Afeni Shakur, former Black Panther and mother of late rapper Tupac Shakur, came to speak at Hopkins last Thursday as part of the MSE Symposium lecture series.
Shakur opened by saying, "I'm not an entertainer," and read an excerpt from her new biography, written by Jasmine Guy and the excerpt was taken from the last five pages of the book.
Following this reading, Shakur looked out at the audience and said, "You all look pretty sad, but I have to tell you something: I'm a happy person." This did seem to be reflective of Shakur's attitude throughout the lecture --- most of the talk was centered around her upbeat attitude toward life, despite her past violent extremist views, and her hope for our generation's future.
Shakur discussed a number of different topics throughout the course of her talk. One main issue she brought up her attempt to, as she put it, continue her son's good works after his death in 1996. She was not explicit as to what good works Tupac himself had been involved in while alive, or to what extent the projects she has pursued reflect any goals for social change Tupac might have possessed.
Nevertheless, she made it quite clear that her activities for the past 10 years have been centered around controlling her son's business -- Tupac has released a post humus CD each year since his death -- and trying to contribute positively to society. "My tradition is to give back to the community."
From what she said, it seemed obvious that her actions have been inspired, in large part, by her desire to contradict what she referred to as the media's vilification of her son.
She went on to further discuss her handling of Tupac's legacy. "One of the things I learned from my son was an appreciation for business. We take the business and money and give back to the community," she said.
Specifically, Afeni Shakur has used the proceeds from Tupac's post-mortem earnings to build the Tupac Amar Shakur Center for the Arts, located in Stone Mountain, Ga. It is a center for "conflict resolution" and a place for young people to express their artistic creativity.
Shakur spent a significant amount of time discussing her belief that society today has been overly inundated with violence and hatred. Shakur herself was, in her youth, a Black Panther, but admitted during the talk that she regrets having been such a violently angry youth. "I spent the first 50 years of my life angry -- angry about a lot of things that are wrong in this society," Shakur said.
"Violence perpetuates violence; one of us has got to try another way," she said.
According to Shakur, in the years following her son's death she has made peace with the world around her. "The gift that I have been given is a new outlook on life."
In an attempt to exemplify her point, Shakur asked audience members to raise their hands if they knew anybody who had committed suicide, saying, "Our young people have lost hope for a future." The audience was generally reluctant to answer this question, and few people raised their hands.
Shakur then accused the Hopkins population of lying, and asked the audience again to raise their hands if they knew anybody who had been murdered. The response was equally lackluster.
According to Shakur, at other universities, significant portions of the audience had replied in the affirmative to both questions, and she suspected that Hopkins students were simply concealing the truth of their familiarity with suicide and homicide victims in an attempt to make the University look better. "It's difficult talking to you," she said, "because you don't tell the truth."
Shakur's speech was heavily reliant on her belief that turning towards religion saved her life -- early on in her speech she said that anger lead her to nothing but, "a crack pipe, a jail cell." During the question-and-answer session following her speech she talked at some length about how her religious epiphany during that period of her life changed her entire future.
"When I was in trouble," she said, referring to the period of her life in which she was pregnant in prison pending charges related to her activities with the black panthers, "the salvation of Jesus Christ carried me through."
