Jada Pinkett Smith and Tupac’s Friendship However, Sekiya’s father, Mutulu Shakur, did not stick around, either. "I felt I needed a daddy to show me the ropes and I didn't have one."Īfeni gave birth to a daughter, Sekiya, two years after Tupac. "I thought my father was dead all my life," he told the writer Kevin Powell during an interview with Vibe magazine in 1996. The rapper would not see his father again until he was 23. Tupac's father, Billy Garland, was also a Panther but lost contact with Afeni when Tupac was five years old. She changed her name to Afeni Shakur after becoming actively involved with the Black Panther Party. Afeni was acquitted the following year after successfully defending herself in court, displaying a gift for oration that her son would inherit. She became pregnant with Tupac in 1970 while on bail after being charged with conspiring to set off a race war. Tupac’s mother, Alice Faye Williams, was the daughter of a North Carolina maid and a high-school dropout. Tupac later took his surname from his sister’s Sekiya's father, another Panther called Mutulu Shakur.
After joining the Black Panther party, his mother changed his first name to Tupac Amaru, a Peruvian revolutionary who was killed by the Spanish. Tupac was named Lesane Parish Crooks at birth. They moved to Baltimore, where Tupac enrolled at the prestigious Baltimore School for the Arts, at which he felt "the freest I ever felt." Tupac’s Mom, Father and Sister The family moved homes often, sometimes staying in shelters. His mother, Afeni, was raising two children on her own and struggled for money. Tupac was born on June 16, 1971, in Harlem, New York. As fate drove him towards the nihilism of gangsta rap, and into the arms of the controversial Death Row Records impresario Suge Knight, the boundaries between Shakur's art and his life became increasingly blurred - with tragic consequences. In life, his biggest battle was sometimes with himself. His skill in doing so made him a spokesperson not just for his own generation but for subsequent ones who continue to face the same struggle for equality. Tupac began his music career as a rebel with a cause to articulate the travails and injustices endured by many African Americans.
He has sold 75 million albums to date, making him one of the top-selling artists of all time.Ī sensitive, precociously talented and troubled soul, Tupac was gunned down in Las Vegas on Septemand died six days later. Tupac Shakur was an American rapper and actor who came to embody the 1990s gangsta-rap aesthetic, and who in death became an icon symbolizing noble struggle.
0 kommentar(er)
