For Mrs. Hawkins

On August 23, 1989, a group of white youths in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, attacked 16-year-old Yusef Hawkins and his companions. Several attackers carried baseball bats, and one fired twice. Hawkins was killed; the case sparked fierce tensions and protest marches in New York. Tupac evidently wrote the poem under the fresh impression of the crime, so presumably in 1989-it is not dated. In the book The Rose That Grew from Concrete, For Mrs. Hawkins bears the note “In Memory of Yusef Hawkins”.

Letter of Condolence to the Mother, Warning to America

The poem is explicitly addressed to Mrs. Hawkins, who lost her son to a racist society. Right at the beginning, the speaker draws a line: he does not want to attack positive people, only the racists who lied to him. Then he points out the double standard: had it been the other way around, people would have spoken of the act of a savage; with a white perpetrator, by contrast, they speak of strength of will.

At the end, the speaker invokes Malcolm X, whose blood he says flows in his veins. America will find no peace, he announces, if Yusef died in vain. The poem is thus both a letter of condolence and a political warning at once.

Alongside Mandela and Huey Newton: Poems from the Summer of 1989

For Mrs. Hawkins appears in the third section of the book, “Just a Breath of Freedom”, alongside Just a Breath of Freedom for Nelson Mandela and Fallen Star for Huey P. Newton, who was shot dead in the same month. The summer of 1989 left visible marks on the eighteen-year-old Tupac. Also related is How Can We Be Free, which addresses an earlier racist attack in Howard Beach. Anger over police brutality and racism later became a core theme of his music, as early as 2Pacalypse Now (1991).

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