Tupac's Baltimore classmates and teachers share their memories of him

[Manuel Hot Pepper Lopez]

Tupac Shakur in Baltimore: Friends, teachers remember the birth of an artist

Mention the name Tupac Shakur to the people who knew him, and you’re bound to get some good stories. That was the case, time after time, during interviews for Sunday’s A&E story on the rapper and future Rock and Roll Hall of Famer's time in Baltimore. We couldn’t fit them all, so here are more anecdotes on Shakur from the Baltimoreans who taught and befriended the future hip-hop icon.

Becky Mossing, friend and current Baltimore School for the Arts teacher, on Shakur missing out on an amusement park trip:


“After prom, the next morning, we were all going to Kings Dominion. Our friend Daniel had his parents’ car. We drove down North Avenue to a gas station. Tupac was in the car, and we dropped him off at a building because he couldn’t go to Kings Dominion because he had to go work. Rather than joining the rest of his friends, he had to be conscientious.”

Mossing on Shakur’s use of the N-word:


“I have this very clear memory of his using the N-word all the time. I remember saying to him, ‘You cannot use that word in front of me. I do not like hearing it.’ He said to me, ‘I use this word because it empowers me. I need to be empowered. I’m using this word as a means to do that.’ For him, that word and using that word empowered him as a young black male in the world that we live in.”


Mossing on sleepovers Shakur attended at her parents’ Pikesville home:


“I used to have a lot of parties that were chaperoned. My parents were upstairs; we’d be in the basement. I have these memories of him and another friend named Gerard Young, and they would want to spin records in my basement. We had a crappy, yucky record player that was mine down in the basement. They wanted the other one. I don’t know how [Shakur] did it, but he somehow convinced my dad that it would be OK to bring down the good record player. I just remember them bringing this record player down the steep basement steps at my parents’ house so that these two guys could spin records in my basement. The next morning, it was always back upstairs. He would always take it back.”

Donald Hicken, Shakur’s former acting teacher at Baltimore School for the Arts, on Shakur’s views of Baltimore:

“I remember [former mayor] Kurt Schmoke had a town-hall meeting about drugs and drug gangs, and Tupac went to it and he actually spoke. Kurt Schmoke mentioned him to me later, that this kid from BSA stood up and talked about how, in his neighborhood, the people who were trying to keep their families together and going to church on Sundays didn’t have glass in their windows, and the guys who were selling drugs were driving around in Mercedes, wearing thousand-dollar suits and Rolex watches. So he said, ‘If you’re a kid growing up, and you’re taking a look at those two situations, who do you think the winners are?’ I thought it was a really interesting perspective on a young kid looking at the situation in those neighborhoods.”Hicken on Shakur returning to Baltimore as his career was taking off:


“Whenever he was in the area, he would come and see me. He showed up in a stretch-limo one time. He pulled up on my little street in Evergreen. He and his posse, they pile out of the car and they come and knock on my door. He wanted to have lunch, so I made them all grilled cheese sandwiches. We sat around my kitchen and talked. He would come into the school. The minute he’d look at me, the whole expression on his face would change. He’d go from this furrowed brow, narrow eyes to this big wide smile. Within a few minutes of sitting in the office and talking, he was back to being the Tupac that I knew as a teenager. We had a good relationship.”

Richard Pilcher, BSA principal acting teacher, on realizing Shakur’s worldwide influence:

Pilcher on his Shakur-related classroom rule:


“Interestingly enough, I don’t allow students to wear Tupac T-shirts in my class, because he’s a kid that I knew who was murdered. Yes, it’s iconic and I understand why you’re wearing that, but it just makes me sad. So I ask them not to do that.”

 

[Manuel Hot Pepper Lopez]

t the height of his celebrity, Tupac Shakur chose to give author Kevin Powell some of his most revealing interviews ever — from a subdued, introspective conversation while the rapper was incarcerated to resentful provocations against rivals that fueled the escalating East Coast-West Coast rap beef.

Powell said that one topic came up often, when the recorder was on and off: The brief but formative time a teenage Shakur called a small apartment at 3955 Greenmount Ave. home.

“He talked about Baltimore a lot,” Powell said this month. His time here “foreshadowed Tupac Shakur the rapper, foreshadowed Tupac Shakur the amazing [actor]. It would not have happened — any of that — without Baltimore.”

Since the 1996 drive-by shooting that killed him at age 25, Shakur’s legend has grown across the world. Now he’s more than a rapper. He’s hip-hop’s Bob Marley, a transcendent black icon whose life and art continue to resonate with audiences young and old, rich and poor, American and international, black or not.




As the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame prepares to induct Shakur — the first solo rap artist in its history — on April 7, the people who knew him before the platinum records, many controversies and his untimely death are choosing to remember Tupac Shakur, the Baltimore School for the Arts theater student who never got to fulfill his obvious potential. What’s become lost in the conversation, they say, is Shakur’s humanity — his caring for others, his earnest sensitivity and his deep respect for art.

“I could have seen him as a Denzel Washington,” said Richard Pilcher, the BSA’s principal acting teacher who helped cultivate Shakur’s penchant for Shakespeare. “I think he would have become one of our finest film actors.”

His teachers and friends in Baltimore appreciated his music, but said they barely recognized Shakur the rapper, who tattooed “Thug Life” on his abdomen, partied hard and was convicted of sexual abuse that resulted in a nine-month prison stay. (Shakur maintained his innocence afterward.)

People from his BSA years still wonder if Shakur saw rapping as another acting role, one he got swept up in amid fame, money and controversy.


“[The rap persona] was nothing like the person that I knew,” said Becky Mossing, his classmate and friend at BSA who now teaches musical theater at the school. “I honestly believe he was playing a part that he probably was made to play.”


A new home

In 1984, a 13-year-old Shakur arrived in Baltimore with his younger sister, Sekyiwa, and mother, Afeni, the Black Panther Party member who moved her family from New York City to the neighborhood of Pen Lucy in search of a job and a better life.

Though Shakur attended Roland Park Middle School for eighth grade and Paul Laurence Dunbar High School as a freshman, he had heard about the BSA from peers, said Donald Hicken, the longtime head of the school’s theater department who retired last year.

Shakur walked in for an audition in 1986, Hicken said, as a character from “A Raisin in the Sun,” a play Shakur performed in years prior that first sparked his love of acting. The staff quickly recognized Shakur had “a very special gift,” Hicken said.

“The empathy, the mimetic instinct, the emotional connection, the vulnerability,” Hicken said. “He had all of that.”

Aside from Shakur’s raw acting potential, Hicken also noticed how attuned the teenager was to injustice and the plights of the underserved, especially poor black communities in Baltimore.

“He lived in a very rough part of town,” Hicken said. “He had a real clear, I guess you’d say, revolutionary perspective on the world.”
Shakur’s outward confidence, along with his ability to socialize with anyone, made him incredibly popular with students, said Mossing.

“He just had a magnetism that defied logic, and everybody was drawn to him,” Mossing said. “Everyone wanted to hear what he had to say.”

As he did as an adult, Shakur had plenty to say, constantly writing poetry and thoughts in a notebook and engaging in discussions of plays like “King Lear” and “Hamlet.”

E.D.I. Mean, a member of Shakur’s rap group the Outlawz, visited his lifelong friend in Baltimore around this time. He noticed a newfound confidence.

“I just remember him growing a lot artistically,” E.D.I. Mean said on the phone from Los Angeles. “He seemed a lot more sure about what he wanted to do and what direction he wanted to take his career.”

More stories of Tupac Shakur's time in Baltimore, from town hall meetings to school sleepovers
Then there was the rapping, the stylized rhyming and nascent music genre that captivated Shakur, and seemed destined to be in his future.

“He’d be humming something in his head. That was constant,” Mossing said.

Around BSA, Shakur earned the nickname MC New York. He and friends — including a young aspiring actress named Jada Pinkett — would face off in rap battles in an alley by the school, said classmate and friend Linda-Denise Fisher-Harrell*.

“Stuff just rolled off his tongue,” said Fisher-Harrell, now an associate professor of dance at Towson University. “He could just flow.”

What the often gregarious Shakur didn’t share with everyone were his problems at home. Bills were a struggle to pay, Afeni’s addiction to crack cocaine worsened and Shakur often slept at friends’ houses, friends said. (Afeni died in May in California at age 69.)

Donald Hicken, who taught Tupac Shakur acting at the Baltimore School for the Arts in the '80s, owns this poster for Mondawmin Mall, which features Shakur and actress Jada Pinkett Smith when they were students there.
(Barbara Haddock Taylor / Baltimore Sun)

Mossing, who remembers Shakur DJing dance parties-turned-sleepovers in her parents’ Pikesville basement, said Shakur was under pressure to make money, so he bussed tables and washed dishes at an Inner Harbor restaurant.

“When he wasn’t in school, he worked a lot of nights and weekends,” Mossing said. “It was very stressful for him.”

For Shakur, BSA — where the pursuit of art mattered above all else — was a sanctuary. It didn’t take long for him to develop deep appreciations for unfamiliar disciplines.

“I loved my classes. We were exposed to everything … theater, ballet, listening to different types of music,” Shakur said in an interview years later that was used in the documentary “Tupac: Resurrection.” “I started going, ‘Damn, man, I would have been a totally different person had I not been exposed to these things.’”

Leaving, reluctantly

In 1988, Shakur’s progress came to an abrupt halt. With his junior year coming to an end, Shakur cried in Hicken’s office as he delivered the news: He was moving to California with his mother and sister.

Hicken “had big plans” for Shakur’s senior year, which at BSA is dedicated to technique development through rehearsals and performances. He offered to find a host family so Shakur could stay for his senior year, but the student declined.


The music video for "Dear Mama" features Tupac Shakur's mother, Afeni, who died in 2016. (Photo credit: Associated Press/file photo)

“His father was not in the picture, and he really was the man of the house,” Hicken said. “What he said to me then and later was he really needed to be there for his sister.”

Shakur moved to Marin City, Calif., which is where the story of his career began for much of the world.

Rap stardom came first, with poignant, storytelling classics like “Dear Mama” and “Brenda’s Got a Baby,” followed by the highly publicized feud with the Notorious B.I.G. and New York’s Bad Boy Records.

Albums like 1995’s “Me Against the World” and 1996’s “All Eyez on Me” solidified their places in rap’s canon long ago, thanks to Shakur’s mix of emotionally charged, unapologetic diatribes and poignant tales that vividly depicted the inner-city struggle.

“While the rich kids is driving Benz / I’m still trying to hold on to surviving friends / And it’s crazy, it seems it’ll never let up / But please, you got to keep your head up,” Shakur once rapped.

But as he ascended in hip-hop, negativity always seemed present, from his own doing and not. In 1993, he pleaded guilty for assault against another rapper during a concert. He was found guilty of assaulting movie director Allen Hughes in 1994 after bragging about it on MTV. That same year, Shakur was shot five times in a New York recording studio during a robbery.

This was the Shakur his Baltimore teachers and friends say they did not know.

“This persona that you saw, this ‘Thug Life,’ maybe that was a part of a larger act,” Fisher-Harrell said.

Tupac Shakur (left) and actor Tim Roth in a scene from the 1997 film "Gridlock'd." Shakur died four months before its release.

(Handout)
While those from his past had trouble making complete sense of his music, they immediately recognized Shakur’s acting prowess in movies like “Juice” and “Poetic Justice.” A moment of off-the-cuff dialogue between Shakur and Mickey Rourke in the 1996 crime-drama “Bullet” stuck with Hicken.

“Watching that scene, I thought, ‘Wow, there he is. There’s the creative artist. There’s the actor,’” Hicken said. “I watched him do it in class. … You could see him disappear into a role.”

Given his age and potential, Shakur has become one of the highest profile cases of “what could have been?” Powell believes acting was Shakur’s “true calling,” and had he not gone to California, he would have further honed the craft.

“If Pac would have stayed in Baltimore, he probably would have gone to a school where there was a theater program,” Powell said.

Instead, Shakur is known largely for his indelible, tumultuous rap career and his role in rap’s most infamous beef — arguably still the genre’s darkest moment. In September 1996, Shakur was shot four times in a drive-by in Las Vegas, and died a week later. (Six months later, his rival, the Notorious B.I.G., died from a drive-by shooting in Los Angeles. Both killings remain unsolved.) Following Shakur’s death, his legacy grew around the world, and over time, he has become a symbol of perseverance and a voice for the oppressed.

Tupac Shakur (right) speaks as fellow rapper Snoop Dogg listens during a voter registration rally in Los Angeles on Aug. 15, 1996. He was shot less than a month later in Las Vegas, and later died on Sept. 13, 1996.

(Frank Wiese / Associated Press)
Those layers of complicated greatness led to his upcoming Hall of Fame induction, an honor Hicken believes might have given his former student mixed feelings.

“The artist in him would be pleased with that,” Hicken said, “but the revolutionary in him would sort of eschew any kind of establishment recognition.”

Shakur once told Powell his only goal “was to hear my name on the radio one time,” he said. Powell imagines Shakur’s global impact, especially on people living through tough times as he once did, would make the late rapper most proud.

“I think he’d be blown away,” Powell said of the induction. “But I also think he’d realize his life — 25 short years, including that short period in Baltimore — had an amazing impact on so many Baltimores around the world.”

 

[Xtraz2]

They doing too much tryna play up Baltimore

pac never reps that shyt, he wuz ashamed of his Baltimore upbringing

tha Bay turned him out on some revolutionary and playa shyt, and LA had that nikka gangbangin and thugged out

 

[Waterproof]

The GOAT

 

[Manuel Hot Pepper Lopez]

They doing too much tryna play up Baltimore

pac never reps that shyt, he wuz ashamed of his Baltimore upbringing

tha Bay turned him out on some revolutionary and playa shyt, and LA had that nikka gangbangin and thugged out

STFU you corny white boy

 

[EducatedBrothaFromTheBank]

Pac has one o the most interesting, complex upbringings and story in music history.

 

[Xtraz2]

STFU you corny white boy

 

[Guvnor]

"Around BSA, Shakur earned the nickname MC New York. He and friends — including a young aspiring actress named Jada Pinkett — would face off in rap battles in an alley by the school, said classmate and friend Linda-Denise Fisher-Harrell*."

Imagine being a kid in that school freestyling with Pac and Jada. Then years l]ater you find out your homie died.

Also don't y'all ever discredit Pac's NY roots again. Dude went by Mc New York first.

 

[Dad]

WOW! Dudes owns a priceless piece of history

 

[scarhead]

Great read.
Pac was multifaceted and multitalented - what a loss.

 

[Niqqa You Gay]

WOW! Dudes owns a priceless piece of history

Them jeans them nikkas rocking

 

[Still Benefited]

Imagine if Pac stayed in Baltimore,might've ended up a all time great actor lipsynching lyrics in a Kendrick video...instead of hiphop goat

Both great accomplishments,but I ain't trading 4 classics to be Don Cheadle

nikkas really was getting at Jada though....wonder what the nikka that said "I'll come back for you" is doing now.

 

[The Intergalactic Koala]

Dude would have been in La La Land or a moty with Denzel by now.

 

[Grano-Grano]

I think Pac smashed Jada

 

[Bugsmoran]

Them jeans them nikkas rocking

lol I had jeans like that