While rapper Tupac Shakur, who was killed in 1996 at the age of 25, is an iconic figure still widely remembered today, his family background and heritage are lesser known. Yet at one time, the Shakur family was at the center of the Black liberation movement of the 1960s and ’70s, and Assata Shakur—Tupac’s stepaunt—became legendary as a fugitive from justice who sought asylum in Cuba and wrote a deeply political autobiography. Journalist Santi Elijah Holley aims to expand our knowledge of this radical clan with his new book, An Amerikan Family: The Shakurs and the Nation They Created (Mariner, May 23). In a starred review, our critic wrote, “Well written and richly detailed, this book is a strong contribution to the literature of Black militancy.” Holley, 41, has written for the Guardian, the Atlantic, the New Republic, and the Economist; he spoke with us over Zoom from his home in Los Angeles. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

To start with, who were the Shakurs?

The Shakur family was not a family in the traditional sense, the way that we think about a biological family where everybody’s related. They’re more of a collective, a group of individuals who have all adopted this name for themselves. Some are part of the original family, but others either married in or just wanted to align themselves. They were serious, they were intelligent; they were also very loving and kind and welcoming. They were like the royalty of Black liberation in the U.S., and they worked in various parts of the movement, whether the Black Panthers or the Republic of New Afrika or the Black Liberation Army. By taking the Shakur name they were asserting their commitment to the cause.

What drew you to their story?

It’s the same thing that will draw a lot of people: Tupac Shakur. I’ve been a longtime Tupac fan. But in recent years, as a journalist reporting on social justice issues, I’ve learned about other Shakur family members: Mutulu Shakur, his stepfather; Afeni, his mother; Assata. And that made me come back to Tupac’s lyrics and realize how much he thought about issues of police brutality, social injustice, and poverty. He didn’t just come out of nowhere. I really wanted to show the family that he was raised in, the community that helped to raise him.

Afeni and Assata are figures who really stand out in the book, especially in a very male-dominated movement.

I didn’t actually know much about Afeni going in, and I was surprised by how much she became the hero of the story. She had a rough background, and when she discovered the Black Panther Party, it was a place for her, she would say, to channel all of her rage, and she did it constructively, helping people. There’s a lot of complaints, even at the time, of the Black Panther Party being chauvinist. This was Assata’s complaint, too; it was why she left, because there were a lot of clashing male egos—these powerful, megalomaniacal figures like Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver. Afeni and Assata, I think, were celebrated because they weren’t that. They proved to be great leaders. They were just in it for the work; they saw what needed to be done, and they wanted to do it.

Afeni even acted as her own attorney during the Panther 21 trial in 1970-71, when members of the Black Panther Party were charged with a series of planned attacks. She had no previous legal experience, but it worked out pretty well: She was acquitted.

All the people I talked to say the same thing: that Afeni was brilliant and forceful, but she was also very stubborn, and she didn’t accept anybody else doing things for her. She didn’t like who was representing her interests at trial? She was like, I’m gonna do it myself. Why not? She just had to just figure it out on the fly.

So much of the Shakur story is told through police records and legal proceedings—they faced a lot of serious charges, including the murder of policemen. At the same time, we know they were targeted by misinformation and infiltration campaigns like the FBI’s COINTELPRO. Was it difficult, as a researcher and reporter, to piece together what happened?

You know, I never tried to be a historian, where I’m stating things as facts. I’m stating the records of what [the Shakurs] were accused of, why the authorities pursued them. Those things are undebatable. Whether or not they did these things, whether or not they’re guilty of certain things they’re accused of, for the most part I tried to stand back from that. I didn’t want to accuse; I also didn’t want to justify anybody’s behavior. I’m presenting the stories that are there—what they were fighting for and what they were up against—and making a narrative from it, more of a documenter rather than a historian.

You dedicate a chapter to the detox program at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx, where Mutulu Shakur helped establish a regimen to treat drug addicts with acupuncture. Why was that important?

We think about these activists and organizers as advocating for self-defense in the community or maybe the free breakfasts for schoolchildren, but they were committed to community health care. This was one of those quieter things that they did. They saw a need, and any way they could address that need, without formal training and without permission, they would just teach themselves how to do these things, including how to use acupuncture to help people detox from heroin and methadone.

It was important to have that in the center of the book, because the family came together in this beautiful moment and then influenced something that we still feel today. There are thousands of people across the world who use acupuncture to quit drugs and [treat] withdrawal symptoms. I wanted to show that this came from a radical little collective in the South Bronx, spearheaded by Mutulu Shakur, Tupac’s stepfather. It’s such an under-the-radar, uncelebrated thing that we still benefit from but don’t really know where it came from, you know?

By contrast, a lot has been written about Tupac’s brief life. Is there anything you learned about him in researching the book that surprised you?

I didn’t know that he was chairman of the New African Panthers, which was a youth organization that wanted to carry on the work of the Black Panther Party. Tupac was very, very close to leaving music behind—he wasn’t getting anywhere with it. He was going to leave it all behind and be a New African Panther leader. And at the last minute, he got a deal from [the Oakland-based rap group] Digital Underground to be a dancer and a roadie. So he took that, just to get his foot in the door, and then took off from there. But if things didn’t work out for him, he was going to go in a whole different direction.

But even to say it’s a different direction isn’t really accurate, because he got into music thinking that it would be a vehicle for him to get this message out to more people. He was still going to be an activist, but through his music. But then as his career progressed and he got sucked into the music industry, he started to have two minds—social justice, but I need money to feed my family and I like the fame and the riches. Through his whole life, he was toggling between the two, just a very contradictory and conflicted individual.

Tom Beer is the editor-in-chief.