Tupac’s mother speaks about her work

Whereas many fans remember Tupac’s verbal dexterity and his tragic passing, Afeni Shakur… Whereas many fans remember Tupac’s verbal dexterity and his tragic passing, Afeni Shakur remembers her son’s street-smart approach to education.

“One of the things that my son used to do all the time, consciously, was to interrelate with people who were different, and to make a pact with them: You teach me this, and I’ll teach you this,” she said in an interview.

Shakur, mother of late hip-hop legend Tupac, stopped by Pitt on Friday to champion this attitude of community betterment in her keynote address at the Black Action Society’s Indaba ceremony, an annual swearing in of the organization’s steering committee. The hour-and-a-half event took place in the William Pitt Union’s Assembly Room.

Before kicking off the ceremony, Shakur said she was honored to be a part of the proceedings.

“This is a place with a group of people with real history,” Shakur told the enthusiastic crowd. Her speech touched upon subjects as disparate as her history with the Black Panther Party, suicide and local food.

Above all, she rallied people to, as she said in the interview, “Get up and do something” in their community.

Shakur said the Black Panthers — which she joined in 1968 in New York City, as a high school dropout — helped instill her with this sense of public welfare. Contrary to popular perception, she said the party was initially more hospitable than militaristic.

“In the black community, we complained a lot about us not being able to agree on anything,” Shakur said. “The Black Panther Party was a way to get together — different people from different places in life.”

She said the party’s convergence of worlds was egalitarian.

“The Black Panther Party was everybody in our community,” she said. “I was a high school dropout, but I got to work and learn alongside people who were Ph.D.s.”

But, Shakur came to realize that the Panthers couldn’t fully grasp the consequences of their actions.

“When the repercussions [to being a member] came, a lot of people fell. A lot of people folded. A lot of people were destroyed,” she said. “As an activist, we shouldn’t be an activist and expect that we would not be hurt, put in jail. We shouldn’t do it and then think everyone should stop everything they’re doing and raise bail money for us.”

In April 1969, soon after she joined the party, she and 21 other members were arrested and tried as conspirators on multiple counts. This was much to Shakur’s surprise.

“I really couldn’t understand: What was I being arrested for?” she said.

At the time, she said, it was the longest trial in the history of New York. If she and her co-defendants had been convicted they would have been sentenced to what seemed liked 350 years in jail. Rather than disheartening her, it was this possibility that led her to dismiss her soft-spoken attorney and testify in her own defense.

“I fully expected to be convicted,” she said. “But if I had to go, I certainly didn’t want to go without speaking up for my own self.”

The move didn’t find much favor among her co-defendants.

“There’s a real long list of words they use for fiery women,” she said of the others on trial. “They used them all on me.”

But miraculously, it worked: The entire group was acquitted.

While Shakur’s life since has been rife with pain — most famously, her son was shot and killed in 1996 — she now seems to have found hope in another community-based endeavor: youth-oriented philanthropy.

“I’m a real believer in learning and in education,” she said.

Shakur organized the “Keep the Youth Alive” campaign, an effort to reduce teenage mortality, and founded the Tupac Amaru Shakur Center for the Arts, an establishment in Georgia for creative young people.

On the local spectrum, Shakur expressed enthusiasm for the Community Empowerment Association in Homewood, which she visited prior to the ceremony.

“One of the best things that has happened to me coming to Pittsburgh was the 10 minutes that I spent there,” she said. “We saw young people helping young people.”

If there’s one institution Shakur thinks is failing in community engagement, however, it’s hip-hop.

“When Haiti happened, when Katrina happened, did you not all feel: Where is hip-hop?” she said. “I’m a little pissed.”

But at 63, Shakur is too experienced to let this anger get the best of her. Rather, she re-affirmed her dedication to counterattacking the street problems that, to some, might seem overwhelming.

“No work that I can do can bring my son back,” she said. “I don’t do it for my son. I do it for these children who are still left here with the same problems that existed when Tupac was shot. Nothing has changed in that situation. That’s pretty much my life. That’s all I care about.”