Only God Can Judge Me

The book traces the life of Tupac Amaru Shakur from his origins in Black Panther radicalism to his murder at twenty-five.

Tupac's mother, born Alice Faye Williams in rural Lumberton, North Carolina, grew up poor and Black in the Jim Crow South. After relocating to the South Bronx, she dropped out of school, joined a street gang, and used drugs before joining the Black Panther Party in 1967. She took the name Afeni and married Lumumba Shakur, the Harlem Panther section leader. In April 1969, Afeni was arrested as part of the "Panther 21," a group charged with conspiring to bomb New York City landmarks. Released on bail, she began an affair with Billy Garland, a fellow Panther, and became pregnant. When her bail was revoked in February 1971, Afeni returned to jail five months pregnant and served as her own attorney. On May 13, 1971, after ninety minutes of deliberation, the jury acquitted all defendants. Five weeks later, she gave birth to a son she named Tupac Amaru Shakur, after Túpac Amaru, an Incan ruler executed by Spanish colonists for resisting conquest.

Tupac's childhood was defined by instability. Afeni had no money, no stable housing, and a deepening dependence on cocaine, LSD, and alcohol. The family bounced between relatives' apartments, sometimes attending six or seven schools in a single year. Around 1975, Afeni had a daughter, Sekyiwa ("Set"), with Mutulu Shakur, a Black radical. In 1981, Mutulu went on the run after a deadly armored truck robbery and landed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List. Afeni took up with a Harlem gangster who introduced her to crack cocaine.

Despite the chaos, Tupac discovered performance on the stoops of the Bronx, freestyling under the name MC New York. At thirteen, he performed in A Raisin in the Sun at Harlem's Apollo Theater. After the family relocated to Baltimore in 1984, settling in a row house with no heat, Tupac enrolled at the Baltimore School for the Arts (BSA), a tuition-free magnet school. BSA became an oasis where the theater program taught him to channel vulnerability into art. He befriended fellow student Jada Pinkett and was described by peers as comfortable expressing femininity, wearing nail polish and pink eye shadow. His home life remained dire; on one occasion, classmates found Afeni smoking crack.

In 1988, Afeni uprooted the family to Marin City, California, a public housing community north of San Francisco. Tupac moved in with Demetrius Striplin, a talented DJ, and the two created music together. After losing a freestyle battle to a local teenager, Tupac spent a week observing a neighborhood drug kingpin and returned with "Dayz of a Criminal," a song marking his artistic shift to visceral street storytelling.

Leila Steinberg, a social justice organizer, became Tupac's first manager and connected him to Digital Underground, a Bay Area hip-hop group. Tupac joined the group's national tour as a roadie and hype man and made his television debut on The Arsenio Hall Show in May 1990. That July, Tupac was devastated when dancer Troy Dixon, a close friend, died in a backstage accident. He earned his first solo verse on "Same Song" and landed the role of Bishop in the film Juice (1992) after an electrifying audition. Off set, Tupac began absorbing Bishop's aggression into his own persona.

His debut album, 2Pacalypse Now (October 17, 1991), received a muted reception, though "Brenda's Got a Baby," inspired by a newspaper article about a twelve-year-old who abandoned her newborn, became his first recognized track. Juice opened to strong reception and established Tupac as a screen presence. Controversy followed when a Texas highway patrolman was killed and a 2Pacalypse Now cassette was found in the suspect's car; Vice President Dan Quayle demanded the album be banned.

Violence increasingly shadowed Tupac's rise. On August 22, 1992, at a festival in Marin City, a member of Tupac's entourage fired a gun and a stray bullet killed six-year-old Qa'id Mansour Walker-Teal. Tupac assaulted a limousine driver and director Allen Hughes. He got THUG LIFE, a personal acronym for "The Hate U Give Little Infants Fucks Everybody," tattooed across his stomach. After his distributor refused to release his second album for glorifying violence against police, Tupac salvaged a few tracks as Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z..., which produced the hits "Keep Ya Head Up" and "I Get Around." In October 1993, he shot two off-duty police officers who were beating a Black man outside his Atlanta hotel; charges were dropped when the officers were found to have carried stolen guns. The following month, he was charged with sexual abuse after a woman alleged he held her down while others assaulted her in his New York hotel suite. Tupac claimed he froze and left the room.

In the early morning hours of November 30, 1994, Tupac was ambushed and shot in the lobby of Quad Recording Studios in Manhattan. He was hit three times, robbed of his jewelry, and rushed to surgery. Upstairs, the Notorious B.I.G. (Biggie Smalls), a prominent New York rapper, and Sean "Puffy" Combs, Biggie's manager and head of Bad Boy Entertainment, were present. The next morning, Tupac arrived at court in a wheelchair and was convicted of sexual abuse, receiving a sentence of one and a half to four and a half years.

At Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York, sobriety sharpened Tupac's mind. He read voraciously, including Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince, and filled notebooks with lyrics. Me Against the World debuted at number 1 on the Billboard 200, making him the first artist to top the chart while incarcerated, and "Dear Mama" became one of hip-hop's most iconic songs. He became convinced Biggie had orchestrated the Quad shooting, despite evidence to the contrary. Suge Knight, CEO of Death Row Records, a West Coast hip-hop label, courted Tupac with gifts and secured his signature on a three-album contract. The $1.4 million bail was funded as an advance on Tupac's future earnings; he effectively paid his own way out.

Released on October 13, 1995, Tupac recorded at a frenetic pace. His first studio night produced "Ambitionz az a Ridah" and "I Ain't Mad at Cha," and the single "California Love" became a hip-hop anthem. All Eyez on Me, released February 13, 1996, debuted at number 1 with 566,000 first-week sales. Behind the bravado, Tupac suffered from night terrors, and Death Row deducted expenses from his earnings, leaving him with little actual wealth. He privately told crew members he wanted to escape the label. He became engaged to Kidada Jones, daughter of Quincy Jones. The war with Biggie escalated when Tupac recorded "Hit 'Em Up," a diss track that fueled a media firestorm around the "East vs. West" hip-hop rivalry.

On September 7, 1996, Tupac traveled to Las Vegas for the Mike Tyson fight at the MGM Grand. After the bout, he punched Orlando Anderson, a member of the South Side Compton Crips gang, on the casino floor. That night, as Tupac rode in Knight's BMW, a white Cadillac pulled alongside at a red light and Anderson fired through the window, hitting Tupac four times. Police found Tupac slumped and bleeding. Asked who shot him, he uttered his final conscious words: "Fuck you."

On September 13, 1996, after six days on life support, Tupac Amaru Shakur died at twenty-five. His sister Set said he died feeling alone, with no protection and no safe harbors. The book reveals that, contrary to popular belief, the majority of Tupac's ashes were not scattered in the Pacific but buried by Afeni beneath a headstone in Lumberton, North Carolina. His legacy endures through more than seventy-five million albums sold and a global cultural presence that continues to speak for marginalized people.