Mount Vernon Literary Tour: Tupac Shakur

Be Here Stories

The Mount Vernon Literary Tour is created by The Baltimore National Heritage Area (BNHA), which promotes, preserves, and enhances Baltimore's historic and cultural legacy and natural resources for current and future generations. A site-by-site walking tour of this and other destinations is available at www.https://bnha.visit.zone/ Located at Baltimore School for the Arts, 712 Cathedral Street Transcript: Rap icon Tupac Shakur (b. 1971, d. 1996) grew up steeped in poetry and revolutionary politics thanks to his mother. His family moved to Baltimore when he was 13 and struggled with poverty—when their electricity was cut off, he would read Malcolm X by streetlight. While in high school at Baltimore School for the Arts, Shakur explored creative expression with close friends like future actress Jada Pinkett. He shone in theater, music, even ballet. Though his family moved away before his senior year, his time here was transformative. As he put it, “I started to feel like I really wanted to be an artist.” Shakur would achieve global fame with powerful songs about racial inequality, female empowerment, addiction, and poverty. In his brief, turbulent life, he was unable to avoid the fate he depicted in a prize-winning rap he wrote as a Baltimore teen. He called it, “Us Killing Us Equals Genocide.”