Lesane, Tupac, 2Pac, Makaveli: A Life in Names

The name on his birth certificate is not Tupac. The one the world knows him by came a year later, and more followed: one for his first rhymes in Baltimore, one for the stage, one for the prison cell. Read Tupac’s names in order and you are reading his life story, from the Black Panther movement to his final months at Death Row.

A Cover Name for a Panther Baby

When Tupac was born in East Harlem on June 16, 1971, his name was Lesane Parish Crooks. His mother, Afeni Shakur, had been acquitted in the Panther 21 trial just a month earlier. She did not want her son to stand out as a “Panther baby,” so she registered him under an inconspicuous name. The birth certificate lists it as “Parish Lesane Crooks.”

Afeni borrowed the surname from Carol Crooks, a friend from her time in jail. That is how Staci Robinson tells it in the 2023 authorized biography. The name has nothing to do with Billy Garland, his biological father.

Named for a Rebel of the Andes

About a year after his birth, Afeni renamed her son. His new first name honors Túpac Amaru II, born José Gabriel Condorcanqui, an Indigenous leader in what is now Peru. In November 1780 he launched a major uprising against Spanish colonial rule; on May 18, 1781, he was executed in Cusco. He had taken his fighting name from an ancestor: Túpac Amaru, the last Inca ruler of Vilcabamba, whom the Spanish put to death in 1572.

The name is Quechua. Thupaq means roughly “royal” or “shining,” amaru “serpent” or a serpent-like being from Andean mythology. Afeni later explained that she wanted her son to carry the name of revolutionary, Indigenous people. He should know he belonged to a world culture, not just to his neighborhood.

The surname came from Lumumba Shakur, whom Afeni had married in 1968. His family left such a mark on the radical movement that other activists took the name as a sign of allegiance, among them Tupac’s future stepfather, Mutulu Shakur. The word itself is Arabic: shakūr means “very grateful.”

MC New York: Homesickness as a Stage Name

Tupac wrote his first rhymes in Baltimore, where the family had moved in 1984. There he called himself MC New York, after the city he came from. With Dana “Mouse” Smith and others he formed the group Born Busy; their tapes are considered his first recordings.

He took the name with him to the Bay Area in 1988. In 1989 he cut his first studio recordings there with the group Strictly Dope, released in 2007 on Beginnings: The Lost Tapes 1988-1991.

One Numeral Makes a Stage Name

When Tupac joined Digital Underground in 1990, he needed a name for the stage. He swapped the first syllable of his first name for a numeral: 2Pac. That is how listeners first heard him, on Same Song in January 1991. Every solo album released in his lifetime carried the name, from 2Pacalypse Now to All Eyez on Me.

To friends and fans he was simply Pac. The short form also appears in album titles such as Pac’s Life (2006).

THUG LIFE: A Motto Across His Stomach

THUG LIFE was never a stage name, but it was the motto that defined Tupac more than any other. In 1992 he had the two words tattooed in large letters across his stomach. Behind them sat an acronym: “The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everybody.” The hatred a society shows its children comes back to hit everyone. Staci Robinson’s biography renders it as “The Hate U Gave …”

The idea was meant politically. It grew out of an earlier plan: Tupac wanted to recruit one young Black man in every US state and build a network of organizers modeled on the Panthers. That plan had an acronym too, N.I.G.G.A.Z., “Never Ignorant, Getting Goals Accomplished.” In 1993 it gave his second album its title.

With Mutulu Shakur he wrote a “Code of Thug Life” in 1992, a kind of code of conduct for the street: no drugs to children, no violence against bystanders, schools and concerts as neutral ground.

Thug Life was also the name of the group Tupac formed with Mopreme Shakur, Big Syke, Macadoshis and The Rated R; their only album came out in 1994. In prison in 1995, Tupac announced he was leaving THUG LIFE behind. The motto outlived him anyway: in 2017 author Angie Thomas named her novel The Hate U Give after it.

Makaveli: Reading in a Cell

In prison in 1995 Tupac read Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince. What drew him in was the idea of reaching goals through strategic thinking; he did not take the author himself as a role model. That became his last name: Makaveli, deliberately spelled differently from the original, a brand of his own.

The story often goes that Machiavelli advised faking one’s own death. After 1996 that fed the rumors that Tupac was still alive. The Prince says nothing of the kind.

Under the name Makaveli, The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory was released on November 5, 1996, almost two months after his death. It remained his only album under that name. The fashion label Makaveli Branded later picked the name up as well.

Noms de Guerre for the Crew

In 1995 and 1996 Tupac gave his crew, the Outlawz, names taken from enemies of the United States: Yaki Kadafi, Hussein Fatal, Napoleon, E.D.I. Mean (after Idi Amin), Kastro and Mussolini. Within that circle he himself was Makaveli.

And the name from the Andes lives on through his estate. In 1997 Afeni founded the label Amaru Entertainment, which releases Tupac’s unreleased recordings. In June 2026 Sega announced that Tupac would appear in the game Stranger Than Heaven (due January 2027) as a character, with his estate’s permission. The character’s name: Amaru.