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.
The Black Panther reported that Joan Bird (printed Byrd) and Afeni Shakur were returned to maximum-security confinement on February 8, 1971 after Michael Tabor and Richard Moore failed to appear in the Panther 21 trial. It described Shakur as four months pregnant. The women’s detention is distinct from the two absent defendants’ flight. The Black Panther, February 13, 1971, original PDF page 11. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/black-panther/06%20no%203%201-20%20feb%2013%201971.pdf#page=11
The Black Panther, June 7, 1969: Her jail letter on printed page 10, signed Afeni O. Shakur, urges Panthers to explain their ten-point program and serve the community. She writes of seventy years she is facing. This is contemporary personal correspondence from confinement and a threatened exposure, not an imposed seventy-year sentence or completed term. Source: https://washingtonareaspark.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/1969-06-07-black-panther-vol-3-no-7.pdf#page=9
The October 22, 1970 Daily Iowan, reprinting The Guardian, reports that Afeni Shakur was returned to prison on September 30 after Judge John Murtagh revoked her bail when she arrived forty minutes late for court. It records her explanation that a false report of her mother’s serious illness had sent her to the hospital. This contemporary report supplies an additional remand observation during the Panther 21 prosecution, before the separate February 1971 remand already recorded. It does not establish how long this September 1970 detention continued or an actual discharge date, so no continuous interval or additional custody total is inferred.
The Daily Iowan, October 22, 1970, page 2, reprinting The Guardian.
