Afeni Shakur facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Afeni Shakur
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Shakur giving a speech in 2009
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| Born |
Alice Faye Williams
January 10, 1947 |
| Died | May 2, 2016 (aged 69) Sausalito, California, U.S.
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| Occupation | Activist |
| Years active | 1968–1971 |
| Political party | Black Panther Party |
| Spouse(s) |
Lumumba Shakur
(m. 1968; div. 1971)Mutulu Shakur
(m. 1975; div. 1982)Gust Davis
(m. 2004) |
| Children | 2, including Tupac Shakur |
Afeni Shakur Davis (born Alice Faye Williams; January 10, 1947 – May 2, 2016) was an American political activist and member of the Black Panther Party. Shakur was the mother of rapper Tupac Shakur and the executor of his estate. She founded the Tupac Amaru Shakur Foundation and also served as the CEO of Amaru Entertainment, Inc., a record and film production company she founded.
Early life
Afeni Shakur was born Alice Faye Williams on January 10, 1947, in Lumberton, North Carolina. She had an older sister, Gloria "Glo" Jean. She had a troubled childhood. At the age of eleven in 1958, Williams and her sister moved to the South Bronx with their mother, a factory worker.
Williams attended Benjamin Franklin Junior High School in the Bronx, where she demonstrated above average reading ability and her grades qualified her for honors. She wrote for the school newspaper, The Franklin Flash, and in the ninth grade won a journalism award for which she received congratulations from Mayor Robert F. Wagner. In 1962, Williams passed the qualifying examinations for the Bronx High School of Science and High School of Performing Arts in Manhattan. She chose the latter because she felt performers and actors were free spirited. However, Williams couldn't afford the school supplies and she felt like an outcast at the school, so she dropped out after one term.
She briefly worked a postal job, becoming one of the first women mail carriers in New York.
Activism
After hearing Bobby Seale speak, Williams joined the Black Panther Party when they opened an office in Harlem in 1968. There she met Lumumba Shakur, a Sunni Muslim, who she married in November 1968. Following their marriage, she changed her name to Afeni Shakur. She became a section leader of the Harlem chapter and a mentor to new members such as Jamal Joseph.
The Panther 21
In April 1969, Shakur and twenty other Black Panthers were arrested and charged with several counts of conspiracy to bomb police stations and other public places in New York.
She and the others in the "Panther 21" were acquitted in May 1971 after an eight-month trial. Altogether, Afeni Shakur spent two years in the New York Women's House of Detention before being acquitted. After being released, she participated in a workshop organized by the Gay Liberation Front at the Revolutionary People's Constitutional Convention in 1970 and continued to advocate against homophobia in the Black Panthers.
Later life and death
On June 16, 1971, she gave birth to her son, Lesane Parish Crooks, who was later renamed Tupac Amaru Shakur.
In 1975, Shakur married Mutulu Shakur and had their daughter, Sekyiwa Shakur. They got divorced in 1982. Shakur used to work as a paralegal.
Shakur moved her family to Baltimore, Maryland in 1984 and then relocated to Marin County in California.
In 2004, Shakur released her biography, Afeni Shakur: Evolution of a Revolutionary. In her biography, which was written by Jasmine Guy, Shakur reflected on her childhood experiences and her upbringing as well as her involvement in the Black Panther Party.
Shakur traveled across the U.S., making guest appearances and delivering lectures. On February 6, 2009, she gave the keynote address for Vanderbilt University's Commemoration for Black History Month. She shared with people her experiences and ways in which to overcome loss.
Shakur later married Gust Davis.
Shakur died at a hospital in Greenbrae, California, at around 10:28 p.m. on May 2, 2016, after going into cardiac arrest at her home earlier in the evening; she was 69. Her body was cremated.
Estate of Tupac Shakur
Exactly one year after Tupac's death, with revenue from his albums released posthumously, Shakur founded the Georgia-based Tupac Amaru Shakur Foundation to provide art programs for young people and the Tupac Amaru Shakur Center for the Arts in Stone Mountain, Georgia.
In 1997, she founded Amaru Entertainment, a holding company for all of Tupac's unreleased material. She also launched a fashion clothing line, Makaveli Branded in 2003.
In 2014, Shakur helped create the Broadway musical Holler If Ya Hear Me, which featured Tupac's music.
Shakur set up a trust to control all of Tupac's music rights which assigned music executive Tom Whalley as the executor of his estate following her death in 2016.
See also
In Spanish: Afeni Shakur para niños
- Tupac Shakur
- Assata Shakur
- Mopreme Shakur
