Biography
Afeni Shakur, born Alice Faye Williams in Lumberton, North Carolina in 1947, was a leader of the New York chapter of the Black Panther Party and one of the most prominent women defendants of the postwar Black liberation prosecutions. On April 2, 1969, she was arrested with twenty other New York Panthers in the case that became known as the Panther 21 — accused of conspiring to bomb New York police stations, a railroad station, and Manhattan department stores. She was held without bail at the Womens House of Detention in Greenwich Village for eleven months before being released on bond in February 1971. She was pregnant during her detention and gave birth to her son, the rapper Tupac Shakur, on June 16, 1971 — one month after she and the rest of the Panther 21 were acquitted on all 156 counts by a New York jury after a record-long deliberation of less than 45 minutes.
She represented herself at portions of the Panther 21 trial. After her release she remained politically active for decades, working in legal reform and prisoner support, and after her sons death in 1996 she founded the Tupac Amaru Shakur Foundation. She died on May 2, 2016.
