GANG violence among blacks in the post-Black Panther period was mostly a construct of US federal agents who diverted the revolutionary activism of blacks into drug and territorial wars.
Tupac Shakur was instrumental in causing many gang truces and calming the east and west feuds.
As a result, Shakur, along with other former Black Panthers, was made president and guest of honour during many gang peace and truce events.
Because of such efforts, even other minority groups like the Latin Kings gang comprising Latinos became activists and these developments alarmed the white authorities.
Shakur’s legal problems multiplied.
On one occasion in Atlanta, he shot two cops on their rear ends, but was acquitted because he acted in self-defense.
A gang of white people had attacked his car without provocation or warning.
Shortly after this, two uniformed but off duty police officers broke his car window with the butt of a gun.
Shakur exited his vehicle and shot them.
The cops fled from the scene and this was an overwhelmingly obvious failed assassination attempt by the US authorities.
The guns the off-duty cops had, had been smuggled out of the evidence locker and were non-traceable.
They were called ‘throw away guns’ because they had no traceable serial numbers that could serve as evidence after being used.
Besides his own legal woes, Shakur also spent a great amount of cash in fighting for his Black Panther extended family.
Lawyer and bail money were common expenses that Shakur incurred regularly.
Meanwhile, his popularity was growing and this led the US authorities to try and infiltrate Shakur’s entourage.
He was signed to a multi-million-dollar record label called Interscope.
He was told Danielle, the daughter of Interscope co-owner, Ted Field, heard and liked Shakur’s first music project and endorsed him.
A music promoter called Haitian Jack would also appear in Shakur’s life and had a very flamboyant lifestyle.
He had money, music equipment and connections who he offered to Shakur as long as they got into business together.
One day Jack introduced a young woman to Shakur and they began seeing each other occasionally.
In November of 1993, Ayanna Jackson, who is the woman in question, accused Shakur and Jack for first degree sexual abuse.
Shakur pleaded not guilty.
The case would take about a year before the verdict was reached.
On November 29 1994, a day before the trial with the verdict, Shakur was shot five times by three men in a lobby in Manhattan while he was on his way to a studio upstairs to see fellow rapper and friend Christopher ‘Biggie’ Wallace.
Two of the bullets hit his head and the rest his body.
Shakur survived yet again and would attend his trial the next day, regardless of his injuries because he was confident in his innocence.
Shakur was found not guilty of many of the charges which included sodomy and rape after the evidence was assessed.
However, he was found guilty of touching a woman’s bottom against her will.
For this he was handed down a sentence of one-and-a-half to four-and-a-half years in a maximum security prison.
Eventually Shakur would find out that Jack was an informant to the FBI and that is where he was getting his financial backing from.
It was Jack who had set the whole thing up and although he was also charged, Jack was only given two misdemeanors for not paying a parking ticket and no jail time.
If Shakur was to be found guilty of all the charges, he was to serve a long-term prison sentence of 15 years and up.
The fact that someone organised and tried to assassinate Shakur hours before his trial suggests that a party which initially sort to put him away through long-term imprisonment was now trying to assassinate him possibly after knowing that the trial would give him a shorter sentence than the party desired.
In a long recorded phone conversation with his sister Sekyiwa Shakur, Tupac was convinced that he had been set up in both the alleged rape case and the assassination attempt against his life.
The violent methods of silencing Shakur clearly came after the plotter and attacker realised that locking him up for a long time was not likely to happen.
All this hints to US authority involvement and as Tupac Shakur said to his sister: “The girl that did this rape case is hooked up with the people who shot me.
“It was all connected, it was a big plan.”
Similar tactics were used to dismantle earlier black movements led by the likes of Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X and the Black Panthers.
In prison, Shakur was treated very badly by the guards, but respected by the black inmates for his revolutionary activity.
He succumbed to systematic abuse by the guards.
For example, they would perform rectal examinations called cavity searches with gloved fingers to check for drug smuggling whenever Shakur and the rest of the inmates were visited.
He was placed in this maximum security prison to make him frustrated.
Rumours were also generated while he was in prison, about who set him up to get shot and also arrested and this caused him to become paranoid.
Meanwhile, in his absence, the US authorities were undoing the East and West truces that Shakur and the former Panthers had worked so hard to promote.
They were setting up an atmosphere that would cause the splitting of past alliances into rivalries through rumour-mongering; a tactic that had been effective in dismantling the Black Panthers.
Because Shakur had been shot in Manhattan and Wallace was expecting him, rumours started going out that it was Wallace who was behind his shooting.
Wallace dismissed these claims as false and maintained his innocence.
At the same time, Suge Knight, who was running an LA record label called Death Row was trying to sign Shakur to his label.
To the surprise of Shakur, Interscope co-owner Dave Kenner was for the idea and encouraged Shakur to join Death Row Records.
It would eventually be found out that Death Row Records was full of covet (undercover) agents and was the tool fashioned to accelerate Shakur’s demise.
For this reason, even Interscope Records did not fight to retain Shakur who still scored high album sales despite his problems.
Shakur accepted and signed to Death Row Records for a release of three albums.
Knight had once paid Shakur a ridiculously high amount of cash for a single track and these incentives attracted him to the label which also paid his bail of US$1,4 million shortly after they signed him.