Uploaded September 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
📷 🎤 Join us for a book talk on Words for My Comrades: A Political History of Tupac Shakur on the 29th anniversary of his death. We’ll be joined by the author and music journalist Dean Van Nguyen to discuss the icon, rapper, and son of a Black Panther whose artistic and political legacy still resonates today.
✊🏾 Before his murder at age twenty-five, Tupac Shakur rose to staggering artistic heights as the preeminent storyteller of the 1990s, building, in the process, one of the most iconic public personas of the last half century. Using oral histories from conversations with the people who directly witnessed Tupac’s life and career, Van Nguyen demonstrates how Tupac became one of the most enduring musical legends in hip-hop history, and how intimately his name is threaded with the legacy of Black Panther politics—including how he and Afeni Shakur, his mother and a Panther herself, championed the disenfranchised in distinct ways.
📙 Words for My Comrades is the story of how the energy of the Black political movement was subsumed by culture, and how America produced two of its most iconic, enduring revolutionaries.
📷 🎤 Join us for a book talk on Words for My Comrades: A Political History of Tupac Shakur on the 29th anniversary of his death. We’ll be joined by the author and music journalist Dean Van Nguyen to discuss the icon, rapper, and son of a Black Panther whose artistic and political legacy still resonates today.
✊🏾 Before his murder at age twenty-five, Tupac Shakur rose to staggering artistic heights as the preeminent storyteller of the 1990s, building, in the process, one of the most iconic public personas of the last half century. Using oral histories from conversations with the people who directly witnessed Tupac’s life and career, Van Nguyen demonstrates how Tupac became one of the most enduring musical legends in hip-hop history, and how intimately his name is threaded with the legacy of Black Panther politics—including how he and Afeni Shakur, his mother and a Panther herself, championed the disenfranchised in distinct ways.
📙 Words for My Comrades is the story of how the energy of the Black political movement was subsumed by culture, and how America produced two of its most iconic, enduring revolutionaries.
