By Larry Clinton, Sausalito Historical Society
Recent reports of the arrest of a suspect in the 1996 murder of Tupac Shakur reminded me of the iconic rapper’s local routes.
STUDIO PUBLICITY STILL
Tupac Shakur at the height of his fame.
The Shakur family lived in Marin City for a time, and Tupac attended Tamalpais High School in Mill
Valley.
The rapper made headlines in Marin in 1992 when his entourage was involved in a fight at a Marin City festival that led to the death of a 6-year-old boy. Qa'id Walker-Teal, of Marin City, was in the crowd at the city's 50th anniversary festival when he was struck in the head by a stray bullet fired during the fight between Shakur's entourage and a group of Marin City men. The killer has never been identified.
According to a 2019 profile in Marin Magazine, Shakur was born in New York and then moved to Baltimore with his mother Afeni, a member of the Black Panther Party. Afeni then “arranged for a fellow Panther to watch over Tupac and his sister, Sekyiwa, in Marin City while she stayed in Baltimore and saved for another ticket to California. Eventually, Afeni would join her children, but by all accounts, Tupac’s time in Marin was one of struggle and extraordinary responsibility.
“In contrast, former Tamalpais High School teacher Barbara Owens has fond memories from Shakur’s brief period of time in her classroom. She says that it wasn’t until much later that she understood how much her student was truly dealing with.
“’I knew he was challenged,’ Owen says, ‘but I didn’t know how, in particular, other than by being an African American student from Marin City at a predominantly white school.’”
In his 2001 book on Shakur, Holler If You Hear Me, author Michael Eric Dyson describes how Afeni’s crack addiction was exacerbated by her move to Marin City, noting that it put her “in dangerous proximity to the drug’s infamous center of distribution in Northern California’s black ghettos.” At some point, the situation with his mother got so bad that Tupac moved out to live with friends in an abandoned apartment. He also started selling crack to afford food. Despite these substantial hardships, Shakur’s grades apparently never slipped.
Barbara Owens noted that one of her favorite memories will always be of the time she asked Shakur to read some Shakespeare aloud. “I asked him to take the part of Othello,” she says. “All of the students read the play aloud and he took that part. It was absolutely, hands down, one of the most stellar performances of Shakespeare, let alone Othello, that I have ever heard.”
Eventually, Shakur dropped out of Tamalpais High and moved to Oakland. in 1989, he attended a poetry class taught by Leila Steinberg, who became a mentor. Steinberg introduced him to Atron Gregory. The two would go on to work together extensively, with Gregory serving as a manager and executive producer as Shakur began his ascent to superstardom.
The Associated Press recently recounted the details of Shakur's death:
“Prosecutors allege Shakur’s killing stemmed from a rivalry and competition for dominance in a musical genre that, at the time, was dubbed ‘gangsta rap.’ It pitted East Coast members of a Bloods gang sect associated with rap music mogul Marion ‘Suge’ Knight against West Coast members of a Crips sect that Davis has said he led in Compton, California.
“Tension escalated in Las Vegas the night of Sept. 7, 1996, when a brawl broke out between Shakur and Davis’ nephew, Orlando ‘Baby Lane’ Anderson, at the MGM Grand hotel-casino following a heavyweight championship boxing match won by Mike Tyson.
“’Knight and Shakur went to the fight, as did members of the South Side Crips,” prosecutor Marc DiGiacomo said last week in court. ‘And (Knight) brought his entourage, which involved Mob Piru gang members.’
“After the casino brawl, Knight drove a BMW with Shakur in the front passenger seat. The car was stopped at a red light near the Las Vegas Strip when a white Cadillac pulled up on the passenger side and gunfire erupted.
“Shot multiple times, Shakur died a week later at age 25.”
After he was murdered, his mother Afeni — who had inspired much of his work — managed his estate and music portfolio, eventually buying a number of floating homes at Kappas Marina. She died in Sausalito in 2016 at age 69.