Revolution in the Blood

Tupac Amaru Shakur was born into a revolutionary family. His mother, Afeni Shakur, was a prominent member of the Black Panther Party and one of the “Panther 21” activists charged with conspiring to bomb New York landmarks.

In fact, it was while she was pregnant with Tupac that Afeni deftly represented herself in the Panther 21 trial. On May 12, 1971, she and her comrades won acquittal on all 156 counts with which they had been charged. A month later, Tupac was born, on June 16 in New York City.

At birth, he was named Lesane Parish Crook. However, a few days later, Afeni renamed him after Tupac Amaru II, the eighteenth-century indigenous Peruvian leader who led an uprising against Spanish colonizers. “I wanted him to know he was part of a world culture and not just from a neighborhood,” Afeni said. “I wanted him to have the name of revolutionary, indigenous people in the world.”

Long before he ever picked up a mic, Tupac was steeped in the language of liberation, solidarity, and socialist struggle — not in abstract, academic terms, but as part of a living, breathing movement. His life unfolded within a militant black Marxist tradition forged under police repression, FBI surveillance, and community survival.

That inheritance ran deep in his extended family, too. His godmother, Assata Shakur, was also a former Panther and member of the Black Liberation Army who was convicted of killing a New Jersey state trooper in 1973 before escaping prison and receiving asylum in Cuba. In 2013, Assata became the first woman to be placed on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list. Her autobiography is a vital piece of reading.

Tupac’s stepfather, Mutulu Shakur, a revolutionary healer and acupuncturist, helped plan Assata’s escape from prison, before later being imprisoned himself. Mutulu spent over thirty-six years in jail and was finally released in December 2022 on parole due to his deteriorating medical condition. He died eight months later.

In this environment, condemned to repression throughout his life, political education and class consciousness flowed through Tupac’s veins. He was inspired by Malcolm X and joined the Young Communist League as a teenager while being absorbed by the everyday humiliations of second-class citizenship. This foundation defined his music. On “Words of Wisdom,” from his 1991 debut 2Pacalypse Now, he raps:

No Malcolm X in my history text, why’s that?

’Cause he tried to educate and liberate all Blacks

Why is Martin Luther King in my book each week?

He told Blacks, if they get smacked, turn the other cheek

Tupac had seen firsthand how the US government criminalized black radicalism. He knew the names and fates of those who dared to dream of liberation. His music, later celebrated for its emotional depth and street realism, was a continuation of that revolutionary lineage for the era of Reaganomics, mass incarceration, and neoliberal abandonment.

Before the celebrity and spectacle, Tupac was a child of the movement. Afeni and Mutulu had taught him that the system was designed to kill him. He subsequently watched his mother succumb to crack addiction, while his stepfather was sent to prison. This legacy of black radical socialism and loss would be the foundation of everything that followed.

Music as Class Warfare

If Tupac inherited a revolutionary worldview from his family, his weapon for expressing it was through music. A track like “Brenda’s Got a Baby,” also from 2Pacalypse Now, is a direct commentary on how capitalism and patriarchy abandon working-class black women. The story of a twelve-year-old girl impregnated by her cousin, forced to give birth, and eventually killed is one of structural racism.

In this ballad, Tupac is explicit about Brenda’s poverty, her lack of access to resources, and the callousness of a society that turns its back on its most vulnerable. The indictment isn’t directed against Brenda, but against the society that abandons her and lets her die: “Prostitute, found slain, and Brenda’s her name. She’s got a baby.”

Similarly, “Keep Ya Head Up,” from his second album, Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z., insists on dignity for black women in the face of misogyny and abandonment. It became a generational anthem.

These songs reveal the sharpness of Tupac’s perception and the compassion with which he wrote. He was a pioneering force, inspiring scores of rappers to write similarly raw and socially attuned music. “I think the shit that I say, no one else says,” he said in a 1995 interview with the LA Times. “Who was writing about Black women before ‘Keep Ya Head Up’? Now everybody got a song about Black women.”

He distilled his worldview bluntly, and with the clarity and rage that defined the man. “There’s no way that these people [celebrities] should own planes when there are people who don’t have houses,” he famously remarked:

You only need one house. And if you only got two kids, can you just keep it to two rooms? I mean why have 52 rooms and you know there’s somebody with no room? It just don’t make sense to me.

By the mid-1990s, even as his life became entangled with the spectacle of the music industry and the violence of street politics, Tupac’s analysis only deepened. On “White Man’z World” from his 1996 album The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory — recorded only a month before he was killed — Tupac addresses black prisoners and all men and women struggling under systemic inequality.

He returned time and again to the themes of class inequality, wealth redistribution, and the moral bankruptcy of capitalism. He described the police as an occupying army in black neighborhoods, spoke of prisons as modern-day plantations, and decried the horrors to which US imperialism subjected the Global South. Despite his popularity, he remained angry, impatient, and unrelenting in his belief that another world was possible.

Perhaps the clearest distillation of his class politics came posthumously, with “Changes,” one of his most recognizable songs, built around a haunting sample from Bruce Hornsby’s “The Way It Is.” Tupac raps about police brutality, the war on drugs, systemic racism, and wealth inequality:

Instead of war on poverty

They got a war on drugs so the police can bother me

“Changes” is a demand for solidarity across race and class, and a call to turn society’s energy from war and repression toward justice and equality. It’s socialism refracted through hip-hop, and a fitting anthem by which to remember Tupac’s revolutionary spirit.

What made him radical was his ability to reach those who had never read Karl Marx or Frantz Fanon. His songs didn’t just chronicle injustice; they also mobilized anger, consciousness, and hope for millions, from Harlem to Soweto, who had been denied education by a white supremacist order. For many, Tupac was their first encounter with a politics of resistance.

Trapped in the Spectacle

As Tupac rose to fame, he inherited not only his family’s revolutionary legacy but also the repressive framework that had stalked them. For him, this took the form of “hip-hop task forces,” police dossiers, and constant field surveillance. At the same time, Tupac was also being pulled into another trap: the media spectacle of East Coast versus West Coast rap.

What was, at its core, a petty industry feud with The Notorious B.I.G. and Bad Boy Records became a lethal diversion, reframing Tupac not as a political figure but as a gangster caricature. The media obsessed over his legal troubles, his conflicts with The Notorious B.I.G., and his supposed descent into nihilism. What disappeared in the coverage was his radical message about poverty, racism, and the carceral state.

As with the Panthers before him, the easiest way to disarm Tupac was to criminalize him, to strip his politics of legitimacy by recasting him as a reckless, violent, and self-destructive figure. The corporate music industry played its part, amplifying the sensationalism while profiting off his image. By the time he was gunned down in Las Vegas in 1996, the story of Tupac the revolutionary had been almost entirely eclipsed by the spectacle of Tupac the outlaw. For many, this remains the case today.

Yet for those who listened closely, the political core never disappeared. His songs, interviews, and affiliations all pointed to a young black artist who understood the system’s playbook and struggled, often desperately, against it. That struggle continued to define the final years of his life.

In many ways, Tupac’s words, image, and spirit have only grown louder in death. Murals of him adorn walls across the globe. His lyrics continue to speak to millions, often resurfacing in moments of protest. Despite the frequent misrepresentation of his life, for countless people in the Global South as well as in the United States, Tupac is remembered not simply as a rapper but as a revolutionary voice.

In hip-hop, his influence is immeasurable, too. Peruvian American rapper Immortal Technique channels Tupac’s urgency and militant politics in his searing indictments of capitalism and imperialism. Kendrick Lamar invokes him explicitly, including in “Mortal Man,” the closing track of To Pimp a Butterfly, which ends with an imagined dialogue between Kendrick and Tupac, crafted from a 1994 interview.

For these artists, as well as countless others who grew up hearing him articulate rage and love in equal measure, Tupac became a political lodestar. When Dead Prez declared, “It’s bigger than hip-hop” in 1999, they were echoing Tupac’s conviction that music was a powerful tool for political education.

A Comrade in Struggle

The industry has tried to commodify him into a poster, a hologram, a brand. But the countless artists Tupac inspired keep his fire alive, reminding us he was not just an icon but a comrade in struggle, someone who stood at the nexus of art and struggle, demonstrating how culture could give voice to the voiceless while indicting those in power.

His words remain urgent. “They got money for war but can’t feed the poor,” he rapped in “Keep Ya Head Up,” a line that cuts especially deep today, when the United States provides billions in military aid to Israel for its genocidal onslaught against Gaza’s women, children, and journalists, while over thirty million Americans live in poverty.

Make no mistake, Tupac was far from perfect. His life was also riddled with contradictions. His alignment with Suge Knight and Death Row Records pulled him into the toxic spectacle of the East Coast–West Coast feud, where posturing and cycles of violence often overshadowed the revolutionary commitments that had once defined him.

The same man who wrote “Keep Ya Head Up,” could also produce lyrics that lapsed into misogyny. He was also once convicted of sexual abuse, and while he maintained his innocence, he did admit to shame about the circumstances that brought about that conviction.

If we are to honor his legacy, it should not be with mere platitudes, nor by canonizing him as a saint who could do no wrong. Instead, we should embrace the revolutionary fervor that defined his life and music: the unapologetic demand for liberation.