Originally excerpted from The Women’s House of Detention on LitHub on 5/12/2022.
Afeni Shakur is today remembered for many things, including her leadership in the Black Panthers; her brilliant legal mind; the incredible life and work of her son, rapper and actor Tupac Shakur; and her autobiography, Evolution of a Revolutionary, which she cowrote with actor Jasmine Guy. Forgotten, though, is her history as a gay liberation radical, her presence at the Stonewall Riots, and her own bisexuality. But all of these parts of her history connect in one spot: the Women’s House of Detention at 10 Greenwich Avenue. In fact, a close look at Shakur’s time in the House of D shows the powerful ways in which Black liberation influenced gay liberation, and vice versa.
Shakur’s time at the House of D began the night of April 2, 1969, when the NYPD tried to crush the Black Panther Party in New York City. There had been other skirmishes between the two groups before, but that night the police were out to decapitate the party, conducting at least thirteen simultaneous, “heavily armed” midnight raids on the homes of Panther leaders. Doors were kicked in, children were held at gunpoint, and friends and acquaintances who were unlucky enough to be present were rounded up along with the intended targets—a group that would be known as the Panther 21, one of the most infamous causes célèbres of the late 1960s…