Tupac
Amaru
Shakur

A little over a month later, on June 16, 1971, Afeni's son was born in East Harlem.Birth The often-repeated claim that he was born in Brooklyn is wrong. On the birth certificate Afeni entered the name Lesane Parish Crooks (listed there as "Parish Lesane Crooks"). She borrowed the surname from her friend and former cellmate Carol Crooks. The idea was that the child should not be instantly recognizable as a "Panther baby."

About a year later the boy received the name the world knows: Tupac Amaru Shakur, after the Peruvian rebel Túpac Amaru II, whom the Spanish colonial authorities had executed in 1781. Afeni later explained that she wanted to give him the name of revolutionary, indigenous people. He was to know that he belonged to a world culture and not just to one neighborhood. Where his other names came from is covered on the page Names and aliases.

Afeni's marriage to Lumumba fell apart soon after the birth. Billy Garland played no part in Tupac's childhood, and for years Tupac believed his biological father was dead.

Later in 1984 Afeni moved with Tupac and Sekyiwa to Baltimore, into a ground-floor apartment at 3955 Greenmount Avenue in the Pen Lucy neighborhood. Tupac was 13 and in eighth grade at Roland Park Middle School. On the school bus he met the beatboxer Dana "Mouse" Smith, and the two wrote rhymes every afternoon. In November 1985 they won a rap contest held by the Enoch Pratt Free Library. Tupac's handwritten "Library Rap" is now in the library's special collections.

After a year at Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, Tupac auditioned for the Baltimore School for the Arts and was accepted as a theater student. He later called his two years there, roughly 1986 to 1988, a happy time. He performed Shakespeare, studied Ibsen and Sam Shepard, took ballet and danced the Mouse King in The Nutcracker. His teacher Donald Hicken remembered an unusually charismatic student who spent his lunch breaks reading in the library.

This is where he met Jada Pinkett. Their friendship lasted until his death, and he wrote poems for her, including Jada. With friends he formed the group Born Busy, whose tapes are considered his first recordings; on the mic he went by MC New York. In 2006 Jada Pinkett Smith gave the school $1 million, and its new theater was named after Tupac.

In 1990 Atron Gregory brought him into Digital Underground, the playful Oakland funk-rap crew led by Shock G, as a roadie and dancer. On tour with Public Enemy he became friends with Treach of Naughty by Nature.

He did not stay in the background for long. In January 1991 the single Same Song came out, and on it a rapper called 2Pac was heard for the first time. The song was featured in the film Nothing But Trouble, in which Digital Underground made a cameo: Tupac's first moment on screen. Through the group he also met the Queens rapper Randy "Stretch" Walker, with whom he would often perform over the next few years.

Soon he had a deal of his own. Through Gregory's company Tupac landed at Interscope Records, a young Los Angeles label that handled his releases until his move to Death Row.

His film career began at the same time, almost by accident. Tupac tagged along with bandmate Money-B to an audition and asked to read himself. He won the part of Roland Bishop in Juice, released on January 17, 1992. Bishop, a Harlem teenager who spins out of control after a robbery, was the strongest character in the film. In Rolling Stone, Peter Travers called him its most magnetic presence.

In 1993 he played the mail carrier Lucky opposite Janet Jackson in John Singleton's Poetic Justice, and in 1994 the gangster Birdie in Above the Rim. Other roles slipped away. He was dropped from Menace II Society after assaulting director Allen Hughes, and cut from Singleton's Higher Learning after an arrest because the studio would not back him.

Musically he followed up in February 1993. Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z. entered the chart at No. 24, went platinum and included I Get Around and Keep Ya Head Up, an anthem to the dignity of women. Tupac read the title as "Never Ignorant, Getting Goals Accomplished."

THUG LIFE took shape around the same time, political at its root: an indictment of a society that abandons its children. In 1992 Tupac had the two words tattooed across his stomach. With Mutulu Shakur he wrote a code of conduct for the street, and he founded a group of the same name, whose only album, Thug Life: Volume 1, came out in September 1994.

In 1993, in Los Angeles, he met a young Brooklyn rapper named Christopher Wallace, soon to be known as The Notorious B.I.G. They became friends and visited each other in New York and Los Angeles, and Tupac brought Biggie on stage at his own shows. The friendship broke apart after the 1994 robbery.

Shortly after midnight on November 30, 1994, while the jury was still deliberating, Tupac went to Quad Recording Studios in Times Square to record a verse for another artist. In the lobby three armed men robbed him. He fought back, was beaten and shot, and lost jewelry worth around $40,000. He himself said he had been hit five times.

After emergency surgery he checked himself out of the hospital against medical advice. The next day he sat in court in a wheelchair, bandaged. He spent the following weeks recovering at actress Jasmine Guy's home, guarded by the Fruit of Islam and former Panthers. After the shooting Billy Garland got back in touch, and father and son saw each other for the first time since Tupac was a small child.

Tupac was convinced he had been set up. He suspected people from the Bad Boy camp who were in the building that night; they denied it. In 2011 a man imprisoned in New York claimed to have been one of the robbers. The robbery never came before a court. The full story is on the 1994 shooting page.

Legal bills had drained him, and Afeni was about to lose her house. Through Keisha Morris, contact was made with Suge Knight, head of Death Row Records in Los Angeles, the label of Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg. Knight visited Tupac in Dannemora. On October 12, 1995, Tupac walked free after Death Row put up a $1.4 million bond; his appeal continued. The price was a contract for three albums.

That same night he was in a Los Angeles studio. The months that followed were the most productive of his life: song after song, film shoots and videos, and a new crew around him, the Outlawz. Journalist Kevin Powell, who had interviewed him on Rikers, found him more aggressive after his release, almost transformed.

His work rate became famous. Friends and producers later described him writing and recording several songs in a day, often in two studio rooms at once, then heading straight to a film set. Much of what he recorded in those eleven months only came out after his death. He gave the Outlawz noms de guerre taken from dictators and enemies of the United States: Kadafi, Napoleon, Hussein Fatal, E.D.I. Mean. Before long he was calling himself Makaveli.

Tupac left behind hundreds of unreleased recordings. As early as November 5, 1996, The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory, recorded the previous summer, came out under the name Makaveli and debuted at No. 1. It was followed by R U Still Down? (Remember Me) (1997), Greatest Hits (1998), Still I Rise with the Outlawz (1999), Until the End of Time (2001), Better Dayz (2002), the Tupac: Resurrection soundtrack (2003), Loyal to the Game (2004) and Pac's Life (2006). Most went platinum.

Afeni Shakur, sober by then, watched over the work. In 1997 she founded the label Amaru Entertainment and a foundation, now the Tupac Amaru Shakur Foundation, that supports young people in the arts. In 1999 his poetry collection The Rose That Grew from Concrete was published, with poems from his youth; many of them appear on our poems page. He kept appearing on screen as well: in Bullet (1996), Gridlock'd and Gang Related (both 1997).

In December 1997 a Los Angeles court rejected Billy Garland's claim to half of the estate, finding that his contributions to Tupac's upbringing had been minuscule. A planned burial of the ashes in Soweto for the tenth anniversary of his death in 2006 was called off by Afeni at short notice. Most of them reportedly rest in her hometown of Lumberton. Afeni Shakur died on May 2, 2016, in Sausalito, California.

For nearly three decades nobody was charged with the murder. Orlando Anderson, named early on as a suspect, denied any involvement and was killed in an unrelated shooting in 1998. Yafeu "Yaki Kadafi" Fula of the Outlawz, who had been riding in the car behind Tupac, was himself shot dead in New Jersey in November 1996.

The case only moved again because of Duane "Keffe D" Davis, Anderson's uncle and a former leader of the South Side Compton Crips. As early as 2008 he had described to investigators how the shooting came about, under an agreement that his statements would not be used against him. He later repeated the story in a TV documentary and in his 2019 book Compton Street Legend. In July 2023 police searched a house belonging to his wife in Henderson, Nevada, and on September 29, 2023, Davis was arrested after a murder indictment. He pleaded not guilty.

After several delays the trial opened in Las Vegas in August 2026. On August 31, 2026, the jury found Davis guilty of first-degree murder with a deadly weapon. Prosecutors did not claim he fired the shots himself but that he obtained the gun and set the attack in motion. Who pulled the trigger has never been established in court. Davis said he would appeal, and the verdict is not final; sentencing is scheduled for October 13, 2026 (as of October 2026). Full details are on the investigation page.