Afeni Shakur

Alice Faye Williams was born on the tenth of January 1947 at Lumberton, North Carolina, the younger of two daughters of Walter Williams Jr. — a long-haul truck driver — and Rosa Belle Williams, a homemaker. Both parents were Lumbee descendants and the household was raised within the Lumbee Native American Methodist tradition of southeastern North Carolina. Her parents separated when she was eleven; she and her sister moved with their mother to the Bronx in 1958. She was educated at the High School of Performing Arts at Manhattan and at Bronx High School.

She joined the New York City chapter of the Black Panther Party in 1968 at twenty-one and took the new name Afeni Shakur — meaning "Dear One" in Yoruba — at the suggestion of the Yoruba Temple of Harlem. She conducted across the following two years the principal community-programme organising work of the Harlem and Bronx BPP chapters, including the Free Breakfast for Children programme at the West 122nd Street store-front office.

On the second of April 1969 she was arrested at her Harlem apartment as one of twenty-one members of the New York Panthers indicted for conspiracy to bomb the New York Botanical Garden, the New York Police Department, four department stores and a railway line. The charges, ultimately holding the largest single political indictment in New York State history, were prepared by FBI Counterintelligence Program operations and presented through the New York County District Attorney's Office. The trial — the longest political trial in New York State history at that date — opened in October 1970 and closed in May 1971 after eight months of testimony.

The defendants — denied bail for the duration of the trial — refused court-appointed counsel and defended themselves through their own attorneys and through their own oral cross-examination. Afeni Shakur, twenty-three years old and visibly pregnant with her first child, conducted her own cross-examination of the prosecution witnesses for forty-seven separate sessions. On the thirteenth of May 1971 the jury acquitted all defendants of all charges in less than three hours.

Her son Tupac Amaru Shakur was born one month after the acquittal at the East Harlem hospital. She raised him as a single mother across the next twenty-five years through poverty, brief periods of homelessness, and the addiction issues she addressed across the late 1980s. She managed her son's musical career from 1991 to his death in 1996 and across the remaining twenty years of her life directed the Tupac Amaru Shakur Foundation she founded in 1997 with the proceeds of his estate.

She died of a heart attack at Sausalito, California, on the second of May 2016, at sixty-nine.

She is honored here as the matriarch of the Panther 21.