In the spring of 1971, a 24-year-old with no legal training stood in a New York courtroom, defending herself, and pregnant. A few weeks after her acquittal, her son was born. Afeni Shakur gave Tupac his name and the political consciousness that runs through his songs. She was a Black Panther, later fought addiction, and after her son’s death spent twenty years looking after his work.
From Lumberton to the Bronx
Afeni Shakur was born Alice Faye Williams on January 10, 1947, in Lumberton, North Carolina. She had an older sister, Gloria “Glo” Jean. As a child she moved with her mother and sister to the Bronx in New York.
She passed the entrance exam for the prestigious High School of Performing Arts in Manhattan. But she soon dropped out and for a while drifted into a street gang.
A Speech in Harlem, an Indictment in New York
In 1968 she heard Bobby Seale speak in Harlem and joined the Black Panther Party. In November of that year she married the Panther Lumumba Shakur and took the name Afeni Shakur. The surname belonged to the family of Lumumba’s father, Saladin Shakur, an associate of Malcolm X. Within the movement it was later taken up by people who were not related to the family at all.
On April 2, 1969, Afeni was arrested along with Lumumba and 19 other Panthers. Prosecutors accused the “Panther 21” of plotting bomb attacks on police stations and department stores. Bail was set at $100,000 per person. Afeni was among the first to be bailed out, so she could raise money for the others. When co-defendants fled, she was sent back to jail.
During this period she became pregnant, not by her husband but, as far as is known today, by the Panther Billy Garland. According to Staci Robinson’s authorized biography, she herself was unsure at the time whether Garland or her short-term partner Kenneth “Legs” Saunders was the father.
Acquitted on All 156 Counts
In court, Afeni took on her own defense. Under her cross-examination, the undercover officer Ralph White admitted he had never seen her with a gun or explosives, only doing party work in schools and hospitals. On May 13, 1971, the jury acquitted all defendants on all 156 counts.
A Son With Three Names
A little over a month later, on June 16, 1971, her son was born in East Harlem. On the birth certificate she had him registered as Lesane Parish Crooks; sources give the first names in different orders. “Crooks” came from her former cellmate Carol Crooks and was meant to keep the child from being recognized as a “Panther baby.”
Soon afterwards she named him Tupac Amaru, after the Peruvian rebel Túpac Amaru II, whom the Spanish colonial power executed in 1781. She wanted him to know he was part of a world culture, she said later, “and not just from a neighborhood.”
By then her marriage to Lumumba had already fallen apart. In 1975 Afeni married Mutulu Shakur; Tupac’s half-sister Sekyiwa was born the same year. Afeni worked as a paralegal for Bronx Legal Services. The couple split in 1982.
The Years of Addiction
In the early 1980s Afeni became addicted to crack. In 1984 she moved with both children to Baltimore, and in 1988 on to Marin City near San Francisco. There the addiction escalated, and Tupac moved out at seventeen. After returning to New York in 1991, she got clean with the help of Narcotics Anonymous. Mother and son reconciled.
Tupac worked through those years in Dear Mama (1995). The song does not hide the addiction, and it is a declaration of love all the same: even in her darkest years, he calls her a queen in it.
Afeni said she could not listen to it without crying.
Twenty Years for Her Son’s Work
Tupac died in Las Vegas on September 13, 1996. Afeni became co-executor of his estate and fought numerous legal battles: against Death Row Records over the master tapes, and against his biological father Billy Garland, who claimed half the estate and lost in December 1997.
In 1997 she founded the label Amaru Entertainment. That same year it released R U Still Down? (Remember Me), the first of many posthumous albums. The Tupac Amaru Shakur Foundation, which supports young people in the arts, followed in September 1997; Afeni later had to sell its arts center in Stone Mountain, Georgia.
In 2003 she told XXL that she believed her son’s killer was himself no longer alive, and that punishment was God’s business anyway. In 2004 her life story Afeni Shakur: Evolution of a Revolutionary was published, written by Tupac’s friend Jasmine Guy. That same year she married Gust Davis Jr.; she filed for divorce in March 2016.
Her Death and the Docuseries
On the evening of May 2, 2016, Afeni Shakur suffered cardiac arrest at her home in Sausalito, Marin County. Less than an hour later she died in hospital, aged 69. She had previously placed the rights to Tupac’s music in a trust administered by music executive Tom Whalley.
In 2023 Allen Hughes told the story of mother and son as a double biography in the docuseries Dear Mama. The series treats Afeni as a historical figure with her own political history.