In addition, he was the subject of two wrongful-death lawsuits, one involving a six-year-old boy who was killed after getting caught in gang-war crossfire between Shakur's gang and a rival group. I was starting to feel like I really wanted to be an artist.īy the time he was twenty, Shakur had been arrested eight times, even serving eight months in prison after being convicted of sexual abuse.
Before that, I just believed what everyone else said: They was devils. "That was the first time I saw there was white people who you could get along with. "Them white kids had things we never seen," he said. 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. People in small towns feared the Big Apple's reputation he called himself MC New York and made people think he was a tough guy. 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. "The reason why I could get into acting was because it takes nothin' to get out of who I am and go into somebody else." He was good at it, eager to leave his crummy family behind. Acting was an escape from his dismal life. And in that book I said I was going to be famous." He wanted to be an actor. He retreated into writing love songs and poetry.
I could do all the things my mother could give me, but she couldn't give me nothing else.” The loneliness began to wear on him. Then his cousins started saying he had an effeminate face. I didn't have no buddies that I grew up with."Īs time passed, the issue of his father tormented him. My major thing growing up was I couldn't fit in. No matter where they moved-the Bronx, Harlem, homeless shelters-Tupac was distressed. With Mutulu (Stepfather) away, the family experienced hard times. This child's 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. It was just some rough times.” When he was two, his sister, Sekyiwa, was born. "She just told me, 'I don't know who your daddy is.' It wasn't like she was a slut or nothin'. But his mother Afeni had no answer when he asked about his daddy. From childhood, everyone called him the "Black Prince." For misbehaving, he had to read an entire edition of The New York Times.