He sat in the dock with Afeni Shakur before her son was even born. Jamal Joseph does not belong to the Shakur family, yet he is featured in this section: as a young Black Panther, he became Tupac’s godfather and continues to work on his legacy to this day-as an editor, producer, and storyteller. His own story leads from Leavenworth prison to a professorship at Columbia University. The political background is explained on the page Tupac and the Black Panther Party.
In the Panthers at 15: Books Instead of a Gun
Joseph was born Edward Joseph in New York in 1953 and grew up in the Bronx and in Harlem. He was a good student and sang in the choir. Following the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, he went looking, as he told NPR, for “the most militant group” around, and joined the Black Panther Party at age 15. Instead of the weapon he had hoped for, they handed him a stack of books at the office.
On that first visit, he met Afeni Shakur. She saw through him pretending to be older and sent him home. Later, she became “my big sister,” Joseph told the trade publication Deadline in 2023, and remained so for a lifetime.
Facing 300 Years in Prison: The Panther 21 and Afeni’s Protection
In April 1969, Joseph was arrested as one of the Panther 21, together with Afeni and Lumumba Shakur. The defendants were accused of bomb plots; Joseph faced prison terms totaling more than 300 years. After about a year in pretrial detention, Joseph was released, and in 1971 all defendants were acquitted. The trial and Afeni’s self-defense are chronicled on the page about Afeni Shakur.
From this period comes the scene Joseph recounts in his text Birthday Hymn for Afeni on Tupac’s official website: in 1970, in the basement of a church in Harlem, he and Afeni were serving breakfast to children, a Panther program. He was 16, she was 22. When around twenty police officers walked in and a lieutenant questioned him, Afeni stepped in between, forbade him from answering, and made the officers leave.
Joseph also recalls that during her detention, Afeni fought successfully to receive an egg and a glass of milk each day for her unborn child. “I knew Tupac when he was still in the womb,” he said in 2023.
After the Brink’s Robbery: Five and a Half Years in Leavenworth
After the Brink’s robbery in Nanuet in October 1981, for which Tupac’s stepfather Mutulu Shakur was later also convicted, Joseph stood trial once again. In the first Brink’s trial in New York, from April to September 1983, the jury acquitted him of murder and robbery charges. However, they convicted him as an accessory after the fact; other accounts describe the core of the case as aiding underground Panthers. The court handed down twelve and a half years.
Joseph served about five and a half years at the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas. There, he took courses through a University of Kansas program, earned two college degrees, wrote a play for Black History Month, and founded a theater group. He later summarized his attitude this way: you could do the time, “or you can let the time work for you.”
Pencil and Haikus: An Eleven-Year-Old Writes to the Cell
Tupac’s earliest known manuscript dates from these years. As an eleven-year-old, he wrote and illustrated a seven-page booklet of haikus and poems in pencil, dedicating it to four imprisoned Panthers from his mother’s circle of friends: Jamal Joseph, Chui Ferguson-El, Sekou Odinga, and Bilahl Sunni Ali. One drawing shows the boy asleep, pencil in hand, dreaming of the prisoners’ release. The booklet is signed “Tupac Shakur, Future Freedom Fighter.”
It reached Joseph in prison. He kept it for about a year, he told Sotheby’s; when guards searched the cells following a stabbing and threw letters and photos into disarray, he sent it to his wife Joyce with permission from a counselor. In March 2022, Sotheby’s offered the booklet for an estimated $200,000 to $300,000 (news item); reports do not cite a final result.
A Second Life: From Prisoner to Columbia Professor
After prison, Joseph built a second life. In 1997, he founded the IMPACT Repertory Theatre in Harlem, a theater and music group for young people; in 1998, he began teaching at Columbia University. There, he became a professor of film and for a time chaired the program.
Together with Charles Mack and Tevin Thomas, he wrote the song Raise It Up for the film August Rush, performed by Jamia Nash and IMPACT; in 2008, it was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song. His memoir Panther Baby was published in 2012, and in 2015 he received the Purpose Prize, which honors individuals over 60 for social impact.
The Godfather Guards the Legacy: Albums, Documentaries, and Walk of Fame
Joseph was an important partner for Tupac’s estate. He was among the executive producers of The Rose That Grew from Concrete (2000), the album based on Tupac’s poetry, and in 2006 wrote the illustrated biography Tupac Shakur Legacy. In 2022, he was announced as an executive producer of a feature film about Afeni (news item).
On the documentary series Dear Mama (2023), he served as executive producer and interview subject; the series was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series. At the unveiling of Tupac’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in June 2023, he gave one of the speeches. According to a Columbia University profile, he also wrote the book for a Broadway musical about Tupac’s life.
Joseph paints no picture of a saint. “There were two Tupacs, and both were real,” he told HuffPost in 2015. Regarding the murder case, he was cautious in August 2023: Afeni had focused her energy on her son’s legacy rather than on the investigation; new answers would be good. A few weeks later, Duane Davis was arrested (see The Investigation and Duane “Keffe D” Davis).