An Amerikan Family: The Shakurs and the Nation They Created

By Santi Elijah Holley

A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' PICK

An NPR Best Book of the Year • Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year

Longlisted for the 2024 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence

"Magnificent…. A uniquely intimate history of Black liberation." – Los Angeles Times

The long overdue story of the Shakurs, persistent fighters in the U.S. struggle for racial justice, and one of the most prominent, influential and fiercely creative families in recent history

For over fifty years, the Shakurs have inspired generations of activists, scholars, and music fans. Many people are only familiar with Assata Shakur, the popular author and thinker, living for three decades in Cuban exile; or the late rapper Tupac. But the branches of the Shakur family tree extend widely, and the roots reach into the most furtive and hidden depths of the underground. Whether founding one of the most notorious Black Panther chapters in the country, spearheading community-based healthcare, or engaging in armed struggle with systemic oppression, the Shakurs were at the forefront.

They have been celebrated, glorified, and mythologized. They have been hailed as heroes, liberators, and freedom fighters. They have been condemned, pursued, imprisoned, exiled, and killed. But the true and complete story of the Shakur family—one of the most famous names in contemporary Black American history—has never been told.

An Amerikan Family is a history of the fight for Black liberation in the United States, as experienced and shaped by the Shakurs. It is a story of hope and betrayal, addiction and murder, persecution and revolution. Drawing from hundreds of hours of personal interviews, historical archives, court records, transcripts, and other rare documents, An Amerikan Family tells the complete and often devastating story of Black America’s long struggle for racial justice and the nation’s covert and repressive tactics to defeat that struggle. It is the story of a small but determined community, taking extreme, unconventional, and often perilous measures in the quest for freedom.

In short, the story of the Shakurs is the story of America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: May 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9780358588696

Santi Elijah Holley

Santi Elijah Holley has reported for more than a decade on the intersec­tion of culture, music, race, religion, and politics. His work has appeared in numerous national and inter­national outlets, including The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Economist, The Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post. Holley is the recipient of grants from PEN America and the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, and he was awarded an Oregon Literary Fellowship for nonfiction. He lives in Los Angeles.

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Part I

1.

The Trial

IN THE EARLY morning hours of April 2, 1969, Detective Francis Dalton, of New York City Police Department’s Bureau of Special Services and Investigations, arrives at the door of apartment 9, 112 West 117th Street, in Harlem. He’s accompanied by four additional officers, armed with two bulletproof vests and one shotgun. On the detective’s command, the men light a rag on fire in the apartment hallway and begin shouting, Fire! Fire!

The two occupants of apartment 9, Lumumba Shakur and his wife, Afeni, wake to the cries and smell smoke. Lumumba jumps up, looks through the door’s peephole, and sees the flames. When he opens the door, he is greeted by a shotgun pressed into his chest, while other officers, stationed outside on the fire escape, enter through the window and hold Afeni at gunpoint.

One mile away that same morning, Dhoruba bin Wahad is apprehended from his apartment; Robert Collier is taken into custody from his home on East 8th Street; and a few blocks away, Detective Joseph Coffey, accompanied by his own team, kicks open the door of Michael Cetewayo Tabor, holds a gun to his head, and declares, I’ve got you, you Black bastard, and If you move, I’ll blow your brains out.

Before the sun rises in New York City, ten members of the Harlem chapter of the Black Panther Party are arrested and jailed, including seventeen-year-old high school student Jamal Joseph and twenty-year-old Bronx Community College nursing student Joan Bird.

Other suspects—computer analyst Sundiata Acoli, research chemist Curtis Powell, Kwando Kinshasa, Shaba Om, Lee Mkubu Berry, and seventeen-year-old high school student Lonnie Epps—are later apprehended or surrender. Suspects Richard Harris and Kuwasi Balagoon are already in a Newark jail, on earlier bank robbery charges. The three remaining suspects—Larry Mack, Thomas Mshina Berry, and Sekou Odinga—manage to get away, disappearing from sight.

From the raided homes, the NYPD Special Services teams retrieve five .38 caliber pistols, two military rifles, three shotguns, a pair of handcuffs, items that could be used as homemade explosives, a map of Bronx railroad stations, and a copy of the Urban Guerilla Warfare manual, written by Black Panther guerrilla team captain Kwando Kinshasa.

Twenty-one members of the Black Panther Party are indicted on conspiracy to shoot police officers and bomb police stations, railroad tracks, Manhattan department stores, and the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx. With Joseph and Epps granted youthful offender status, Berry too ill to stand trial due to chronic epilepsy, two members already held in New Jersey on other charges, and the three escapees, only thirteen ultimately stand trial. The case is formally recorded as The People of the State of New York v. Lumumba Abdul Shakur et al., but the defendants become internationally known as the Panther 21. The ensuing trial will show the world, for the first time, how desperate American law enforcement is to eliminate the Panthers and make them an example of what happens when Black people in America dare to assert their right to self-defense and self-determination.

This has been a systematic plan by the fascist pigs to stifle the black liberation struggle in New York City, Lumumba wrote. Now I realize the Panther 21 arrest is all part and parcel of a national conspiracy by the American government to destroy the Black Panther Party and all revolutionaries.

As the purported ringleader of the planned attacks, Lumumba Shakur was named lead defendant in the case. A dark-skinned, attractive, twenty-five-year-old man, with dark eyeglasses, mustache, and goatee, Lumumba was, at the time of his arrest, section leader of the Harlem Panthers, tasked with recruiting new members and implementing the Black Panther Party’s cornerstone Ten-Point Program. He and his team claimed responsibility for installing a Black principal in a majority-Black school in Harlem, and he was deputy of the Ellsmere Tenants Council, an Office of Economic Opportunity anti-poverty program.

Under Lumumba’s leadership, the Harlem Panthers were distinguished for their militancy. Lumumba’s close friend and section leader of the Bronx Panthers, Bilal Sunni-Ali, called Lumumba the leader of the most notorious chapter of the Black Panther Party, which is an accomplishment in an organization not lacking in notoriety.

The Black Panthers weren’t the only ones allegedly conspiring to blow up buildings throughout the United States. In the late 1960s and through the 1970s, a wave of bombings swept the nation, in protest of America’s involvement in Vietnam, police brutality, and other emblems of American hegemony. From January 1969 to October 1970, there were around 370 bombings in New York alone, roughly more than one every two days, though many of the bombings were deemed minor. Appearing before Congress in 1970, NYPD Commissioner Howard R. Leary testified that bombings during this one-year period had achieved gigantic proportions.

I look for it to accelerate to a greater degree, Leary continued. It appears that this is the only way that these extreme groups who are organized are able to find a public expression and a public platform to make known their feelings and their dissatisfactions.

The raid on the New York Panthers was spearheaded by the NYPD’s surveillance team, the Bureau of Special Services and Investigations (BOSSI). Applying similar counterintelligence methods as the FBI, BOSSI had become, by 1965, the most extensive political intelligence operation of any state, local or municipal police department in the nation’s history. Throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, BOSSI infiltrated political organizations in New York City, installing undercover detectives to spy on subversive groups and individuals. The organization was touted throughout the country as proselytizers for the cult of intelligence. Some of these agents had infiltrated the New York Panthers, became trusted members of the group, and were ultimately responsible for furnishing the intelligence that would lead to the raid on April 2.

The swift arrests came after the NYPD’s undercover agents determined that the Panthers were planning to carry out the bombings of department stores, railroads, and police stations on the following day. Bail for the jailed Panthers was set at $100,000 each (more than $700,000 in today’s dollars)—an amount so prohibitively high as to be considered unviable and discriminatory. Indicted on 156 counts, the defendants faced life in prison.

Unable to make the exorbitant bail, the Panthers were held separately in detention centers throughout New York City, including Rikers Island and the Queens House of Detention. Pretrial hearings began February 2, 1970, at the New York State Supreme Court. Newspaper columnist Murray Kempton remembered his impression when Lumumba, followed by the other defendants, entered the courtroom with a pencil in his hair, his glasses gleaming, his chirrup of ‘Power to the People,’ his right fist half-raised and then withdrawn in a gesture that seemed less to proclaim defiance than to exchange complicities with some vast secret army that would arise whenever he chose to whisper whatever signal had been agreed upon in some smoky grove among cypresses and Spanish moss.

The Panther 21 trial attracted national attention, becoming a rallying point for young activists and leftists who connected the harassment of the Black Panther Party to the repression of other anti-imperialist movements across the country. The Panthers had captured the imagination not only of young Black Americans; affluent White college students and older White liberals were entranced by what they perceived to be a highly disciplined organization of freedom fighters and anti-racist crusaders.

Not all of the publicity surrounding the Panthers was positive. When the composer Leonard Bernstein and his wife, Felicia, hosted a fundraising party for the Panther 21 defendants at their penthouse apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, with the aristocracy of New York’s arts society rubbing shoulders with Black Panthers, the party was condemned by the New York Times, which characterized it as the sort of elegant slumming that degrades patrons and patronized alike. It might be dismissed as guilt-relieving fun spiked with social consciousness, except for its impact on those blacks and whites seriously working for complete equality and social justice. It mocked the memory of Martin Luther King Jr. The author Tom Wolfe, in a scathing article for New York magazine, lampooned the party as radical chic—a term he coined for socialites and other members of high society who take up left-wing, radical political causes.

Notwithstanding these criticisms, the fundraisers were a blessing for the jailed Panthers, who needed all the financial support they could get, from whomever they could get it. After being held for ten months at the Women’s House of Detention in Manhattan, Afeni was freed on bail on January 30, 1970. Her $100,000 bond was provided by female supporters in the labor movement and members of Presbyterian and Episcopal churches, who’d raised $66,000 in cash and used church assets as collateral on the remainder. Twenty-three years old and a gifted writer, teacher, and mentor, Afeni was the first to be bailed, and she was entrusted with the responsibility of raising bail funds for as many other Panthers as possible by organizing and speaking at rallies in support of the defendants. With fashionable plaid pants, a black turtleneck, and a long black leather vest, Afeni stood on a makeshift stage before hundreds of White and Black New Yorkers, took the microphone in her hand, and called down all the fury of her ancestors—for the long history of brutality against her people, for the undue repression of her comrades, and for the indignity of being woken up early in the morning by the NYPD.

Of course, this wasn’t what she’d signed up for when she joined the Black Panther Party in 1968. A headstrong young woman from the Bronx, she’d joined the Party to give her life direction and purpose—something she had been denied as the youngest daughter of a single, working mother. Now, less than two years later, she was tasked with defending not only her life but the lives of her colleagues and husband, by channeling her internal rage and indignation into speechmaking and fundraising. When Afeni set out to do something, she did it completely. There was no half stepping. This tenacity, however, wasn’t always welcomed by others.

Against the advice of her Panther colleagues, Afeni chose to act as her own attorney, while the others were represented by activist attorney Gerald B. Lefcourt. Afeni had had no prior law experience, no training whatsoever, and she came to her decision only after determining that the attorney she’d been assigned, Carol H. Lefcourt, possessed a tiny, squeaky voice that wouldn’t command respect in the courtroom. I’m facing the same three hundred and fifty years everyone else is facing, and I am not going out like that, Afeni later recalled thinking. "With this here, Carol Leftcourt [sic], speaking for me? Shit."

Lumumba tried to dissuade Afeni from representing herself. He mocked her as being too emotional and not educated or qualified and said that she would fuck everything up. This was only the beginning of the imminent and irreparable division between husband and wife.

The Shakurs were a close and devoted family, and Afeni and Lumumba could count on receiving support, including from Lumumba’s father, Salahdeen Shakur, who visited courtroom proceedings with his wife, Mariyama. A stately and imposing man, Salahdeen was a respected merchant of African goods and clothing, a former associate of Malcolm X, and a mentor to young Black New Yorkers. Lumumba’s older brother, Zayd, helped organize rallies and fundraisers for the Panthers, while also being assigned the difficult task of keeping the Harlem chapter afloat while most of its leaders were in jail. Zayd was often joined at these rallies by a close friend and a young newcomer to the Harlem chapter named JoAnne Chesimard, who would soon change her name and find worldwide notoriety as Assata Shakur.

Afeni and Lumumba, however, had only been married less than a year before their arrest, and if found guilty, they would never see each other again. Afeni was still a young, attractive woman, confronted with a possible life sentence. All hopes, dreams, and plans for the future were placed on hold, including nuptial commitments. So while she was out on bail in the summer of 1970, Afeni took other lovers, including a Black Panther from Jersey City named Billy Garland, whom she met while laying low in a Jersey Panther pad. But though Garland was already married with three young children of his own, when Afeni discovered she was pregnant, she decided to keep the child. If she was found guilty, her child would be the only part of herself that remained free. She didn’t yet know the sex, eye color, or voice of her child, but she had a premonition he was destined for something big.

Afeni kept her pregnancy to herself at first, but as time went on, it was becoming harder to conceal. When the Panthers’ defense team got wind of Afeni’s infidelity and pregnancy, lead attorney Gerald Lefcourt told one of his colleagues, Lumumba’s going to look at her some morning and find out about her, and then he’s going to knock me halfway across the room.

As her child continued to grow inside her, Afeni became more and more appalled by the conditions of the penitentiary. I would like to bring to the attention of the court what I am sure the court doesn’t know about, she told Justice Murtagh, and that’s the situation that exists with Miss Bird and myself and for the other women that are being held in the house of detention. The boilers are broken there. There is no hot water. The conditions are not just abominable, as they were before; they are inhuman.

There was no toilet paper, she said, and the food was spoiled. She then went on to address the prison doctors’ invasive and degrading examination practices, which she and Bird were punished for refusing to undergo: Joan and myself are being held in a lockup simply because we refuse to be examined by those doctors who are not doctors, by those doctors who care very little about the structure of the female body. So we would request to have our own physicians come in and give us any examinations we need to have in the Women’s House of Detention, and we would request that some facilities be provided so we can take hot showers. The showers are dirty enough as it is, but to be subjected to cold showers in that filth is ridiculous.

When Murtagh demurred, accusing the defendants of being interested only in winning attention from the press, Afeni interrupted, finally addressing the elephant in the room: The interest, Mr. Murtagh, is in assuring the life of my child. The court partially conceded, granting Afeni one daily glass of milk and a hard-boiled egg to contribute to the health of her child.

The journalist Kempton, observing these proceedings from the gallery, reported how Afeni rose before the judge and spoke as though she were bearing a Prince. Despite the fact that her infidelity was now evident to all, Afeni stood in front of the court like Athena, single-handedly staring down the twin pillars of imperialism and patriarchy.

Behind Afeni Shakur there could almost be seen the long scroll of birth and death and birth again, of pain and resurrection, the things women know, Kempton wrote, and it could be understood that the grandness of Afeni Shakur’s impudence consisted in her capacity to appreciate the special opportunities of Woman.

The trial was dragging on into its eighth month. The prosecution had introduced various dead ends into evidence, including an in-court screening of the film The Battle of Algiers as a Black Panther training film, but the case against the defendants depended almost wholly on the testimonies of the undercover detectives. In spring 1971, the BOSSI officers who had infiltrated the Panthers took the stand.

These undercover agents included Detective Eugene Roberts, who had, years earlier, infiltrated Malcolm X’s Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU) and had risen high enough in the ranks to become Malcolm’s bodyguard, until Malcolm’s assassination in 1965. Roberts would later maintain that he’d tried to save Malcolm’s life by applying mouth-to-mouth resuscitation after the shooting, but now, six years later, attorney Gerald Lefcourt asked Roberts: Isn’t it a fact that you helped murder Malcolm X?

Yes! shouted Afeni.

The defendants were caught off guard, however, when Harlem Panther Yedwa Sudan took the stand. He had hired Lumumba and other Panthers to the Ellsmere Tenants Council, regularly smoked weed with the others, talked freely about icing pigs, and had even gone as far as to shoot his gun erratically in the presence of others. Now he was revealed as undercover police detective Ralph White.

This was so inconceivable to Lumumba that, when asked earlier during the trial whether he’d believed Yedwa might’ve been an undercover officer, Lumumba replied: "Man, he couldn’t be a cop. You should have seen the shit he did."

But it was precisely the shit he did that had provoked Afeni’s suspicions from the beginning. Before the raid on the Panther homes, Afeni had already been speaking to other Party members, raising concerns about Yedwa. He was too erratic, she believed, too unpredictable, a hothead, too eager to prove himself to Lumumba and the others.

Like slowly pulling at a loose thread, when Afeni cross-examined the undercover officers, she compelled each of them to admit that they had never seen her commit any of the bombings or shootings she had been charged with, unraveling the fabric on which the case was built. Her closing statement to the jury, inspired by Fidel Castro’s 1953 History Will Absolve Me courtroom speech, was largely unprepared and improvised.

It was the statement of a woman backed against a wall, fighting not only for her life, but for the life of her unborn child:

So why are we here? Why are any of us here? I don’t know. But I would appreciate it if you would end this nightmare, because I’m tired of it and I can’t justify it in my mind. There’s no logical reason for us to have gone through the last two years as we have . . . So do what you have to do. But please don’t forget what you saw and heard in this courtroom . . . Let history record you as a jury that would not kneel to the outrageous bidding of the state. Show us that we were not wrong in assuming that you would judge us fairly and remember that that’s all we’re asking of you. All we ask of you is that you judge us fairly. Please judge us according to the way that you want to be judged.

On May 13, 1971, at four thirty in the afternoon, the jurors returned after forty-five minutes of deliberation with their verdict. After an eight-month trial—the longest and most expensive criminal trial in New York State history—the defendants were acquitted on all 156 counts. Spectators cheered, jumped up, and called out Power to the People! Still seated in her chair, Afeni sobbed to herself.

Later that day, as the lawyers and jurors celebrated with the newly freed Panthers, one of the jurors, an elderly Black man named Benjamin Giles, approached Afeni. Where’d you find out how to talk like that, child? he asked.

Fear, Mr. Giles, Afeni responded. Plain fear.

One month after the acquittal, on June 16, Afeni gave birth to a son. She named him Parish Lesane Crooks, but one year later he was rechristened with a new name: Tupac Amaru Shakur.

2.

Patriarchs

FOUR YEARS BEFORE the raid on the homes of the New York Black Panthers, on the afternoon of February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was assassinated while preparing to address about four hundred supporters and spectators at the Audubon Ballroom in Washington Heights. Malcolm had planned to use this occasion to deliver the official program of the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), which he co-founded the year before. Modeled after the Organization of African Unity, the OAAU sought to unite all peoples of African descent in the West, including twenty-two million Black Americans, by encouraging communication, cooperation, and solidarity with peoples of the African continent. Malcolm advocated for greater economic and political power in Black communities, while urging Black Americans to embrace their African heritage. As well as developing a Pan-African consciousness, Malcolm and the OAAU sought to bring the plight of Black Americans to the international stage, arguing that systemic racism and racist violence in the United States were not civil rights but human rights issues, and thus the United States should be brought before the United Nations and tried for human rights violations and acts of genocide.

On June 28, 1964, Malcolm made the first public announcement of the formation of the OAAU. He had recently returned from a two-month tour of Africa and the Middle East, where he’d performed the hajj pilgrimage in Mecca, a religious requirement of all able-bodied Muslims, and visited with African leaders and officials, which inspired him to form this new organization. Speaking at the Audubon Ballroom that evening, Malcolm addressed a crowd of a thousand observers, stating that the mission of the OAAU was to fight whoever gets in our way, to bring about the complete independence of people of African descent here in the Western Hemisphere, and first here in the United States, and bring about the freedom of these people by any means necessary. That’s our motto. We want freedom by any means necessary. We want justice by any means necessary. We want equality by any means necessary.

His speech stimulated the imagination of scores of Black men and women in New York and across the nation, but it especially captivated a small and devoted family of Afrocentric New Yorkers, the Shakur family, who would adopt by any means necessary not only as a motto but as a call to arms.

Malcolm X had Black liberation in his blood. Born Malcolm Little on May 19, 1925, in Omaha, Nebraska, Malcolm was raised on a farm near Lansing, Michigan, by Garveyite parents. Founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey arrived in Harlem in 1916, promoting Black self-determination and self-respect. By the 1920s the UNIA boasted over a million followers, with more than eight hundred chapters in the United States and abroad, becoming one of the greatest mass movements in Black history.

We must canonize our own saints, create our own martyrs, Garvey declared, and elevate to positions of fame and honor black men and women who have made their distinct contributions to our racial history.

Garvey’s most ambitious undertaking was the Black Star Line shipping company. The Black Star Line was touted as a fleet of steamships that would transport goods to and from Africa while also relocating American Blacks to the homeland, where they would establish an independent Black nation-state. A quixotic, Exodus-style campaign, the Black Star Line was immediately beset by irresponsible or questionable business decisions, mismanaged funds, and organizational misconduct. It also attracted the attention of the young, newly appointed head of the Special Intelligence Division in the Bureau of Investigation, twenty-four-year-old John Edgar Hoover.

In an October 1919 memo to Special Agent Ridgely, Hoover described Garvey as particularly active among the radical elements in New York City in agitating the negro movement. Hoover expressed disappointment that Garvey had not yet violated any federal laws that could lead to his deportation but asked if there might be some proceeding against him for fraud in connection with his Black Star Line propaganda.

In a foreshadowing of the heightened surveillance tactics that would later be used against other Black leaders and organizations, the Bureau installed informants and spies in the UNIA, including the Bureau’s first Black special agent, James Wormley Jones, whom Hoover appointed, according to historian Theodore Kornweibel, to go into Harlem and to infiltrate the Garvey movement and to try and find evidence that could be used to build the legal case for ultimately getting rid of Garvey.

The federal government soon uncovered enough evidence to build a case against Garvey. On January 12, 1922, he was arrested on charges of mail fraud. The Black Star Line, already suffering devastating setbacks and losses, dissolved completely after Garvey’s arrest. In December 1927, President Calvin Coolidge deported Garvey to Jamaica. After relocating to London in 1935, Garvey suffered a stroke and died on June 10, 1940, at the age of fifty-two.

Malcolm X was just fifteen years old when Garvey died, but by then, his family had already suffered its own devastating losses. When Malcolm was six, his father, Reverend Earl Little, was run over by a streetcar, nearly severing his body in two. His death was ruled as accidental by the Lansing coroner, but Malcolm wondered throughout his life if his father, an outspoken Black man and Garveyite organizer, had been murdered by racist Whites.

With the death of Malcolm’s father, his mother, Louise, struggled to raise seven children on her own. Accumulating bills, discriminatory welfare agencies, and fights with the life insurance company—who brazenly judged her husband’s death as suicide—took an increasing toll on Louise’s mental health, until she was ruled insane and admitted to Kalamazoo State Hospital, where she remained for twenty-four years.

Drifting among Michigan, Boston, and Harlem, which he’d hailed as Seventh Heaven, Malcolm soon reinvented himself, in the first few years of the 1940s, as Detroit Red—the zoot-suited, lindy-hopping, jive-talking, hair-conking, reefer-peddling street hustler and petty criminal. Malcolm’s stint in the criminal underworld lasted only a few years. After a series of home burglaries throughout Boston’s White and affluent neighborhoods, accompanied by his friend Shorty and two White women, Malcolm was apprehended by police at a pawn shop while trying to buy back a stolen watch. Subsequent searches of each of their apartments turned up more stolen goods and firearms. On February 26, 1946, Malcolm was given an eight-to-ten sentence. He was twenty years old.

While at Norfolk Prison Colony, Malcolm was introduced to the teachings of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, the leader of a small and obscure Black separatist religious sect called the Nation of Islam (NOI). The self-ordained Messenger of Allah, Muhammad taught a highly unorthodox form of Islam, proclaiming that the Black man was Earth’s original man, the builder of magnificent empires and civilizations in Asia and Africa, until the devil white man appeared, pillaging, raping, kidnapping, and enslaving millions of Black men, women, and children in the West. Black people had been cut off from all knowledge of their own kind, Malcolm later wrote in his Autobiography, and from any knowledge of their own language, religion, and past culture, until the black man in America was the earth’s only race of people who had absolutely no knowledge of his true identity. Severed from their heritage and dignity, Black people had accepted their positions in the United States as second-class citizens.

As the child of Garveyites, Malcolm was naturally receptive to this message. He joined the Nation of Islam and dedicated himself to his adopted faith and his newfound life’s purpose: telling my black brother inmates about the glorious history of the black man and also telling the white man about himself. When he was paroled in August 1952, he emerged from prison, reinvented once more, as Malcolm X.

Appointed first as minister of the Detroit temple, Malcolm was later assigned the prominent Temple No. 7, in his beloved Harlem. Malcolm immediately set about building the NOI’s ranks. Tall, handsome, charming, and already a masterful orator, Malcolm was the NOI’s most zealous and successful recruiter, building it into a formidable organization, establishing new temples across the country and recruiting hundreds of new members each month; national membership swelled from just four hundred in 1952 to forty thousand members and forty-nine temples by the end of the decade.

As the public face of the NOI and Muhammad’s chief spokesman, Malcolm lectured and debated on Harlem street corners, college campuses, and television news programs. The Nation of Islam’s message of Black separatism, self-determination, and self-defense offered a contradistinction to the broader civil rights message of integration and nonviolent protest, as promoted by Martin Luther King Jr. and such interracial organizations as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the NAACP, and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).

The Nation of Islam was a religious group, however, and not a political organization, which put the NOI and Muhammad increasingly at odds with Malcolm, who was, by the start of the 1960s, beginning to connect the plight of Black Americans to the struggles for independence and self-determination happening across the globe, particularly in Africa and Asia.

On November 10, 1963, Malcolm was invited to speak at the first Northern Negro Grass Roots Leadership Conference, in front of a predominantly Black and non-Muslim audience, at the King Solomon Baptist Church, in Detroit, Michigan. In his speech, Message to the Grass Roots, Malcolm distinguished the Negro revolution from the Black revolution and house negroes from field negroes. Laying out what would become the foundation for the more radical and militant Black liberation groups to come, like the secessionist Republic of New Afrika, Malcolm suggested that the aim of all world revolutions, whether in China, Russia, France, or America, was the pursuit of land, and the only way to achieve land, and thus liberation, is through bloodshed:

Revolution is bloody. Revolution is hostile. Revolution knows no compromise. Revolution overturns and destroys everything that gets in its way. And you, sitting around here like a knot on the wall, saying, I’m going to love these folks no matter how much they hate me. No, you need a revolution. Whoever heard of a revolution where they lock arms . . . singing We Shall Overcome? Just tell me. You don’t do that in a revolution. You don’t do any singing; you’re too busy swinging. It’s based on land. A revolutionary wants land so he can set up his own nation, an independent nation. These Negroes aren’t asking for no nation; they’re trying to crawl back on the plantation.

The chasm between Malcolm and the Nation of Islam, already opened by the time of his speech, widened after the revelation of Muhammad’s infidelities with his secretaries, and Malcolm’s offhand chickens coming home to roost remark following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Suspended indefinitely from the NOI in March 1964, Malcolm established a new organization, Muslim Mosque, Inc. (MMI), consisting initially of other NOI

Reviews for An Amerikan Family

[pomo58 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

An Amerikan Family by Santi Elijah Holley is a fascinating examination of both the Shakur family and the forces working against an equitable society for all members.This is both very well-researched and written in a very compelling manner, which makes even the most infuriating parts a good read. As simply the story of one family, albeit a very important one, coupled with the societal/governmental infrastructure within which and against with they struggled, this is a great read. Hopefully readers won't stop there.This is an opportunity to see just how far we still have to go. Our state has become ever more surveillant, and the paramilitary arm of the white supremacist government, the police and other law enforcement agencies, has become more extreme in its "legal" techniques to maintain an unequitable society. Highly recommended for those wanting a better, and more honest, history of the latter half of last century. Also those who might only know of Tupac and/or Assata, this will make you understand and appreciate them more.Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.