Thank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster ebook.
Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions.
CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP
Already a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox.
CHORUS (in order of appearance)
CHUCK WALKER, University of California, Davis, professor; author, The Tupac Amaru Rebellion
SHARONDA DAVILA-IRVING, childhood friend of Tupac and Black Panther Party daughter
JANE RHODES, University of Illinois at Chicago professor; author, Framing the Black Panthers
LEVY LEE SIMON, actor, 127th Street Repertory Ensemble
RICHARD PILCHER, retired principal acting teacher at Baltimore School for the Arts
BECKY MOSSING, Baltimore School for the Arts class of 1988
STELLA NAIR, University of California, Los Angeles professor
KENDRICK WELLS, friend and personal assistant
RYAN D ROLLINS, Marin City rapper, member of One Nation MCs
BARBARA OWENS, former English teacher at Tamalpais High School
PUDGEE THA PHAT BASTARD, New York City rapper
D-SHOT, Vallejo rapper, member of the Click
ROB MARRIOTT, former Source editor and Vibe writer
JUSTIN TINSLEY, The Undefeated staff writer
KHALIL KAIN, actor, “Raheem” in Juice
GOBI RAHIMI, videographer, Look Hear Creations cofounder
JAKI BROWN, casting director for Juice
MARK ANTHONY NEAL, African and African American studies department chair at Duke University
LESLIE GERARD, former assistant and A & R at Interscope Records
MOE Z MD, Los Angeles producer
KEVIN HOSMANN, art director and designer for 2Pacalypse Now
KARL KANI, fashion designer
ALEX ROBERTS, former head of business affairs at Death Row Records
TIM NITZ, engineer
COLIN WOLFE, Los Angeles producer
ERIC ALTENBURGER, art director and designer for Strictly for My N.I.G.G.A.Z… and Me Against the World
BLU, Los Angeles rapper
WENDY DAY, Rap Coalition founder
ETHAN BROWN, author, Queens Reigns Supreme
TERRENCE “KLEPT” HARDING, Brooklyn rapper, Junior M.A.F.I.A. member
EZI CUT, Danish DJ and producer
CHARISSE JONES, former New York Times staff writer; USA Today correspondent; coauthor of Shifting: The Double Lives of Black Women in America
RICHARD DEVITT, juror in Tupac’s sexual abuse case
CATHY SCOTT, former Las Vegas Sun crime reporter; author, The Killing of Tupac Shakur
DR. LEON PACHTER, former trauma department chief at Bellevue Hospital
GREG KADING, former LAPD detective
ANGELA ARDIS, Tupac pen pal; author, Inside a Thug’s Heart
VIRGIL ROBERTS, former president of SOLAR Records
TOMMY “D” DAUGHERTY, former Death Row Records engineer
CORMEGA, New York City rapper
NAHSHON ANDERSON, former Look Hear Creations intern
ERIC FARBER, former attorney for the Tupac estate
DR. JOHN FILDES, former trauma department chief at Las Vegas’s University Medical Center
CHUCK WALKER Initially, he wasn’t that big a hero in colonial Peru. The Spanish were so petrified they really tamped down on, like, publicity. It’s really the twentieth century, and particularly with this really peculiar 1968 military government that is leftist.
This is a moment when US-supported right-wing military regimes are dominating. Peru has a left-wing regime. And they’re looking for a hero. He becomes the national symbol. He’s indigenous but mestizo—so in other words, he’s got European blood. He’s cool looking. He’s got a ponytail. He looks good on a horse. The other national heroes had all been white dudes from the coast.
So in the sixties, people wrote more about him. What I understood is the Black Panthers chapter that Afeni was involved with in New York City had a reading group, and they were understandably looking for revolutionaries of color. They read about Túpac Amaru II and thought it was cool. Afeni said later that she named her son that because she wanted him to be worldly.
I
SHARONDA DAVILA-IRVING In our community, we would be considered extended family. Our mothers were pregnant together.I We were born together. Our mothers were both in the Black Panther Party. When we were small, my family moved to Jersey City. So when we saw each other, we were going there or coming here. We were taught to be leaders from the beginning. When you don’t really know boundaries, in a positive sense, being amongst the people is important to your existence. If your parents are immersed in working for the people, then that means as a kid, you’re right there with whoever they are going to visit or whoever they are going to support. You play with all the kids that are there.
JANE RHODES The founding of the Panthers is very much rooted to the dual sort of transitions of both civil rights and Black Power activism during that period. They’re very much indebted to and engaged with the sort of rising Black nationalist thinking and affinity that’s coming out of SNCCII in particular, but also Malcolm X in the Nation of Islam. Robert Williams.III There’s a whole constellation of people who they sort of saw and heard and read.
Both Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, who are ostensibly the founders of the Black Panthers, sort of came up in the kind of civil rights, Black community activism of the period. They worked for antipoverty agencies. Bobby Seale was a Vietnam War vet. And so he was very much situated within that kind of antiwar veterans movement. They both are going to Merritt College, which is a junior college, and they get caught up in all of the stuff that’s going on. All of this is going on simultaneously. It’s just this maelstrom of activism. It’s not surprising that this would happen in Oakland and San Francisco, in particular. Those cities kind of epitomize the crisis and the grievances of young Black people. The urban renewal and the rising inequality and the destruction of the postwar promise had struck a chord.
At Merritt College, they are part of a Black student group called the Student Advisory Committee. They meet each other, and they’re both sort of underwhelmed by the sort of activist potential of their colleagues at the college. They felt like it’s not radical enough, it’s not militant enough. They wanted to really push for a much more sort of strident and militant kind of activism. One of the things that they did was they took it outside, away from the academy. They’re sort of straddling class. They have the benefit of being well read and much more educated than a lot of the people around them. But they still are deeply identified with the brothers on the street. That very much shapes, I think, the underlying ideology of the party. Basically, they organize by pulling together some friends, a small group; there are just eight or nine folks that are sitting around debating, coming up with kind of grandiose ideas, but not really doing much.
Then the prototypical story: a young Black man is killed by the police in nearby Richmond,IV and the parents of the young man sort of appealed to this group of activists and said, “Hey, would you help us?” And so this is the founding story, if you will, because they get mobilized and actually have a purpose and start organizing. They organize demonstrations at the sheriff’s office; that’s when they started the Black Panther newspaper. They begin to sort of articulate all of the things that are resonating in this current moment: a critique of the police and police treatment of Black people and police brutality in Black and poor communities; a critique of structural inequality. They’re not that generative. They’re borr
owing from a lot of places. But they forge an entity, and a lot of it is about making demands and articulating those demands.
The initial work was really this idea of surveillance to the police, which I think is a really interesting and a kind of genius project. They’re going to reverse the gaze. It’s really a way of disrupting state power. It came back to bite them in the ass, but that was sort of a key action. It appealed to the younger acolytes to join up because there’s all of this anger and fury in the community about the police. Over time, they begin to see themselves as doing more, being servants of the people.
That very much comes out of reading Marxist theory, reading Milton, looking at sort of postcolonial struggles, and recognizing that part of what you have to do is win the hearts and minds of the community and try to respond to the various issues that are sort of hurting the community. The service initiatives really sort of emerge gradually, and really take off, quite frankly, after the party begins to sort of step away from or abandon the police-confrontation tactic.
SHARONDA DAVILA-IRVING Because of the targeting of the Panthers, many people’s parents took different pathways out of what was imminent danger for them. Some people just walked away from it. Some people went to jail. Some people just stopped and went mainstream, because it just was too hard to keep going. Some people got hooked on drugs, because of the level of stress and anxiety. But their kids came out differently with gifts that their parents instilled in them. He was able to really be prepared to shine so that when he got that opportunity, all of that grooming was paid back when it needed to be.
JANE RHODES If you look at the people that really found the Panthers compelling, it’s urban youth, primarily Black youth, but they had a lot of other people of color and white allies who were also drawn to them. It’s about the deep inequalities and crisis of the city in this historical moment. The Vietnam War has a powerful role here because you have a whole generation that is completely sort of disillusioned by the state. This generation increasingly sees themselves in solidarity with sort of global movements. It’s not surprising that an organization comes along that takes a very different approach from the civil rights movement, that says, “We’re not asking for our rights, we’re going to demand them,” that’s uncompromising, that lays out not only a social justice agenda but also an agenda that really critiques the entire structure of capitalism, and the ways in which capitalism and racism operate in tandem. I think all of that spoke to not only Black folks but a lot of young people. It was more than just marching and protesting. You could feed people, you could educate people, you could help families with incarcerated family members, you could provide health care. And I think that’s a powerful thing, particularly for young people who feel like they don’t have a way to actually sort of serve their community or address the pain that they see.
The Panthers were extraordinarily skilled at creating an image and a persona. They were attractive. People wanted to be them. I was in junior high school when the Panthers were founded, and my brother was in the Panthers, so I’ve lived through that moment. And, you know, the Panthers were hot shit. They had sex appeal, they were rhetorically incredibly skilled. Eldridge Cleaver or Bobby Seale or Huey Newton or Kathleen Cleaver could stand in front of a microphone and just lay it out in extraordinary and exquisitely articulate detail. I think they were a profound contrast to the heroes of the civil rights movement.
SHARONDA DAVILA-IRVING If you talk to children of Panthers, you will probably hear some similar things around developing the mind and developing the ability to go into a room and speak to anybody. Across communities, we’ve got certain principles that are shared within the party, and it makes us, I think, a unique group of people. The world got an opportunity to see an example of what our parents were trying to create for their kids and for all Black kids with Tupac.
JANE RHODES I think they understood that the news media in particular was oriented toward sensationalism. And they knew that they would get attention for being sensational. And so they sort of delivered that. And what that did over time was to create a cult of personality, really, for the entire organization. So at the same time that the state is demonizing them, and trying to undermine them, and going after them guns blazing, the popular media—you know, quite frankly, the Panthers sold. Before I was an academic, I was a journalist, and if it bleeds, it leads. That’s the premise. So they were a commodity, a saleable commodity, and the Panthers knew that. They were like, Okay, I’ll give you something, and then they would deliver the goods.
The sort of younger members of the press and other media organizations… some of them were part of that world that was enamored of the Panthers. Tom Wolfe’s classic send-up of the PanthersV was very much about that: young, white, upper-middle-class liberals wanted to get in with the Panthers. It was a way for them to define and deploy their political leanings—to get street cred, essentially. And so that certainly played into the media fascination.
The Panthers were very strategic. Kathleen Cleaver told me, “We stayed in the face of the media because that was one strategy for not getting killed.” They courted that media attention, and they knew that it would be far more difficult for them to be incarcerated or killed by the state if they had that kind of following.
The parallels are kind of unmistakable. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the rhetoric and the tactics are the same. But the conditions are very similar. And I think that the same thing that helped mobilize young people into the streets and into protest movements in the sixties and early seventies is very much in action today.
SHARONDA DAVILA-IRVING Growing up around the Black Panther Party created a sense that anything was possible for me. You’re with people who are doing all kinds of things—the poets, the musicians. And Pac was a creative person.
LEVY LEE SIMON The history of the African American studio 127th Street Repertory Ensemble, founded by the great Ernie McClintock, started I think in the 1960s with Lou Gossett. Lou Gossett went on to pursue his career in Hollywood, and Ernie was the one that was left to develop the company. He felt like there were particular needs that the African American theater artists had that were not being addressed in a white theater. So he wanted to accentuate that in teaching acting from that point of view.
I graduated from Cheyney State College in Pennsylvania in the early eighties, and at twenty-two, I decided I wanted to pursue a career in acting. I’m from Harlem. When I came back home, back then the face of Black theater was the Negro Ensemble Company with Douglas Turner Ward, and all of those great actors that came out of there.VI But there was this buzz around town about Ernie. I met a couple of people that sang his praises and told me that their work was more cutting edge and provocative, and I was all about that. Intuitively, I just felt like, You know what, I’m gonna check these people out.
I auditioned and got in, and the great thing about Ernie’s company was that it was like a training ground. Once you’re in a company, then you did vocal training, you did speech and diction, you did movement. We did all kinds of different scene-study exercises and acting exercises. He had this concept: that his ensemble should be trained together, so that when they stepped on the stage, they would be a unified force.
We did a play called Hand Is on the Gate, which was an ensemble piece that was a collection of poems by Langston Hughes that we dramatized. We did a play where we told the story of Malcolm X through his speeches. Then, in 1984, Ernie came in and told us that we were going to do A Raisin in the Sun at the Apollo Theater as part of [a fundraiser] for Jesse Jackson, who was running for president back then.
Jesse was going to speak at intermission, and we were going to be the entertainment for the night. Minnie Gentry, who had played Mama on Broadway with Sidney Poitier, was gonna play Mama in the show. And then there was a young Tupac Shakur.
He was twelve years old, and no one knew what was in his future, but he played my son, Travis. His mother had been bringing him around the company. There were a number of kids around during that tim
e. Terrence Howard, Minnie Gentry’s [great-]grandson, would come hang out and watch, and Bokeem Woodbine, son of Mamie Anderson, who was in a company, would come through and watch and study. But Tupac—whatever that “it factor” is that people talk about, the indescribable thing that certain performers or artists have, he had it. He already had it back then.
SHARONDA DAVILA-IRVING When you’re a teenager and your personality starts to become a little bit more distinct—He was a sensitive guy, which allowed for us to be able to really kind of share experiences with one another in a way that you don’t always necessarily talk to everybody about. What people see as celebrity, I just see as family. You could be creative and dynamic and outgoing, but you also were a part of the family, so go sit your ass down.
We spent a lot of our time talking. We went to the movies and to the beach and got on the train and went places. My aunt would take us places; she was the one with the car. It was a fancy sports car. So we would be excited to go places with her in her car. When you talk to people who were a part of his life from earlier on, I feel like the political landscape of the time is inextricable from what we were doing and saying. It is hard to understand that it really was a way of life. If we were doing something, we didn’t know if we were there because they were trying to organize a rent strike or something. It wasn’t like, “Oh, let’s hook up and go to Great Adventure.”
LEVY LEE SIMON After we did the performance at the Apollo, later that summer, we did an entire summer at the Walden School.VII They had a great theater off of Central Park West. We did an ensemble of plays where every time he would step on the stage there would be an audible reaction from the audience, just for him stepping on the stage. I mean, he just had this thing. He was twelve then.
Pac was a knucklehead. He was laughing all the time, cracking jokes, playing pranks on people. He would terrorize the women just doing practical jokes. One day, he got into the women’s dressing room and he stole somebody’s big panties, they were like big bloomers, and he put them on his head and he was running around the theater.
Changes Page 1