“No love from my daddy, ‘cause the coward wasn’t there,” Tupac rapped in Dear Mama in 1995. He meant Billy Garland, his biological father, a man he believed dead for most of his life and who only reappeared after the 1994 shooting.
A Panther from New Jersey
William “Billy” Garland was born in New Jersey in 1949 and grew up in Somerville. After the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968 he joined the Black Panther Party in Jersey City. In the fall of 1970 he met Afeni Shakur at a meeting; she was out on bail at the time and on trial in the Panther 21 case. According to the authorized biography, he drove her to court every morning in the party’s van. The affair lasted only a few days.
At first Afeni was unsure whether Garland or Kenneth “Legs” Saunders was the father. Only a DNA test during the 1997 estate dispute settled the question: with a probability of 99.97 percent, Garland was Tupac’s father.
Absent
According to People, Garland had no contact with Tupac from the time the boy was five; he and Afeni were never married. Tupac grew up without him and for a long time thought he was dead, hence the lines in Dear Mama.
Reunion at the hospital
In the early 1990s Garland recognized his son on a poster for the film Juice (1992). After the shooting at Quad Studios in November 1994, he turned up at Tupac’s bedside at Bellevue Hospital. One look at Garland’s face and Tupac knew who he was. “Right then, I thought I had died and gone to Heaven,” Vanity Fair quoted Tupac as saying.
While Tupac was serving time at Clinton Correctional Facility in 1995, Garland says he visited him regularly. At the 1997 trial he produced a signed photo in which Tupac called him “Pops” and asked him to tell the family to come and see him. After the shooting in Las Vegas in September 1996, Garland says he flew there immediately.
The fight over the estate
After Tupac’s death, Garland claimed half of the estate. Afeni fought the claim fiercely. In August 1997 tempers flared in a Los Angeles courthouse. “I’m the only person in here who lost somebody,” Afeni said, adding of Garland: “He don’t even know my son’s birthday.” Garland, for his part, accused her of moving around with the child like a “nomad,” so that he could not find him.
On December 9, 1997, Judge Arnold Gold of the Los Angeles Superior Court denied the claim. Garland’s contributions to his son’s support and care had been “minuscule.” According to the trial reports, the documented total was $820, a bag of peanuts and a movie ticket for Rollerball; Garland had not seen Tupac for 15 of his 25 years. Estate co-executor Richard Fischbein called the ruling “a big defeat for deadbeat dads,” adding: “Being the designated sperm is not enough.”
Today
Garland has other children. Tupac’s half-sister Takerra Allen is a novelist; N’Neka Garland, an Emmy-winning producer of General Hospital, died in March 2023 at the age of 49. Garland appeared in Nick Broomfield’s film Biggie & Tupac (2002) and in the docuseries Dear Mama (2023), and has since told his side of the story in long interviews.
Common Mistakes
It is often said that Garland saw Tupac again “in the film Juice (1993),” that he sued the mother and that the “charges” were dismissed. In fact, Juice was released in 1992, and the case was a civil inheritance claim, which the court rejected in 1997.