Tupac Shakur has been gone for nearly three decades, but his popularity has never waned thanks to family, friends and collaborators like Jamal Joseph and Allen Hughes, who are behind FX’s Emmy-nominated docuseries Dear Mama.
It received two Emmy noms last month: for Outstanding Documentary or Non-Fiction Series and Outstanding Writing For a Non-Fiction Series for Hughes and Lasse Järvi.
The project tells the stories of the legendary rapper and actor, who was murdered in 1996 at the age of 25, and his mother Afeni Shakur, a Black Panther activist who died 20 years later at 69.
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“I knew Tupac when he was in the womb. I’m one of the New York Panther 21. I joined the Black Panther Party when I was 15,” Joseph, a Dear Mama executive producer and doc subject, said during the show’s panel at Deadline’s Contenders Television: The Nominees event.
“The first day I [went] into the Panther office, I thought Dr. King had been assassinated. I [went] in mad at the white power structure,” he continued. “I thought the Panthers were going to give me a gun and send me on a mission to kill white people. But instead, they gave me a stack of books and told me it’s about power to all people. Afeni came up to me and asked me how old I was, and I lied and said I was 16. She said, ‘You look like you’re 13 years old, go home.’ But I didn’t, so she said, ‘I’m gonna keep my eye on you.’ From that moment on, she became my big sister.”
Following a promotion six months later, Joseph became leader of the youth cadre, which led to his arrest as part of the controversial NY Panther 21 case alongside fellow defendant Afeni, who at the time was pregnant with her son. Joseph remained close to the duo the rest of their lives.
In 1991, Tupac Shakur and Hughes paths crossed at a video shoot for Digital Underground. Hughes and his twin brother Albert served as directors and producers on various projects including Menace II Society (1993) and Dead Presidents (1995).
“He wanted us to direct his first three music videos off his debut album 2Pacalypse Now and he made good on that on that promise and we struck up an intense creative friendship,” Hughes said. “It felt like it was three years but it was probably about a year and it produced a crown jewel with ‘Brenda’s Got a Baby’ and the rest is history.”
The pair’s relationship with Tupac and Afeni is detailed in Dear Mama, the five-part series available to stream now via Hulu. Following the show’s release, a new development in the murder investigation of Tupac Shakur was revealed.
Although Joseph and Hughes had long made peace with anyone being charged in the rapper’s death, they’re hopeful justice may one day be served.
“Hope I think is there because you want justice and you want resolution. But Afeni always focused on Tupac’s legacy and she never obsessed with the investigation. She never spent her life like some families might have wanting to know the truth,” Joseph said. “Somehow this is reminiscent of what happened in Malcolm X’s case where we never truly understood, or the assassination of Dr. King — were there bigger forces at play? The counterintelligence program that destroyed the Black Panther Party, I believe some version of that was at play in the hip-hop movement. Then the division of the East Coast and the West Coast; Tupac and I would have conversations about that to learn from those legacies of what had happened in the secret wars against the civil rights movement, the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement.”
He continued, “So I think the focus was to build his legacy and the life lessons in that way. And to me, that’s still the concentration. If new answers come, that would be great.”
Added Hughes, “I’m hopeful [because] where there’s smoke, there’s fire. And I’m hopeful that the case will be closed. But as Jamal said, the work that Afeni did — as much a mystery that [his death] is, never overshadowed the icon, the legend, the art, the poet, the actor, the hip-hop artist that Tupac is globally. That was never bigger than his work. So Afeni, job well done.”
Check back Monday for the panel video.
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