Mutulu Shakur
| Mutulu Shakur | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
Jeral Wayne Williams August 8, 1950 Baltimore, Maryland, United States |
| Residence |
United States Penitentiary, Victorville, Adelanto, California, United States |
| Criminal penalty | 720 months (60 years) of federal incarceration (with the possibility of parole) |
| Criminal status | Incarcerated |
| Conviction(s) | Violation of the federal RICO Act, participation in a racketeering enterprise, two counts of bank robbery, two counts of armed bank robbery and two counts of murder during the commission of a robbery |
| FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitive | |
| Status | |
| Added | July 23, 1982 |
| Caught | February 12, 1986 |
| Number | 380 |
| Captured | |
Mutulu Shakur (born Jeral Wayne Williams; August 8, 1950) is an American black nationalist, acupuncturist and convicted felon. He was a proponent of the Republic of New Afrika and a close friend of Geronimo Pratt.
Shakur is best known for his conviction on racketeering charges following the 1979 prison escape of Joanne Chesimard (Assata Shakur) and the infamous $1.6 million robbery of a Brinks armored truck in New York in which a guard and two police officers were killed. It was later found that an illegal project by the FBI, COINTELPRO, aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and neutralizing what they considered domestic political organizations, like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., had targeted Mutulu as well as many of his comrades. He is currently incarcerated in the United States Penitentiary, Victorville. He was stepfather to the late rap artist Tupac Shakur.
Shakur was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on August 8, 1950, as Jeral Wayne Williams. At age seven he moved to Jamaica, Queens, New York City with his mother and younger sister. By his late teens, he was politically active with the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) and later joined the Republic of New Afrika. He has four biological children and one surviving stepchild.
In 1970, Shakur started working with the Lincoln Detox (detoxification) Community (addiction treatment) Program, which offered drug treatment to addicts using acupuncture vs the FDA approved drug methadone. Shakur became certified and licensed to practice acupuncture in the State of California in 1976. Eventually he became the program’s assistant director and remained associated with the program until 1978. He went on to help found and direct the Black Acupuncture Advisory Association of North America (BAAANA) and the Harlem Institute of Acupuncture.
Since being incarcerated, Shakur founded a New York-based organization named Dare 2 Struggle that released a 10-year anniversary tribute album for Tupac Shakur called A 2Pac Tribute: Dare 2 Struggle in 2006 through music industry veteran Morey Alexander's First Kut Records and Canadian activist Deejay Ra's Lyrical Knockout Entertainment. The album features artists such as Mopreme Shakur, Outlawz, and Imaan Faith. As Shakur explains it, the CD was created in order to motivate, inspire, and challenge black people to struggle against their obstacles. He also recorded a radio PSA for Deejay Ra's "Hip-Hop Literacy" campaign, encouraging reading of books about Tupac. Shakur was interviewed in the Oscar-nominated documentary Tupac: Resurrection, in which he described how he wrote a "Thug Life Handbook" with Tupac, expressing an anti-drug and anti-violence message.
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