The city of Oakland and some of the Bay Area’s most renowned MCs paid tribute to Tupac Shakur Friday at a ceremony celebrating the renaming of a street after the rapper.
Members of the Shakur family were also on hand as a stretch of Oakland’s MacArthur Blvd. became “Tupac Shakur Way” to honor the area of Oakland — Tupac’s self-proclaimed adopted hometown — where the rapper lived in the 1990s.
While Shakur was born in East Harlem and spent most of his high school years in Baltimore, he moved to the Bay Area in the late-Eighties, ultimately living in an apartment on 275 MacArthur near where the street sign now bears his name.
It was in Oakland where his music career began, first as a dancer and member of Digital Underground before releasing his debut album 2Pacalypse Now — recorded in nearby Richmond, California — in 1991.
Digital Underground’s Money B was also at the street naming ceremony Friday, along with Bay Area greats like E-40, Too $hort, Richey Rich Double R, and MC Hammer, who said that Shakur was “hands down, the greatest rapper ever, there’s not even a question of that,” the Associated Press reported.
“He spoke up for our people, for our culture,” E-40 added. “He’s the greatest rapper that ever did it, man. He did so much in so little time.”
“It’s a moment that I know my brother would be proud of,” Tupac’s sister Sekyiwa “Set” Shakur said in her comments. “Establishing love and peace in the Oakland community especially mattered to him. Being able to represent safety to his people mattered to him.”
Sekyiwa added, “Let his spirit live on the rest of these years in these streets and in your hearts.”
The street naming ceremony came just one day after Duane “Keffe D” Davis, the man charged in Shakur’s long-unsolved shooting death, pleaded not guilty to the rapper’s murder.