On September 13, 1996, 7 days after being shot while leaving a Mike Tyson fight in Las Vegas, Tupac Amaru Shakur became hip-hop's first martyr. At 25, 2pac and his music had frequently focused on his own death, but after cheating it once, he was not so lucky the second time, and rap's own Malcolm X was silenced.
             By the time Tupac was born on June 16, 1971, his mother, Afeni Shakur, a member of the Black Panthers, had already defended herself in court and been acquitted on 156 counts. Living in the Bronx, she found steady work as a paralegal and tried to raise her son to respect the value of an education. Tupac's biological father, Billy Garland, was a truck driver who left before he was born. Afeni soon had another child with another member of the Black Panther Party, Mutulu Shakur. However, a few months before the birth of the girl, Mutulu was sentenced to 60 years in prison for a fatal armored car robbery.
             With Mutulu away, the family experienced hard times. No matter where they moved-the Bronx, Harlem, homeless shelters-Tupac was troubled. As time passed, the issue of his father tormented him. The loneliness began to wear on him. He retreated into writing love songs and poetry. His mother enrolled him in the 127th Street Ensemble, a theater group in the impoverished Harlem section of Manhattan, where he landed his first role at age twelve, that of Travis in A Raisin in the Sun. Soon after, however, his mother tried to take a step in the right direction by moving the family to Baltimore.
             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. 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. He enrolled in the illustrious Baltimore School for the Arts, where he studied acting and ballet with white kids and finally felt ...