Essay About Tupac Amaru Shakur And Entire Edition Of The New York Times

Tupac Amaru Shakur
Essay title: Tupac Amaru Shakur
Born: June 16, 1971
Physical Departure: September 13,1996
Tupac Amaru was named after an Inca Chief, it’s meaning is shining serpent. Tupac
Amaru Shakur grew up around many influential leaders of the Black Panther Party.
His mother, born Alice Faye Williams, who later changed her name to Afeni Shakur,
was a section leader in the Black Panther Party. The Black Panther Party spurn from
a movement to re-open the New York Public Schools, feed school kids breakfast and
gain equal civil rights for African Americans.
Tupac was born on June 16, 1971, one month prior to his birth, a pregnant Afeni had
just defended herself in court and been acquitted of 156 counts charged against her
and other members of the Black Panther Party-called the Panther 21. Living in the
Bronx, she found steady work as a paralegal and raised her son to respect the value
of obtaining knowledge.
From childhood, everyone called him the “Black Prince.” For misbehaving, he had to
read an entire edition of The New York Times. When he was two, his sister, Sekyiwa,
was born. Her father, Mutulu, was a Black Panther who, a few months before her birth,
had been sentenced to sixty years for a fatal armored car robbery and had to leave
the family.
Mutulu went away, the family experienced hard times. No matter where they movedthe
Bronx, Harlem, with family-Tupac was distressed. “I remember crying all the time.
My major thing growing up was I couldnt fit in. Because I was grew up everywhere. I
didnt have any buddies that I grew up with.”
As time passed, the issue of his father tormented him. He felt “unmanly,” he said.
Then his cousins started saying he had an effeminate face. “I dont know. I just didnt
feel hard.”
The loneliness began to wear on him. He retreated into writing love songs and poetry.
“I remember I had a book like a diary. And in that book I said I was going to be
famous.” He wanted to be an actor. Acting was an escape from the reality of life. He
was good at it, eager to leave his tough times behind. “The reason why I could get into
acting was because it takes nothing to get out of who I am and go into somebody
else.”
His mother enrolled him in the 127th Street Ensemble, a theater group in the Harlem
section of Manhattan, where he landed his first role at age twelve, that of Travis in A
Raisin in the Sun. “I lay on a couch and played sleep for the first scene. Then I woke
up and I was the only person onstage. I can remember thinking, “This is the best shit
in the world!” That got me real high. I was learning a secret: This is what my cousins
cant do.”
In Baltimore, at age fifteen, he fell into rap; he started writing lyrics, walking with a
swagger, and milking his background in New York for all it was worth. People in small
towns feared the Big Apples reputation; he called himself MC New York and made
people think he was a tough guy.
He enrolled in the illustrious Baltimore School for the Arts, where he studied acting
and ballet with white kids and finally felt “in touch” with himself. “Them white kids had
things we never seen,” he said. “That was the first time I saw there was white people
who you could get along with. Before that, I just believed what everyone