Tupac Shakur

Tupac Amaru Shakur was born on the sixteenth of June 1971 at East Harlem, New York, the son of Afeni Shakur (placed in this archive) — a member of the Panther 21 — and Billy Garland, an associate of the New York Black Panther Party. His mother had been acquitted in May 1971 — one month before his birth — of the Panther 21 charges. He was named after the eighteenth-century Inca revolutionary Túpac Amaru II. He was raised in straitened circumstances by his mother across East Harlem, the Bronx, Baltimore and Marin City. He attended the Baltimore School for the Arts from 1986 to 1988 and studied poetry, acting and dance.

He joined the Digital Underground collective at Oakland in 1989 at eighteen and contributed his first commercial vocal performance to the Digital Underground 1991 album This Is an EP Release. He signed with Interscope Records on the strength of his Digital Underground appearances and released the solo album 2Pacalypse Now in November 1991. The album sold over a million copies in its first year and produced the singles Brenda's Got a Baby and Trapped — the recordings that established him as among the principal political-message rappers of his cohort.

He recorded across the following five years the albums Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z. (1993), Me Against the World (1995) and All Eyez on Me (1996). The 1996 All Eyez on Me — the first double-album in hip-hop history — sold over ten million copies in its first two years and is widely regarded by present consensus as one of the principal albums of 1990s hip-hop.

He was shot four times in a New York studio robbery on the thirtieth of November 1994. He was convicted in February 1995 of sexual abuse of a New York woman and sentenced to four and a half years at the Clinton Correctional Facility. He served eleven and a half months before being released on bail pending appeal in October 1995.

He starred in the films Juice (1992), Poetic Justice (1993), Above the Rim (1994) and Gridlock'd (1996).

He was shot four times in a passenger car on East Flamingo Road in Las Vegas on the seventh of September 1996 and held on life support at the University Medical Center of Southern Nevada. He died on the thirteenth of September 1996, at twenty-five.

He is honored here as the principal political-commercial voice of mid-1990s hip-hop.