“And running from the police, that’s right
Mama catch me, put a whooping to my backside
And even as a crack fiend, mama
You always was a black queen, mama
I finally understand
For a woman it ain’t easy trying to raise a man
You always was committed
A poor single mother on welfare, tell me how ya did it
There’s no way I can pay you back
But the plan is to show you that I understand
You are appreciated
Lady”
— Lyrics from “Dear Mama,” by Tupac Shakur
Afeni Shakur’s life began troubled enough, born Alice Faye Williams and black on Jan. 10, 1947, in Lumberton, to a poor mother and a difficult existence in a Jim Crow and racist South.
Her journey, which ended on Monday when she died unexpectedly at the age of 69 while in California, was winding and not always promising, but it maintained an upward trajectory and she leaves a legacy of enriching the lives of others.
As a youth, Williams, no doubt angry at what the South didn’t offer her, traveled to New York and became a member of the Black Panther Party, a socialist group that is largely misunderstood, but at times did resort to violence. She was accused and acquitted, despite acting as her own courtroom counsel, of numerous bombings, and on June 16, 1971, gifted the world Tupac Shakur, who was born out of wedlock in East Harlem.
The next two decades brought a life of drugs, crack cocaine was her preference, and homelessness, but in the mid-1980s, sober enough for a second to realize that Tupac was drifting away from her drug-dazed self, she enrolled him in a Harlem theater group — “the best thing I could’ve done in my insanity,” she would later say — forever changing his life, and putting him on the road to becoming one of this country’s most incredible talents, an actor and a rapper who sold more than 75 million records.
Tupac was murdered in 1996 at age 25 — his killer was never charged — and his fortune went to his mother, who had been drug-free since 1991. She could have easily fallen back into that pattern, with a son to mourn and a fat bank account to cushion the fall, but instead she began the final phase of her life, one of trying to make changes the right way, through philanthropy and activism, with one of her first acts being the establishment of the Tupac Amaru Shakur Foundation, which introduces children to poetry and the arts.
With control of an estate estimated at $50 million, she could have lived anywhere and as she pleased, but “a country girl through-and-through,” she instead returned quietly to live modestly in her native Lumberton, where she used her street cred of being Tupac’s mother to speak with youths about life’s opportunities, and supported education initiatives, at Robeson Community College, The University of North Carolina at Pembroke and the Public Schools of Robeson County, with gifts presented out of the camera’s eye.
In fact, she had done much good work here before The Robesonian learned that “Tupac’s mother was living in Lumberton.” That is how she was known then.
She leaves us too early as Afeni Shakur, businesswoman, political activist and philanthropist.
And as her son expressed in his tribute to his mother, we, too, appreciate you.
