1947: Alice Williams was born in rural North Carolina. Throughout her childhood, she watched her father abuse her mother until her mom escaped with the family to Brooklyn in 1958. Despite excelling in high school, Alice grew up angry and street tough.
1968: At age 21, two men changed her life. The first was Bobby Seale, the leader of the Black Panther Party. Seeing him speak in public energized her to join the cause.
The second man was Lumumba Shakur, the Black Panthers’ leader in Harlem. They fell in love and married within months of first meeting.
He was a married Muslim man - he already had one wife - but Alice didn’t object. She converted to Islam and was given a new name: Afeni Shakur.
She then devoted herself to the Black Panthers. The US government considered them violent extremists and worked to bring the group down by any and all means.
A new member of the party made Afeni wary. She wondered whether he was an undercover cop. Lumumba dismissed her suspicions.
April 1969: The NYPD arrested Lumumba and Afeni Shakur as well as 19 other Black Panthers on over 150 counts of public violence, including suspected bombings.
They became known as the Panther 21.
Afeni had been correct; the suspicious new member had been working undercover. His infiltration had led to the group’s arrests.
After nearly a year in jail awaiting trial, Afeni was finally released on bail. But her husband remained incarcerated.
September 1970: The pre-trial began. Afeni was assigned a woman attorney who she dismissed as weak. Instead, she opted to defend herself at trial.
Also in September, Afeni got pregnant - but not from Lumumba. The father was another Black Panther member named Billy Garland.
After learning that Afeni was carrying another man’s child, Lumumba wanted nothing more to do with her.
Afeni was pregnant throughout the 8-month-long trial.
February 1971: Two men of the Panther 21 jumped bail. A judge sent Afeni back to jail as a result, even though she was 5 months pregnant.
The trial dragged on.
Finally, the moment she’d been waiting for: the opportunity to question the undercover agent on the witness stand. He had been the prosecution’s primary witness against her.
Afeni got him to admit that her actions as a Black Panther were never militant. Instead, she had worked at a hospital and a school. The cop confessed that she had done “good things” and had never committed any violent acts.
The prosecution’s case fell apart because of his testimony.
May 1971: Afeni Shakur, acting as her own lawyer despite having no legal training, was acquitted.
The next month, she gave birth to her son Tupac.
She remarried and had another child, but her new husband was arrested in the robbing of an armored car. Afeni moved with her children to Baltimore and started a new life as a paralegal secretary.
Stress drove her cocaine addiction. So she sent her son and daughter to Marin City, California, just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. She later joined them but got addicted to crack.
It wasn’t until Tupac began making a name for himself as a rap artist that Afeni finally got off drugs and stayed clean for the rest of her life.
By 1995, mother and son grew closer, and he produced a track called Dear Mama, an ode to Afeni.
When Tupac was murdered in 1996, his fortune went to his mother. She created an artists’ foundation in his name.
After 20 years of sharing her and her son’s stories at lectures, Afeni Shakur - formerly Alice Williams - died of heart failure in 2016.
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