Afeni Shakur: A Black Rose
Over the years there have been many strong women that have contributed to the success and the evolvement of African American culture. Afeni Shakur was one of those women. Born on January 10, 1947, her birth name was Alice Faye Williams. She was born in a small town called Lumberton in North Carolina. Afeni Shakur was well known for being an American music businesswoman, a political activist, and a Black Panther. She was also very well known as the mother of one of the greatest rappers of all time, Tupac Shakur.
The daughter of Rosa Belle, a homemaker, and Walter Williams, Jr., a trucker, Afeni Shakur and her sister, Gloria Jean, had a rough upbringing. It has been told that Afeni’s mom and dad had reoccurring domestic disputes with each other. In 1958, Shakur, her mother, and sister moved to New York City to get away from her father. Shakur went to the Bronx High School of Science. As a result of growing up in a household where she saw her father beating on her mother, Shakur began using drugs like cocaine when she was about fifteen years old, and struggled with drug addiction for most of her life.
Shakur became a member of the emerging Black Panther movement in 1964. She was influenced to change the direction of her life after meeting an associate of Malcolm X who was recruiting some of the black youth in the Bronx. Shakur began to write articles for the Black Panther party’s newsletter, the Panther Post, and was successful in crafting a misdirection campaign that led FBI agents to believe that the Panther Party was slowly becoming a thing of the past. In actuality, it made it easier for the Black Panther movement to organize and carry out orders under the radar. In 1968 Shakur moved in with another Panther who went by the name of Lumumba Abdul Shakur. She soon after switched her name to Afeni Shakur.
Shakur, along with twenty other Panthers was arrested on April 2, 1969. They were all charged with several counts of conspiracy to bomb police stations, several department stores, and other important landmarks throughout the state of New York. Shakur was let out on bail in the fall of 1970, and became pregnant by a New Jersey truck driver named William Garland. Shortly thereafter, Shakur’s bail was revoked and she had to go back to jail to await her trial.
Shakur and the other defendants went to trial in 1971, in what came to be famously known as the Panther 21 trial. Even today, this memorable time in black history is often brought up and referenced to in different college courses throughout the world. Shakur defended herself, despite objections from her codefendants. The case went on for more than five months, and Shakur was largely responsible for overcoming the prosecution’s case, according to an account of the trial in the book “The Briar Patch”, by former lawyer Murray Kempton. In her cross-examination of then undercover detective Ralph White, Shakur performed like a veteran attorney and won her freedom in May of 1971. On June 16, 1971, Shakur gave birth to her son, whom she reportedly named Lesane Parish Crooks, but she later changed it to Tupac Amaru Shakur. His name was derived from the Inca words meaning “shining serpent.”
In an attempt to get her life together, Shakur took a job as a paralegal working for a man named Richard Fischbein in the Bronx. She married a man by the name of Mutulu Shakur. Mutulu acted as a stepfather to her son and became the father of Shakur’s daughter, Sekyiwa. Mutulu Shakur treated Tupac as his son even after his relationship with Afeni Shakur came to an end in 1982. Mutulu Shakur was an activist in the New Afrika independence movement of the 1960s and later became a prominent drug-detoxification and acupuncture specialist in New York City.
Shakur became addicted to crack cocaine in the early 1980s. She was unable to maintain a job and had to resort to using welfare payments to care for her children. Shakur moved her family to Marin County, California, in 1988 in an attempt to leave her drug use in the past.
Shakur’s son Tupac left in 1989 because of his mothers abundant drug use and had no contact with his mother or sister for a few years. He started performing as a dancer and “hype man” with the award winning rap group Digital Underground, and in 1991 released the album 2Pacalypse Now, which became a major success and launched the young musician into stardom. Afeni Shakur returned to New York City in 1991 and started attending Narcotics Anonymous classes. She was able to overcome her drug addiction that spring. Not too long after she reconciled with her son and never looked back.
Exactly one year following her son’s death, with the money made from Tupac’s monumental albums, Afeni founded the Georgia-based Tupac Amaru Shakur Foundation. The program provides art programs for young people. It features a day camp for children, provides scholarships and grants for young aspiring artists, and hosts charitable events. She had also launched a fashion clothing line called Makaveli Branded. All the proceeds have been going to Tupac’s charity, the Tupac Amaru Shakur Foundation.
In 1997 Afeni Shakur created Amaru Entertainment. The company was put together to handle the release of her son’s acclaimed material beginning with The Don Killuminati in 1997 and followed by eight additional albums, a licensed film biography, and several books about Tupac’s life. She established the Makaveli Branded clothing line in 2003, with a portion of the proceeds used to support expansion of the Tupac Shakur Center for the Arts in Stone Mountain, Georgia. In 2006 she added a six-acre memorial park to the complex, with areas for meditation, pavilions for visitors, and a seven-foot statue of Tupac.
Shakur traveled all over the country, making guest appearances and delivering lectures at various colleges and events. In 2007 Shakur signed an agreement with EverGreen Copyrights to put out a number of new albums, including remixes of Tupac Shakur’s most successful hits and, potentially, a Broadway show from a script entitled “Live 2 Tell” written by Tupac Shakur. On February 6, 2007, she gave the Keynote Address for Vanderbilt University’s Commemoration for Black History Month.
Afeni Shakur passed away on May 2, 2016 which was a Monday at her home in Northern California. She was 69. Marin County sheriff’s deputies and firefighters responded to Shakur’s houseboat in Sausalito, Calif., Monday night after she fell ill and suffered an alleged heart attack. A family member and a close friend were there with her when she became unresponsive, cops said. “At this point, there is nothing to indicate to us that there was any foul play, nothing suspicious about this other than this being sadly a natural event,” Marin County Sheriff’s Lt. Doug Pittman stated.
Shakur’s life covered a cross section of African-American history from her days in the segregated South, through the civil rights revolution of the 1960s, to the violent street culture associated with rap music during the 1990s. She will be missed, and hopefully her message and life will transcend throughout the times to come.
by Tamoya Daum
