From wrongfully convicted to leading communities in social activism: Yusef Shakur speaks at CMU
After being sentenced to nine years for a crime he did not commit, Yusef Shakur became a community leader, activist and educator.
Shakur spoke on Thursday, Feb. 1, to students and community members in the French Auditorium on the campus of Central Michigan University. He educated people on his transformation and inspired Black liberation and power from the experiences that he had lived.
Ku’Juana Quinn, president of CMU’s registered student organization Student Advocates for Prison Reform and the Incarcerated (SAPRI), said she brought Shakur out to tell his story about going through adversity and finding the voice he uses to empower others.
Quinn said that once someone is incarcerated, whether or not they did something wrong, that period in their life doesn't define them.
Dr. Yusef Shakur speaks about how he was falsely charged and sent to prison, Thursday, Feb. 1, in the EHS building French Auditorium. At prison, Shakur met his father and the two sent letters to one another, it was in one of these letters that Shakur’s father urged him to continue his education while in prison. (CM Life | Izzy Newton)
“I just want (people) to understand that and not only see (Shakur) as a person but understand what he's been able to do and what they can do as well,” Quinn said.
Growing up in Detroit
Shakur said he dropped out of school in the eighth grade and became a co-founder of a gang. He was addicted to the streets due to his worldview from his oppressed and poverty-stricken environment.
While his father abandoned him, Shakur’s mother raised and helped shape the man he is today.
He said that in their community, his mother was mistreated and labeled with misogyny and sexism because she was a single mother at 15.
"There was a set of controlling images that was described of who she was that became this invisible handcuffs that locked her into a certain social dynamic," he said. "As her son, I'm being raised in that social dynamic."
At 19, Shakur was sentenced to serve five to 15 years for false imprisonment. Shakur met his father for the first time and began his journey into self-reflection and growth.
Transformation and personal growth
During his sentence, Shakur had reached out to his father for help and had developed a relationship with him through letters.
Shakur said his father had written that he hurt to see his son follow him into prison and hurt for abandoning him and his mother.
Shakur said his father had written that from that moment, he would do everything he could to love, protect and invest in him.
Through the genuine and authentic love from his father’s letters and also seeing his father in person a year later, Shakur built himself out of his old mentality by transforming into a mindset of valuing Black Revolution and power.
“Even though I’m in prison, I’m making this situation work for me,” Shakur said. “I’ve transformed my sail into a university. I’m up across the Mackinac Bridge where the racism is as normal as the snow.”
Shakur found a purpose in reading. He said that reading fueled his hunger to gain knowledge of himself, who he was and his impact.
Shakur said while his body was encaged, his mind wasn’t because reading took him to all kinds of places.
While his world expanded, he directed his energy toward being a father, leader, activist, educator, writer and more.
Black history, education and activism
Shakur said people need to deconstruct white social theories and instead understand from Black experiences through their own writing.
“We live in such an anti-Black world, and to break through that anti-Black world is to appear to look at yourself through your own history,” Shakur said. “That is what Black History Month should be about, where we have had created the power to write about our own experiences.”
He said that the problem with the American educational system is that Black History is not represented in education in an authentic way. He advised the audience to unlearn what we know in order to learn what we don’t know.
He said that active resistance was a necessary part of founding and creating Black history.
“Slavery is American history,” Shakur said, transcribing from Carter Woodson. “That is not Black history, but how Black people responded to slavery was a response to resistance. Now that was Black history."
Shakur also said being an activist or leader involves a multitude of different things. He said to stop romanticizing what activism is because it’s about doing the grunt and dirty work.
Maureen Belcher, a senior at CMU, said Shakur’s notion that activism isn’t always a big gesture impacted her.
"It can be the 'nitty gritty' things," Belcher said. "That really resonated with me because I've had that misconception where activism needs to be me doing a speaking event, where I need to put on a presentation, when in reality, it can just be me supporting someone on that personal level, and it should be for the right reasons."
Shakur said, “At the end of the day, as a revolutionary, your job is to make change, and your job is to make change wherever you’re at, but you can’t make change without training yourself. You cannot go out and change the world until you change yourself.”
