Marin City

His junior year, though, Tupac is blown back into the wind again.

Seeking more support from her old community, Afeni moves the Shakur family back to California, Marin City, an area that is extremely impoverished.

Here, Tupac enrolls in another art school.

While a student in the Bay Area, he's interviewed for a news segment that seems to be about 90s teens.

And Tupac was, um, coming up.

Um, so I went to high school with a number of kids from Marin city.

Um, there was a kid at our school named finesse.

His nickname was finesse four finger ring.

Um, a lot of people said that he took a swing at Tupac at the, uh, uh, Marin city festival.

Um, I also went to high school with Tack who played oh yep he went oh yep that's awesome I went to high school with Tack in the in the he was there probably just I think it might have just been freshman year and then I think he transferred to Tamalpais High I went to Redwood High but we had a number of kids from Rissy so I did I was I was hearing the name I was hearing the name and um You know, I always remember this kid, man, Paco's my mama.

Fifty dollars.

So I was kind of I was around there kind of at that.

And I was like, ouch.

And California was thrust upon him and he was just immersed in the middle of crack culture, moved to public housing in a pretty dangerous wild, wild west area, Marin City, but also really exposed him to a lot of artists and a certain style of music that he never would have had had he stayed in.

I always say if Tupac had stayed in Baltimore, There's like a sliding doors moment where he stays in Baltimore.

He graduates from Baltimore School for the Arts, and he winds up going to NYU for film school or Berkeley College of Music.

My mom's a Black Panther, first thing you tell her, my mom's a Black Panther, my mom's a Black Panther.

Well, then you watch your mom, your hero, devolve into the depths of addiction at the worst level as possible.

And not only that, especially when you're in Marin City, not only is your mom a crack addict, but your friends are selling her crack.

And you can't even live with her anymore.

It chronicled where Tupac Shakur came from.

Tupac had written and rapped about his life as a teenager slash young adult in Marin City, California, a neighborhood that consisted largely of other African Americans living in public housing.

His mother, Afeni, was back on the East Coast battling a serious crack addiction, and Tupac was living with an alcoholic ex-Black Panther friend of the family.

Tupac survived Marin City by adapting to the ways of the street, and this meant standing his ground when challenged physically and speaking out against injustices he saw threatening his community.

On Tupacalyps Now, you can hear the paranoia induced by police brutality on Trapped and the trauma of teen pregnancy on Brenda's Got a Baby.

Tupac knew his community, and he was an accepted and protected member of that community, and they were his, and he was theirs.

When he turned 20, it was clear that rapping was his main priority.

It was a vehicle to not only survive the streets, but to escape them.

I said, let's go all day.

And now you're paying tribute to the big news that there was a guilty verdict in the 1996 murder of our own, Marin City's own, Tupac Shakur, Dwayne Davis.

How do you say his name? Kef-D? Kef-D? I don't know.

Kef-D? Kef-D? Kef-D? Kef-D? For use of a deadly weapon for orchestrating the killing of Tupac.

So Gary Snyder, his father lived in Corte Madera, which is a town in Marin County, and he ended up living in the backyard shack of a man named Locke McCorkle.

And while he was staying there, he invited a person he had met earlier, Jack Kerouac, who had spent a little time in Marin City before that.

to come stay and be his guest on his way up to be a fire lookout in the mountains.

And this ended up forming the core of the novel Dharma Bums, the Jack Kerouac novel Dharma Bums, which was another way in which the Renaissance called to me and I think calls to a lot of people.

But you did have an influx of black people from the South when marineship was functioning during the war.

This was a shipbuilding operation that was happening in Sausalito, where many of the workers were actually women and black migrant workers.

So they built a company town to house the workers, which is now called Marin City.

Then what happened is that after the war, it was actually an integrated city, one of the very few in Marin County, and After the war, many of the white people moved out, and a lot of the black people realized that nobody would rent to them.