The story of Tupac Shakur

Born into the struggle

Tupac Shakur's story begins before he was born, inside a New York courtroom. His mother, Alice Faye Williams, grew up in Lumberton, North Carolina, and the South Bronx. After hearing Bobby Seale speak, she joined the Black Panther Party in Harlem in 1968, married a Panther named Lumumba Shakur and took the name Afeni Shakur. In April 1969 she and twenty other Panthers were arrested and accused of plotting to bomb police stations and public places. The case became known as the Panther 21. Afeni chose to represent herself, cross examining witnesses, including an undercover police officer who had infiltrated the party. In May 1971, after an eight month trial, all of them were acquitted. Afeni was pregnant the whole time.[1] [2] [3]

A month later, on the sixteenth of June 1971, she gave birth to a son in East Harlem. His birth certificate did not say Tupac. It said Parish Lesane Crooks. Afeni wanted to keep him clear of the Panthers' name, so she borrowed the surname of a friend and former cellmate, Carol Crooks. She soon renamed him Tupac Amaru Shakur, after Tupac Amaru the Second, a descendant of the last Inca ruler, who led a revolt against Spanish rule and was executed in Peru in 1781. Afeni said she wanted him to carry the name of revolutionary indigenous people, so he would know he belonged to a world culture and not just a neighborhood. His biological father was Billy Garland, whom he barely knew growing up.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The adults around the boy were a who's who of Black radical politics. His godfather was the Panther leader Geronimo Pratt, who spent twenty seven years in prison for a murder he insisted he did not commit, until a judge freed him in 1997. His godmother was Assata Shakur. In 1975 Afeni married Mutulu Shakur, an activist and acupuncturist, and they had a daughter, Tupac's sister Sekyiwa. Mutulu was later convicted over the 1981 Brink's armored car robbery in Nanuet, New York, in which a guard and two police officers were killed, and prosecutors called him its ringleader. He went on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list, was caught in 1986 and sentenced to sixty years. The family moved between the Bronx, Harlem and, at times, homeless shelters.[1] [2] [3]

Politics seeped into Tupac's earliest writing. At around eleven years old he wrote a set of handwritten poems dedicated to the former Panther Jamal Joseph and other members who were imprisoned at Leavenworth. The poems dealt with Black liberation, prison and what it meant to be a man, and they came with a small self portrait of the boy asleep with a pen in his hand, dreaming of the Panthers being freed. He signed it Tupac Shakur, Future Freedom Fighter. Life at home was getting harder, though. Afeni divorced Mutulu in 1982, struggled to find work, and in the early 1980s she began using crack cocaine. In 1984, looking for a fresh start, she moved Tupac and Sekyiwa to Baltimore.[1] [2] [3]

Baltimore stage, Marin City streets

In 1984 a thirteen year old Tupac arrived in Baltimore and settled with his mother and sister in a small first floor apartment at 3955 Greenmount Avenue, in the Pen Lucy neighborhood. He went to Roland Park Middle School, then spent ninth grade at Paul Laurence Dunbar High. But he had heard about a public arts school downtown, and in 1986 he walked into an audition at the Baltimore School for the Arts performing a character from A Raisin in the Sun, the play that had first sparked his love of acting. Donald Hicken, the head of the theater department, said the staff saw right away that he had a special gift, with real empathy and vulnerability. He was in.[1] [2] [3]

The Baltimore School for the Arts opened a whole new world. Tupac studied acting, poetry, jazz and ballet. He played the Mouse King in The Nutcracker, performed Shakespeare, and later said he saw the gang wars of his own streets in plays like Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth. He listened to Kate Bush, Culture Club, Sinead O'Connor and U2. Around school he was known as MC New York, and he battled other students in an alley near the building, sometimes with a young acting student named Jada Pinkett, who became one of his closest friends for life. He also won competitions for the school's best rapper, with his friend Dana Smith, known as Mouse, as his beatboxer.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Behind the popular, funny kid, home life was falling apart. Bills went unpaid, his mother's addiction worsened and he often slept at friends' houses. To bring in money he bussed tables and washed dishes at a restaurant at the Inner Harbor, working nights and weekends. In 1988, near the end of his junior year, he cried in Donald Hicken's office as he explained that the family was moving to California. Hicken offered to find a host family so he could finish his senior year, but Tupac said no. With his father absent, he told his teacher, he was the man of the house and needed to be there for his sister.[1] [2]

The move took him to Marin City, a poor community in the San Francisco Bay Area. He attended nearby Tamalpais High School in Mill Valley and acted in several school productions, but he never graduated, earning a GED later. Afeni's addiction came with them to California. According to accounts of their relationship, she threw him out when he was seventeen, and for years they barely spoke. He moved into an empty apartment with friends and poured his energy into poetry and rap lyrics. It was a painful rupture, but it would later become the raw material for one of the most loved songs he ever wrote.[1] [2] [3]

The roadie who became a star

In 1989 Tupac joined a poetry class run by Leila Steinberg, a Bay Area teacher and hip hop promoter. She thought his poems were important, and he told her flatly that she was now his manager. Steinberg staged a concert for his group Strictly Dope and got a tape to her friend Atron Gregory, who managed the Oakland funk rap band Digital Underground. Their leader, Gregory Jacobs, better known as Shock G, remembered Tupac standing over the mixing desk asking if he should rap right there and then. Shock liked how clearly every word came through. Band co founder Chopmaster J worked on early recordings with him, and later said Tupac was on a mission from the very first day.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Gregory shopped a demo that included the future single Trapped to almost every label, and nobody bit. One executive said he sounded too much like Ice Cube. After a year of waiting, Tupac was ready to quit music and take up a political post with a group called the New Afrikan Panthers. To keep him around, Digital Underground offered him a job as a roadie and backup dancer. Shock G felt awkward asking, but Tupac called back within minutes and said yes. From 1990 he set up stages, loaded turntables and danced on tours with Big Daddy Kane, Heavy D and Public Enemy. Shock said nothing ever got lost on Tupac's watch.[1] [2] [3]

The tours taught him a lot, and showed his temper. On the very first day of his first tour he tried to punch the soundman. On the Public Enemy tour, when Chuck D's jacket went missing in Oklahoma City, Tupac chased a suspect through a hotel lobby, though the man probably had not taken it. That same tour brought tragedy. A dancer with Heavy D known as Trouble T Roy died after a fall in Indianapolis, and Tupac reportedly saw it happen. At after parties he would freestyle for hours while Shock G played piano, and the band came to see him as their secret weapon in rap battles.[1]

Tupac made his recorded debut, under the name 2Pac, on Digital Underground's single Same Song in January 1991. The song was used in the Dan Aykroyd comedy Nothing but Trouble, and the band appeared in the film, giving Tupac his first screen role. In the video he played an African king. In August 1991 Tom Whalley of Interscope Records heard his demo and signed him two days later. That October, two Oakland police officers stopped him for jaywalking downtown. Tupac said they choked him and slammed his head into the pavement. He sued for ten million dollars and the case was settled for around forty three thousand.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Breakthrough and backlash

On the twelfth of November 1991 Interscope released 2Pacalypse Now, produced largely by Digital Underground's team. Songs like Trapped and Brenda's Got a Baby took on police brutality, poverty and teenage pregnancy. Tupac wrote Brenda's Got a Baby while filming his first movie, after reading a newspaper story about a twelve year old girl who became pregnant and abandoned her baby. Then, in 1992, a young man in Texas named Ronald Ray Howard shot dead a state trooper, and his lawyer claimed the album had influenced him. Vice President Dan Quayle said the record had no place in American society. Tupac said he had only wanted to rap about things affecting young Black men, not become the media's punching bag.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Hollywood noticed him fast. Tupac went along to an audition for the film Juice to support his friend Money B of Digital Underground, asked to read himself, was given fifteen minutes to prepare and won the part. As Roland Bishop, a Harlem teenager who becomes addicted to the thrill of violence, he stole the film when it came out in January 1992. Rolling Stone's Peter Travers called him its most magnetic figure. The director John Singleton saw Tupac in a television interview and decided he had to work with him, casting him opposite Janet Jackson in Poetic Justice, released in July 1993, which opened at number one at the box office.[1] [2] [3] [4]

His life was already turning violent. On the twenty second of August 1992, after an outdoor festival in Marin City, a fight broke out around Tupac. He said a gun he was legally carrying fell to the ground and went off when someone with him picked it up. About a hundred yards away, a six year old boy named Qa'id Walker Teal was riding his bicycle in a schoolyard. He was shot in the head and killed. Police matched the bullet to a pistol registered to Tupac. His stepbrother Maurice Harding was arrested, but no charges were filed. In 1995 the boy's mother sued Tupac for wrongful death, and the case was settled.[1]

In February 1993 came his second album, the one fans simply call Strictly. Its title is an acronym he said stood for Never Ignorant, Getting Goals Accomplished. It was his breakthrough. I Get Around, with Shock G and Money B, reached number eleven on the Billboard Hot 100, and Keep Ya Head Up, a tender tribute to Black women dedicated to the memory of Latasha Harlins, reached number twelve. The album went platinum. The journalist Kevin Powell later said the record was Tupac in full, half serious social commentary and half the thug persona he was growing into. Singleton called it the first real Tupac album.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The trouble kept coming. In 1993 the Hughes brothers fired him from Menace II Society after he attacked director Allen Hughes on set, and he later served fifteen days in jail for it. In April 1993 he was charged after a concert at Michigan State University, where he was accused of swinging a baseball bat at another rapper, and he later pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor. Then, on Halloween night 1993 in Atlanta, he was arrested for shooting two off duty police officers, the brothers Mark and Scott Whitwell, after a street confrontation. Accounts of who fired first clashed, and prosecutors eventually dropped all charges on both sides.[1] [2]

Thug Life, a trial and five bullets

Tupac had begun building his own world. In 1992 he formed the group Thug Life with his friend Randy Walker, known as Stretch, the rapper Big Syke, and his stepbrother Mopreme. He explained the name as an acronym about hatred given to children coming back to hurt everyone. With his stepfather Mutulu he also drew up a Code of Thug Life, a set of street rules that banned selling drugs to children and pregnant women and declared schools and concerts neutral ground. It was presented at a gang truce gathering in California. In 1994 he played the drug dealer Birdie in the basketball film Above the Rim, and in September Thug Life released its only album.[1] [2] [3]

Around this time a young Brooklyn rapper asked a mutual acquaintance to introduce him to Tupac in Los Angeles. He was Christopher Wallace, the Notorious B.I.G. They quickly became friends. When Tupac played New York he would call Biggie up on stage to rap with him and Stretch, and Biggie stayed at Tupac's home when he visited California. Biggie reportedly even asked Tupac to manage him, and Tupac told him Sean Combs would make him a star. Tupac was also briefly dating Madonna, something both kept quiet at the time. She said years later that he had wound her up before her notorious 1994 appearance on David Letterman.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In November 1993 Tupac and two other men were charged in New York with sexually assaulting a nineteen year old woman, Ayanna Jackson, in his hotel room. She said Tupac, the music figure Jacques Agnant, known as Haitian Jack, Tupac's road manager and another man forced her into sex acts. Tupac denied it and said he was hurt that a woman would accuse him, having been raised among women. On the first of December 1994 a jury acquitted him of sodomy and weapons charges but convicted him of two counts of first degree sexual abuse. Jackson later filed a civil suit that was settled. Tupac came to believe Agnant had set him up.[1] [2]

The night before that verdict, on the thirtieth of November 1994, Tupac was offered seven thousand dollars to record a verse at Quad Studios in Times Square. He needed the money for his legal bills, and he went with Stretch. In the lobby three men robbed him at gunpoint. He fought back, was pistol whipped and shot five times. Against medical advice he checked out of hospital a few hours after surgery, and the next day he arrived at court bandaged and in a wheelchair to hear the verdict. He recovered in secret at the home of the actress Jasmine Guy, guarded by members of the Nation of Islam and former Panthers.[1] [2]

Number one from a prison cell

Unable to raise three million dollars bail, Tupac surrendered on the twenty third of December 1994. On the seventh of February 1995 a judge sentenced him to between eighteen months and four and a half years. He was held at Rikers Island, then moved in March to Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, upstate New York. In prison he started reading seriously again. Machiavelli's The Prince and Sun Tzu's The Art of War fascinated him, and the Italian philosopher would soon give him a new name. Letters arrived from unlikely fans, including Tony Danza, whom he had never met. On the twenty ninth of April 1995 he married his girlfriend Keisha Morris inside the prison. The marriage was annulled within a year.[1] [2]

While he sat in a cell, his third album did what nothing else had. Me Against the World came out on the fourteenth of March 1995 and went straight to number one on the Billboard 200, staying there for four weeks and selling two hundred and forty thousand copies in its first week. Tupac became the first artist to top the album chart while serving a prison sentence, and for a spell it outsold Bruce Springsteen's Greatest Hits, which he was proud of. He described it as a blues record, full of his fears and sleepless nights. Critics agreed it was his most personal and reflective work. Many still call it his masterpiece.[1] [2]

The lead single was Dear Mama, released in February 1995. It was a tribute to Afeni that was honest about her crack addiction and about his own teenage mistakes, and full of gratitude for what a poor single mother had done to raise him. By then Afeni had gotten clean, and mother and son had reconciled. When he finished the song, Tupac called Jada Pinkett, whose mother had also struggled with addiction, to play it to her. Dear Mama topped the rap chart for five weeks and reached number nine on the Hot 100. Because he was locked up, the video used a lookalike and earlier footage, with Afeni herself appearing on screen.[1] [2] [3]

Prison also hardened a grudge. In an April 1995 interview with Vibe, Tupac accused Sean Combs, the Notorious B.I.G. and others who had been at Quad Studios of setting him up, or at least knowing about the ambush. They denied it. Biggie's Who Shot Ya, released that February, sounded to Tupac like a taunt, though Biggie's camp said it was written before the shooting. That August, at the Source Awards in New York, Death Row Records boss Marion Suge Knight used his time on stage to mock Combs. Knight had visited Tupac in prison, and when Afeni was about to lose her house, Knight reportedly sent her fifteen thousand dollars.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In October 1995 Knight returned with an offer. Death Row, together with Interscope's Jimmy Iovine, posted a bond of one point four million dollars while Tupac appealed his conviction. In exchange he signed a contract to deliver three albums. On the twelfth of October 1995 he walked out of Clinton, flew to Los Angeles and went straight into the studio. Soon he had fourteen new songs finished. He told the Los Angeles Times he was venting eleven months of anger, and that people would feel everything he had been through. Seven weeks later, on the thirtieth of November, exactly a year after the Quad shooting, his friend Stretch was shot dead in Queens.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

All eyes on Death Row

The first taste of the new Tupac was California Love, released in December 1995. Dr. Dre had originally made the track with his own verses and Roger Troutman's talk box chorus, but Suge Knight pushed for Tupac to take it over as his comeback single. Tupac wrote his verse in about fifteen minutes. Jada Pinkett came up with the video concept, a desert party in the year 2095 inspired by Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, though Hype Williams ended up directing it. The song became both Tupac's and Dre's first number one on the Billboard Hot 100, paired with another chart topper, How Do U Want It.[1] [2] [3]

On the thirteenth of February 1996 Death Row released All Eyez on Me, hip hop's first double album, which counted as two of the three albums he owed the label. It had been called Euthanasia before he renamed it for the feeling that the police, the courts, women, rivals and fans were all watching him. It sold five hundred and sixty six thousand copies in its first week and topped both main album charts. Guests included Dr. Dre, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Method Man, Redman and Nate Dogg. Critics noted that the political edge of his early records had given way to a triumphant, unapologetic gangsta tone. It later became one of the few rap albums certified Diamond.[1] [2] [3]

Death Row was fracturing. Dr. Dre, tired of Knight's violence, left the label on the twenty second of March 1996 to start Aftermath, and Tupac turned on him. Meanwhile the war with Bad Boy Records exploded. In June 1996 Death Row released Hit 'Em Up as a B side. On it Tupac attacked Biggie, Combs and a long list of New York rappers, and claimed he had slept with Biggie's estranged wife, the singer Faith Evans. Producer Johnny J said he had never seen Tupac so angry. Ice T later wrote that he urged Tupac to call Biggie and settle things instead. The song is remembered as the point of no return in the feud.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Offstage Tupac was working at a furious pace and still acting. He made the films Bullet, Gridlock'd and Gang Related, all released after his death. In Gridlock'd he played a heroin addict opposite Tim Roth, and Roger Ebert called it his best performance. In 1996 he began dating Kidada Jones, the daughter of Quincy Jones. He had once insulted her father in an interview and later apologized to her. They lived together for four months. He recorded 2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted with Snoop, and on the fourth of July 1996 he played the House of Blues in Los Angeles. It was his last recorded live show.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In July and August 1996, at Can Am Studios in Tarzana, Tupac made one more album in a rush. He wrote and recorded the vocals in about three days and the mixing took four more, hence the title The Don Killuminati, The 7 Day Theory. Twenty one songs were finished and twelve were used. He took the new name Makaveli, after Machiavelli. The album's cover showed him crucified. Around this time he also made peace with Nas, whom he had attacked on the record. The two met in Bryant Park after the MTV Video Music Awards in early September, and Tupac promised to remove the insults. He never got the chance.[1] [2] [3]

Seven days in Las Vegas

On the seventh of September 1996 Tupac and Suge Knight were in Las Vegas for Mike Tyson's heavyweight fight against Bruce Seldon at the MGM Grand. As they left, a Death Row associate named Trevon Lane spotted Orlando Anderson, a member of the South Side Compton Crips, in the hotel lobby. Two months earlier, Anderson and other Crips had tried to take Lane's Death Row medallion at a shopping mall. Lane told Tupac. Tupac walked up to Anderson, asked where he was from and punched him, and Knight's entourage joined in beating him. Hotel security cameras recorded it. Tupac went back to his hotel, the Luxor, changed, and set off with Knight for Knight's nightclub, Club 662.[1] [2] [3]

Knight drove a black BMW 750, leading a convoy of cars. Around eleven o'clock, police on bicycles pulled them over on Las Vegas Boulevard for loud music and missing license plates, then let them go. At about a quarter past eleven, the BMW stopped at a red light at East Flamingo Road and Koval Lane. Tupac was chatting through the window with women in the next car. A white Cadillac pulled up on the passenger side and someone in the back seat opened fire. Tupac was hit four times, twice in the chest, once in the arm and once in the thigh. Fragments grazed Knight's head. His bodyguard, Frank Alexander, had been asked to drive another car.[1] [2] [3]

With a flat tire, Knight drove about a mile before police stopped them again and called paramedics. A bike patrol officer, Chris Carroll, later said that when he asked Tupac who had shot him, Tupac refused to say and cursed at him instead. At University Medical Center, surgeons removed his damaged right lung. Members of the Outlawz and a Death Row video director guarded his room, afraid the gunmen would come back. Kidada Jones said she played Don McLean's Vincent at his bedside, a song he loved. On the afternoon of the thirteenth of September 1996, with Afeni having decided to stop treatment, Tupac Shakur was pronounced dead at three minutes past four. He was twenty five.[1] [2] [3]

The violence spread. Two days after the shooting, a war broke out in Compton between the South Side Crips and the Mob Piru Bloods, with twelve shootings and three deaths. Police arrested Orlando Anderson in October but released him without charges. Tupac's young protege and Outlawz co founder Yaki Kadafi, who had been in the car behind the BMW and whom police had hoped to question, was shot dead in New Jersey that November. He was nineteen. On the ninth of March 1997, the Notorious B.I.G. was killed in a drive by shooting in Los Angeles. Anderson himself was killed in an unrelated gang shooting in 1998. Knight was sent to prison for violating probation in the MGM fight.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The afterlife of a legend

Tupac's body was cremated the day after he died. Members of the Outlawz later said they mixed some of his ashes with marijuana and smoked them, taking literally a line from one of his songs. On the fifth of November 1996, Death Row released The Don Killuminati under the Makaveli name. It went to number one, selling six hundred and sixty four thousand copies in its first week. Its release, so soon after his death, fed the rumor that he was still alive. In 1997 Afeni founded Amaru Entertainment to control his unreleased recordings, and a foundation for young artists. An enormous vault of music, and a steady stream of albums, followed.[1] [2] [3]

The posthumous releases kept coming, R U Still Down in 1997, then Greatest Hits in 1998, which went Diamond. It included Changes, a 1992 recording built on Bruce Hornsby's The Way It Is, which reached number three in the United Kingdom and topped the charts in Norway and the Netherlands. It became the only posthumous song ever nominated for the Grammy for Best Rap Solo Performance. More albums followed: Still I Rise with the Outlawz, Until the End of Time, Better Dayz, Loyal to the Game and Pac's Life in 2006. In 1999 his poems were published as The Rose That Grew from Concrete, and the book is now taught in schools.[1] [2] [3]

The honors grew with time. The documentary Tupac Resurrection, released in 2003, was nominated for an Academy Award. In 2006 Jada Pinkett Smith gave a million dollars to the Baltimore School for the Arts and named its new theater after him. In 2010 the Library of Congress added Dear Mama to the National Recording Registry, calling it a moving homage to all mothers struggling against addiction and poverty. On the fifteenth of April 2012 Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre performed at Coachella alongside a lifelike projection of Tupac, widely called a hologram. On the seventh of April 2017 he became the first solo rapper inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in his first year of eligibility.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

His family kept the flame, and faced losses of their own. Afeni fought Death Row and later distributors in court for control of her son's music. She died of a cardiac arrest in California on the second of May 2016, aged sixty nine. In 2017 the biopic All Eyez on Me opened on what would have been his forty sixth birthday, to poor reviews. Mutulu Shakur, freed on compassionate parole in December 2022, died of cancer in July 2023. That June, Tupac received the two thousand seven hundred and fifty eighth star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, accepted by Sekyiwa. The same year, the director Allen Hughes, who had once fired him, released the documentary series Dear Mama.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Thirty years to a verdict

For decades the killing went unsolved. Las Vegas police complained that Tupac's entourage would not cooperate, and Suge Knight said he would never tell police even if he knew. In 2002 Chuck Philips of the Los Angeles Times reported that the South Side Crips had carried out the shooting to avenge the MGM beating, and that Orlando Anderson fired the shots. Around 2008, a Los Angeles detective named Greg Kading, investigating Biggie's murder, interviewed Anderson's uncle, a Crips leader named Duane Davis, known as Keffe D. Under an agreement that kept his words from being used against him, Davis denied involvement in Biggie's killing but said his side had done the other one, meaning Tupac.[1] [2] [3]

Then Davis kept talking. In a 2018 television documentary he said he had been in the front passenger seat of the white Cadillac, and in 2019 he published a memoir, Compton Street Legend, describing his role in detail. In recorded police interviews he said he had passed the gun to his nephew in the back seat, who fired. On the eighteenth of July 2023, Las Vegas police searched his wife's home in Henderson, Nevada. On the twenty ninth of September 2023 Davis was arrested and charged with murder. He pleaded not guilty that November. Prosecutors said that without his own book and interviews he would probably never have been charged.[1] [2] [3]

After several delays, the trial opened in Las Vegas in August 2026, nearly thirty years after the shooting. Prosecutors did not claim Davis pulled the trigger. They said he planned the attack as gang retaliation for the beating of his nephew and was the commander on the ground, pointing to recordings of his 2008 interviews, his memoir and his public statements. His lawyer, Michael Sanft, argued that Davis had told stories to avoid a drug sentence and later to make money. Old witnesses from Compton and the Las Vegas police took the stand, some reluctantly. Tupac's stepbrother Mopreme sat in the front row, and his sister Sekyiwa was there for the verdict.[1] [2] [3]

On the thirty first of August 2026, one week short of the thirtieth anniversary of the shooting, the jury deliberated for about three hours and found Duane Davis guilty of first degree murder with a deadly weapon. He is the only person ever charged in the case. He told the judge he planned to appeal, and as of 2026 he is scheduled to be sentenced on the thirteenth of October, facing up to life without parole. The family said they were elated and relieved, and honored Afeni for never giving up. Whoever fired the gun, the man who helped set it all in motion had finally been held to account.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The people around Tupac Shakur

Tupac Shakur and Afeni Shakur. Afeni was a Black Panther who defended herself in court while pregnant with him, and she shaped his politics and his sense of mission. Her crack addiction in the 1980s tore them apart, and she threw him out at seventeen. After she got clean they reconciled, and he honored her in Dear Mama. After his death she ran his estate and his foundation until she died in 2016.[1] [2] [3]

Tupac Shakur and Jada Pinkett Smith. They met as teenagers at the Baltimore School for the Arts and stayed devoted friends for life. He helped her get her first film role, she helped him land a part on A Different World, appeared in his videos, and gave a hundred thousand dollars toward his bail. She said she turned down his marriage proposal while he was on Rikers Island. He called her his heart.[1] [2]

Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G.. They met in 1993 and became close, rapping together on stage and staying at each other's places. After Tupac was shot at Quad Studios in 1994, where Biggie was also recording that night, Tupac accused him of knowing about the ambush. The friendship turned into rap's most bitter feud, climaxing with Hit 'Em Up. Both were shot dead within six months of each other.[1] [2] [3]

Tupac Shakur and Suge Knight. The Death Row boss sent money to Afeni and then posted Tupac's one point four million dollar bond in 1995, in exchange for a three album contract. Knight made him the label's biggest star and fed his feud with Bad Boy. He was driving the BMW when Tupac was shot, and the MGM beating that preceded it landed Knight in prison for violating probation.[1] [2] [3]

Tupac Shakur and Shock G. The Digital Underground leader gave Tupac his first break, hiring him as a roadie and dancer and putting him on Same Song in 1991. Shock co produced his debut album, produced and rapped on I Get Around, and produced So Many Tears. Shock liked to point out that Tupac spent about four years with his crew and only nine months on Death Row. Shock G died in 2021.[1] [2] [3]

Tupac Shakur and Dr. Dre. Dre made California Love, and when Tupac took it over it became the first number one for both of them. But Dre was already uneasy at Death Row and left in March 1996 to found Aftermath. Tupac turned on him, attacking him on the Makaveli album and on Toss It Up, which copied Dre's No Diggity beat until a legal threat forced a change.[1] [2] [3]

Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dogg. The two were Death Row's twin stars in 1996 and recorded 2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted together. After Tupac's death Snoop openly criticized Suge Knight over the murder and left the label in 1998. In 2012 he and Dr. Dre brought a projection of Tupac onto the Coachella stage, and at his 2017 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction Snoop called him the greatest rapper of all time.[1] [2] [3]

Tupac Shakur and Madonna. They dated briefly around 1994 and kept it quiet. In a letter written from prison in January 1995, Tupac apologized to her and suggested that, as a Black rapper, being seen with a white superstar would have hurt his image with fans, while it would only help hers. Madonna fought to stop the letter being auctioned, but a court ruled against her.[1] [2] [3]

Tupac Shakur and Kidada Jones. The daughter of Quincy Jones began dating Tupac in 1996, after he had apologized for insulting her father in an interview. They lived together for about four months and walked a runway together in Milan. She was at their Las Vegas hotel the night he was shot, sat by his hospital bed, and was there when he died.[1] [2] [3]

Tupac Shakur and Mutulu Shakur. His stepfather was a Black nationalist and acupuncturist who married Afeni in 1975. Together, Tupac and Mutulu wrote the Code of Thug Life in 1992. Mutulu spent most of Tupac's life on the run or in prison, sentenced to sixty years over the deadly 1981 Brink's robbery. He was paroled on health grounds in 2022 and died in 2023.[1] [2]

Tupac Shakur and Yaki Kadafi. Yafeu Fula, known as Yaki Kadafi, was Tupac's godbrother and founded the Outlawz with him. Tupac named the crew after famous rulers and revolutionaries, taking the name Makaveli himself. Kadafi rode in the car behind the BMW in Las Vegas and was a key witness police hoped to interview, but he was shot dead in New Jersey in November 1996, aged nineteen.[1] [2]

Tupac Shakur and Nas. Tupac thought lines on Nas's 1996 album were aimed at him and attacked Nas on the Makaveli record. Nas said he was brought to tears, because he idolized Tupac. Days before Las Vegas they met in Bryant Park after the MTV Video Music Awards and made peace, and Tupac promised to cut the insults, but he was shot before he could. Nas later said he put Tupac beyond Shakespeare.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about Tupac Shakur

• Tupac's birth certificate originally named him Parish Lesane Crooks. Afeni wanted to shield him from the Panther name, so she used the surname of her friend Carol Crooks. She later renamed him after Tupac Amaru the Second, the Inca descendant executed by the Spanish in 1781.[1] [2]
• At around eleven he wrote poems for jailed Black Panthers and signed them Future Freedom Fighter. The handwritten poems, dedicated to Jamal Joseph and other Panthers held at Leavenworth, came with a self portrait. They were offered for three hundred thousand dollars in 2022 and sold for ninety thousand.[1]
• At the Baltimore School for the Arts, Tupac danced the Mouse King in The Nutcracker. He studied acting, poetry, jazz and ballet there. His classmates remember him as popular with everyone, and his acting teacher said he could have become one of America's finest film actors.[1] [2]
• Tupac auditioned for the Baltimore School for the Arts as a character from A Raisin in the Sun. It was the play that had first made him fall in love with acting. The theater head, Donald Hicken, said the staff spotted a very special gift immediately.[1]
• As a teenager Tupac listened to Kate Bush, Culture Club, Sinead O'Connor and U2. His musical tastes in Baltimore were far wider than hip hop. He later said the arts school exposed him to things that made him a different person.[1] [2]
• In Baltimore his rap nickname was MC New York. He battled other students in an alley near the school, including Jada Pinkett. He kept using the name when he began recording in California in 1989.[1] [2]
• To help his family, the teenage Tupac bussed tables and washed dishes at a Baltimore restaurant. Friends said he worked many nights and weekends at an Inner Harbor restaurant while at school, and often slept at friends' homes as things fell apart at home.[1]
• Before he was a star, Tupac nearly quit music to join a group called the New Afrikan Panthers. Shock G said Tupac grew tired of waiting for a record deal. Digital Underground offered him a roadie job to keep him, and he accepted within minutes.[1]
• Tupac's first screen appearance was in the Dan Aykroyd comedy Nothing but Trouble in 1991. He appeared with Digital Underground, whose song Same Song, featuring his debut verse, was used in the film.[1] [2] [3]
• He only went to the Juice audition to support his friend Money B, then asked to read himself. He was given fifteen minutes to rehearse and won the role of Roland Bishop, the part that made him a movie star.[1] [2]
• Brenda's Got a Baby was inspired by a real newspaper story Tupac read while filming Juice. The article described a twelve year old girl who became pregnant and abandoned her newborn. The black and white video was directed by the Hughes brothers.[1]
• His second album was first called Black Starry Night, then Troublesome 21. Time Warner rejected that version in 1992 amid political outrage over his lyrics. Several songs, including Keep Ya Head Up and I Get Around, were carried over to the album released in 1993.[1]
• All Eyez on Me was originally going to be called Euthanasia. Tupac mentioned the title in a 1995 prison letter to Chuck D, inviting him to guest on a planned track. He renamed it for the feeling that everyone was watching him.[1] [2]
• Tupac was the first artist to have a number one album while serving a prison sentence. Me Against the World debuted at number one in March 1995 and held the spot for four weeks while he was behind bars in New York.[1] [2]
• Tony Danza wrote to Tupac in prison, even though they had never met. Tupac told the Los Angeles Times it was one of the best letters he received, telling him to keep his head up and come out stronger.[1] [2]
• Tupac said Don McLean's Vincent was the kind of song he wanted to write. He called its lyric deeply touching and said he aimed Dear Mama straight at his friends' hearts. Kidada Jones later played Vincent at his hospital bedside.[1] [2]
• Tupac compared Romeo and Juliet to a love story between a Blood and a Crip. In a 1995 interview he said Shakespeare wrote some of the rawest stories around, and that his theater training influenced all of his work.[1]
• When Tupac was locked up, Coolio, Ice T and others filmed the Temptations video in his place. The 1995 clip featured Salt, Treach, Warren G, B Real, Jasmine Guy and Jada Pinkett as a show of support, with a lookalike standing in for Tupac.[1]
• Jada Pinkett dreamed up the Mad Max style video for California Love. She planned to direct it but withdrew, and Hype Williams took over. It was filmed in the desert at El Mirage, California, in November 1995.[1] [2]
• Dr. Dre first recorded California Love with his own verses, planning it for his new label. Suge Knight heard it and pushed for Tupac to take it over. Tupac wrote his verse in about fifteen minutes.[1]
• DJ Quik is credited on All Eyez on Me under his real name. His contract with Profile Records barred him from using his stage name, even though he produced, mixed and appeared on the album.[1]
• Faith Evans originally sang on a track on All Eyez on Me, but her vocals were replaced. The singer Jewell re recorded her part. Evans was Biggie's estranged wife, and Tupac's claims about her became a flashpoint in the feud.[1] [2]
• The Makaveli album's working title was The 3 Day Theory. Tupac wrote and recorded the vocals in about three days, and mixing took four more. Twenty one songs were finished, and twelve made the album.[1] [2]
• The crucifixion cover of the Makaveli album was painted by an artist Tupac met on a video set. Ronald Brent, known as Riskie, showed Tupac his portfolio on the set of the California Love remix video in Compton, and Tupac asked him to paint his next cover.[1]
• Tupac once planned to open a restaurant with Alanis Morissette, Snoop Dogg and Suge Knight. He announced the plan in April 1996. His circle of celebrity friends also included Mike Tyson, Jim Carrey and Mickey Rourke.[1]
• In November 1996, Interscope held the top four spots on the Billboard album chart. It was the first label in twenty years to do it, with records by Bush, Snoop Dogg, No Doubt and Tupac.[1]
• In 2009 the Vatican added Changes to its online music playlist. The song, recorded in 1992 and released after his death in 1998, remains the only posthumous nominee for the Grammy for Best Rap Solo Performance.[1] [2]
• Dear Mama was only the third rap recording chosen for the National Recording Registry. The Library of Congress added it in 2010, after records by Public Enemy and Grandmaster Flash, praising it as a homage to struggling mothers everywhere.[1] [2]
• In 1997 the University of California, Berkeley, offered a student led course on Tupac's poetry. Harvard later co sponsored a 2003 symposium on him as a modern folk hero, and the University of Oslo ran a Tupac course in 2012.[1]
• Tupac was the first solo rapper inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He went in on the seventh of April 2017, in his first year of eligibility. He was only the sixth hip hop act admitted.[1] [2] [3]
• The Coachella hologram of Tupac in 2012 was not technically a hologram. It was a projection using a technique called Musion Eyeliner. After the show, his Greatest Hits album returned to the Billboard 200.[1]
• Tupac's Walk of Fame star was approved in 2013 but took ten years to arrive. It was unveiled on the seventh of June 2023 as the two thousand seven hundred and fifty eighth star on Hollywood Boulevard.[1]
• A Broadway musical built on Tupac's songs lasted only six weeks. Holler If Ya Hear Me opened in 2014 with Afeni's involvement, but became one of Broadway's worst selling musicals of recent years.[1] [2]
• Afeni Shakur was one of the first women to carry mail in New York. Before joining the Black Panthers she briefly worked as a mail carrier. She had also won a school journalism prize as a teenager in the Bronx.[1]
• The late rapper Juice WRLD took his name from Tupac's first film, Juice. The 1992 thriller was also the first film role for Omar Epps and Khalil Kain.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.