Her drug use made her so oblivious to what was happening in her life that when someone told her in 1990 that her son — then on the precipice of becoming the biggest name in hip-hop — was going to be on “The Arsenio Hall Show,” she thought the person was lying, she said.
In the mid-1980s, she was homeless in
New York City and “messing around with cocaine,” she said. Despite the
drug use, she was still coherent enough to realize that Tupac would
become a product of the streets if she didn’t make different choices.
“I was running around with militants,
trying to be badder than I was, trying to stay up later than I should,”
she said in the 2005 interview.
She decided to enroll Tupac in the 127th
Street Ensemble, a Harlem theater group, something she called “the best
thing I could’ve done in my insanity.” They later moved to Maryland,
where she enrolled him in the Baltimore School for the Arts, and then to
a small town outside Sausalito.
It was there that Tupac confronted her about her cocaine use.
“He asked me if I could handle it, and I
said yeah because I’d been dipping and dabbing all my life,” she said
during the interview. “What pissed him off is that I lied to him.”
‘Pac told the local drug dealers not to
sell to her, she said, and he told his mother to get clean or to forget
about being involved in his life.
‘Arts can save children’
She got clean in 1991, she said, and
when her son was gunned down in Las Vegas in 1996, she resisted the
urges to delve back into her old bad habits. She instead founded Amaru
Entertainment to keep her son’s music alive.
Later, she realized that her life — mistake-ridden as it may have been — might serve as a lesson to others.
“Arts can save children, no matter
what’s going on in their homes,” she said. “I wasn’t available to do the
right things for my son. If not for the arts, my child would’ve been
lost.”
She provided the majority of the money
to begin the $4 million first phase of the arts center, while her Tupac
Amaru Shakur Foundation hosted poetry and theater camps for youngsters
in the Atlanta area.
“I learned that I can’t save the world,
but I can help a child at a time,” she said, pointing out that her new
life of philanthropy wouldn’t have been possible without the influence
of her legendary son. “God created a miracle with his spirit. I’m all
right with that.”
And as much as she credited Tupac with
inspiring her to help others, the tribulations she endured in raising
him weren’t lost on the multiplatinum artist. He regularly invoked her
in his music, perhaps never as directly as in his chart-topping song,
“Dear Mama.”
In it, he rapped, “And even as a crack
fiend, mama, you always was a black queen, mama/I finally understand,
for a woman it ain’t easy trying to raise a man/You always was
committed, a poor single mother on welfare, tell me how you did
it/There’s no way I can pay you back, but the plan is to show you that I
understand.”
Shakur Davis is survived by daughter Sekyiwa Shakur.
Kendrick Lamar remembers Tupac
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