Changes
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Changes

An Oral History of Tupac Shakur

Sheldon Pearce

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eBook - ePub

Changes

An Oral History of Tupac Shakur

Sheldon Pearce

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About This Book

A New Yorker writer's intimate, revealing account of Tupac Shakur's life and legacy, timed to the fiftieth anniversary of his birth and twenty-fifth anniversary of his death. In the summer of 2020, Tupac Shakur's single "Changes" became an anthem for the worldwide protests against the murder of George Floyd. The song became so popular, in fact, it was vaulted back onto the iTunes charts more than twenty years after its release—making it clear that Tupac's music and the way it addresses systemic racism, police brutality, mass incarceration, income inequality, and a failing education system is just as important now as it was back then.In Changes, published to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of Tupac's birth and twenty-fifth anniversary of his death, Sheldon Pearce offers one of the most thoughtful and comprehensive accounts yet of the artist's life and legacy. Pearce, an editor and writer at The New Yorker, interviews dozens who knew Tupac throughout various phases of his life. While there are plenty of bold-faced names, the book focuses on the individuals who are lesser known and offer fresh stories and rare insight. Among these are the actor who costarred with him in a Harlem production of A Raisin in the Sun when he was twelve years old, the high school drama teacher who recognized and nurtured his talent, the music industry veteran who helped him develop a nonprofit devoted to helping young artists, the Death Row Records executive who has never before spoken on the record, and dozens of others. Meticulously woven together by Pearce, their voices combine to portray Tupac in all his complexity and contradiction.This remarkable book illustrates not only how he changed during his brief twenty-five years on this planet, but how he forever changed the world.

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Information

Year
2021
ISBN
9781982170486

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 borrowing 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 time. 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.
But then, on a more serious note, he later had a birthday and we collected money for his birthday, so he could get a birthday gift. Everybody in the company chipped in. Afeni was going through her problems with substances at that time, and so he took that money and he went grocery shopping for his family. He was selfless like that. He wasn’t thinking about himself, he was thinking about his family, his sister, his mama.
SHARONDA DAVILA-IRVING We hung out and we had fun, but because we didn’t get to see each other every day, when we did, it would be a whole occasion for me and him. My aunt would either get me or get him and bring them over or whatever. But it would be like a whole day or a whole weekend of stuff; it would be like an adventure. We would always make time to catch up around what was going on in our little preteen lives. For us, it was deep because we were immersed in a community with family members who were doing a lot of social stuff. And also, as we got older, times were changing. And as times changed, the movement changed, and as the movement changed, our experiences as young people changed. We did a lot of talking around how shit was different.
He was protective of the people that he loved. I think that he understood that the journey that he was on was going to be something that would be big enough to really create a community or continue a community.
LEVY LEE SIMON I think that being a part of the ensemble helped shape him. But I also think it had to do with growing up in New York City and having to be the man ...

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