Rapping for the Rev’lution: ‘Pac Was a Teenaged Communist

By: Trevor Loudon
New Zeal

Rap icon Tupac Shakur was a communist.

Tupac Shakur

Raised by Black Panther parents, Tupac joined the Young Communist League as a teen and never lost his revolutionary outlook.

According to Baltimore YCL leader Jordan Farrar, a self-styled “red’ skinhead, Tupac, joined the League in Baltimore as a teen in the late ’80s. Apparently he was dating the daughter of the chairman of the Communist Party of Maryland at the time.

Though murdered in September 1996, the famous East Coast, West Coast hip hop wars of Shakur’s revolutionary memory, lives on in Baltimore. The Young Communist League branch in the city is named the Tupac Shakur Club in his honor.

Tupac Shakur Club members, 2011 YCl Marxism School, Hartford, Connecticut:

Tupac’s “f bomb” laced speech to the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, Atlanta, Georgia 1992:

Know’m, sayin’?