Though
she is best known as Tupac Shakur's mom, she was also a Black Panther
as a young adult and an activist and philanthropist in her later years.
Deputies
responded to a call reporting "a possible cardiac arrest" at her
Sausalito home around 9:34 p.m. Monday, the Marin County Sheriff's
Office said.
Information is still being gathered, and the sheriff's department will
answer questions regarding her death later Tuesday morning, it said.
From drugs to arts
In a 2005 interview ahead
of the opening of the now-shuttered Tupac Amaru Shakur Center for the
Arts in Stone Mountain, Georgia, Shakur Davis recalled how her life was
almost derailed by drugs and how her son got it back on track.
Her drug use made her so oblivious to what was happening in her life
that when someone told her in 1990 that her son -- then on the precipice
of becoming the biggest name in hip-hop -- was going to be on "The
Arsenio Hall Show," she thought the person was lying, she said.
In the mid-1980s, she was homeless in New York City and "messing around
with cocaine," she said. Despite the drug use, she was still coherent
enough to realize that Tupac would become a product of the streets if
she didn't make different choices.
"I was running around with militants, trying to be badder than I was,
trying to stay up later than I should," she said in the 2005 interview.
She decided to enroll Tupac in the 127th Street Ensemble, a Harlem
theater group, something she called "the best thing I could've done in
my insanity." They later moved to Maryland, where she enrolled him in
the Baltimore School for the Arts, and then to a small town outside
Sausalito.
It was there that Tupac confronted her about her cocaine use.
"He asked me if I could handle it, and I said yeah because I'd been
dipping and dabbing all my life," she said during the interview. "What
pissed him off is that I lied to him."
'Pac told the local drug dealers not to sell to her, she said, and he
told his mother to get clean or to forget about being involved in his
life.
'Arts can save children'
She got clean in 1991, she said, and when her son was gunned down in Las
Vegas in 1996, she resisted the urges to delve back into her old bad
habits. She instead founded Amaru Entertainment to keep her son's music
alive.
Later, she realized that her life -- mistake-ridden as it may have been -- might serve as a lesson to others.
"Arts can save children, no matter what's going on in their homes," she
said. "I wasn't available to do the right things for my son. If not for
the arts, my child would've been lost."
She provided the majority of the money to begin the $4 million first
phase of the arts center, while her Tupac Amaru Shakur Foundation hosted
poetry and theater camps for youngsters in the Atlanta area.
"I learned that I can't save the world, but I can help a child at a
time," she said, pointing out that her new life of philanthropy wouldn't
have been possible without the influence of her legendary son. "God
created a miracle with his spirit. I'm all right with that."
And as much as she credited Tupac with inspiring her to help others, the
tribulations she endured in raising him weren't lost on the
multiplatinum artist. He regularly invoked her in his music, perhaps
never as directly as in his chart-topping song, "Dear Mama."
In it,
he rapped,
"And even as a crack fiend, mama, you always was a black queen, mama/I
finally understand, for a woman it ain't easy trying to raise a man/You
always was committed, a poor single mother on welfare, tell me how you
did it/There's no way I can pay you back, but the plan is to show you
that I understand."
Shakur Davis is survived by daughter Sekyiwa Shakur.
CNN's Jeffrey Acevedo contributed to this report.
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