Mutulu Shakur, known for being a Black Liberation activist as well as rap legend Tupac Shakur's (2Pac) stepfather, died on Friday at the age of 72.

Shakur was living with multiple myeloma, a blood-based cancer that damages the bones and kidneys. He had been imprisoned for 35 years but was released on parole last year for health reasons.

Born Jeral Wayne Williams in Baltimore in 1950, Mutulu Shakur was raised in Queens, New York by his blind mother. His political activism sprouted from the injustices he witnessed while helping his mother navigate the social service system.

As a teenager he joined the New Afrikan Independence Movement and in the late 1960s he worked with the Revolutionary Action Movement, a Black Nationalist group that promoted Black self-determination and socialist change across the United States.

Shakur became a member of the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika, a separatist movement which aimed to create a Black state in the Southern states of the U.S.

He was also known as an acupuncturist and in the late 1970s he became the co-founder and co-director of the Black Acupuncture Advisory Association of North America and the Harlem Institute of Acupuncture.

Shakur worked to bolster his community most notably through his work with Lincoln Detox, an addiction treatment program founded in New York by the Black Panthers.

 

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In 1988 he was convicted of leading a spell of armed robberies in 1981, during which two police officers and a guard died.

Shakur was sentenced to 60 years in prison, with conspiracy to violate the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organisations (RICO) Act, bank robbery, armed bank robbery and bank robbery murder, as well as helping activist Assata Shakur in her escape from prison in 1979.

Mutulu Shakur’s supporters have long protested that he was purely a political prisoner that was being made an example of by the authorities for his activism.

2Pac’s mother and Mutulu Shakur’s ex-wife, Afeni Shakur—who was also an activist,  philanthropist and a former Black Panther passed away in 2016 following a cardiac arrest.