Zayd Shakur is one of the names that stand for a heavy price in the Shakur family. He died on a highway in New Jersey, not quite two years after Tupac was born.
A son of Saladin Shakur
Zayd Malik Shakur was born James F. Coston (the name is also spelled “Costan”). He was the brother of Lumumba Shakur, the first husband of Afeni Shakur, and like him a son of Saladin Shakur, the family’s patriarch. That made him Tupac’s uncle, not by blood, but through his mother’s marriage and the shared name. A piece published by PM Press accordingly calls him Tupac’s “step-uncle.”
Mutulu Shakur, too, counted Zayd among his brothers. This is sometimes taken literally, with Zayd described as Mutulu’s brother; what is meant is the political family, not the biological one.
In Harlem and underground
Like his brother, Zayd belonged to the Black Panther Party in Harlem. He later became a member of the Black Liberation Army (BLA), an armed underground group that grew out of the Panthers’ orbit.
May 2, 1973
Shortly after midnight on May 2, 1973, two New Jersey state troopers stopped a car with a broken taillight on the New Jersey Turnpike near East Brunswick. Sundiata Acoli was driving, Assata Shakur sat next to him, and Zayd was in the back seat. A gunfight broke out. Trooper Werner Foerster was killed and his colleague James Harper wounded. Zayd Shakur was fatally shot, Assata badly wounded, and Acoli wounded as well.
Exactly what happened is disputed to this day. Prosecutors saw the car’s occupants as the aggressors; Assata always maintained she shot no one and had her hands up when the bullets hit her. In 1977 she was convicted over Foerster’s death, as was Acoli, who was not paroled until 2022, after 49 years in prison.
For New Jersey, that night remained an open chapter for more than five decades. When Assata died in Cuba in 2025, the governor and the state police said the slain trooper Foerster had never had the chance to live out his days in peace. To the Shakur family, by contrast, Zayd was a fallen member of the movement.
Correction: not her “partner”
Zayd is sometimes described as Assata’s partner. There is no evidence for this. In the reports he appears as a BLA member and a passenger that night, not as her partner.
Remembrance
Zayd remained present in the family. When Tupac died in 1996, Mutulu wrote in his farewell letter that Tupac should tell “Zayd, Lumumba” and the other departed to keep helping those still living. In the family’s 2023 obituary for Mutulu, Lumumba and Zayd are listed among the brothers who died before him.