic Ocean Hill-Brownsville, Brooklyn, parent-student strike (where her nephew was a student) in 1968, and the formation of the Black Panther Party in New York City. Founded in 1966 in Oakland by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, the Panthers quickly grew into a radical wing of the civil rights movement, with support in the hardcore ghettos as well as white patronage from the likes of Jane Fonda and Leonard Bernstein. Best known for their militant display of guns and insurgent tactics, which earned them FBI surveillance and raids, the Panthers were also a community-based organization that provided free breakfast for children and free health clinics in black neighborhoods across the nation.

Afeni joined in September 1968. In April 1969 she and 20 other members of the New York Panthers were arrested and charged with numerous felonies, including conspiracy to bomb several public areas in New York City. The case dragged on for 25 months. While out on bail, Afeni courted two men-Legs, a straight-up gangster ("He sold drugs, he did whatever he needed to make money"), and Billy, a member of the Party. She had previously been married to Lumumba...

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