Can U C the Pride in the Panther

For Tupac, the predator was never merely an image from nature. When he invoked the panther, he meant the Black Panther Party, in which his mother Afeni Shakur was active and with whose history he grew up. The poem Can U C the Pride in the Panther appears in the third part of The Rose That Grew from Concrete, “Just a Breath of Freedom”. The title is often spelled out in full, while in the book Tupac’s own shorthand prevails.

Three Stanzas Widen the View

Three stanzas build the poem, each opening with the same question and widening the view. First, Tupac describes a male panther who overcomes, with dignity, obstacles placed in the path of his people’s progress. Then comes a female panther raising her young alone-a line that can hardly be read as anything other than a nod to his own mother. Here an image also appears that recalls the book’s title poem: a seed must grow, even when planted in stone. In the third stanza, the panthers finally stand united; in the end, a flower blooms so brightly that it outshines the sun.

Set to Music Twice on the 2000 Album

The poem is among the best-known in the book. On the 2000 album The Rose That Grew from Concrete, it appears twice: in a male and a female version, both with Mos Def. The panther reference also ran through Tupac’s early music: a song called Panther Power, recorded with Ray Luv in 1989, was not released until 2003 on the soundtrack to Tupac: Resurrection.

Exactly when the text was written is not documented. According to Afeni Shakur’s preface, the poems in the book date from 1989 to 1991. The counterpart to the proud panther in the same part of the book is Government Assistance or My Soul, where the animal faces a hunter.

The introduction gives an overview of the entire book and all the poems.