Tupac Childhood Home — Oakland, California

Tupac Amaru Shakur — 2Pac — was born in New York City on 16 June 1971 but spent a formative period of his adolescence in the Oakland, California, area, where he attended Oakland School for the Arts (as a student of ballet, theatre, and creative writing) and the Oakland High School before his family moved to Marin City. His stepfather and mother's associates had connections to the Black Panther Party, and Oakland's political culture — radical, community-oriented, shaped by the aftermath of the Panthers and the crack epidemic — profoundly shaped his worldview and his music.

Oakland and the Bay Area produced a distinctive strand of West Coast hip-hop rooted in the social conditions of the urban East Bay — different in texture and politics from the Los Angeles scene that had produced NWA and Death Row Records, with which Tupac would eventually align himself. His lyrics drew explicitly on the experience of poverty, police violence, incarceration, and the fragility of life in communities decimated by drugs and gang activity. He was one of the first hip-hop artists to achieve genuine crossover success without abandoning the social realism that had made the music significant.

The address associated with Tupac's Oakland years is a private residence. Oakland maintains a complex relationship with his legacy — proud of the talent the city helped form, conflicted about the violence that surrounded and ultimately killed him. Various community murals and informal memorials throughout Oakland acknowledge his importance. Tupac was shot and killed in Las Vegas on 13 September 1996 at the age of 25, six days after being shot while leaving the MGM Grand.