A Chat with Sekyiwa Shakur
Sekyiwa ‘Set’ Shakur is the President of the Tupac Amaru Shakur Foundation. Founded in 1997 by Afeni Shakur, her mother, the Foundation’s goal is to address mental health and trauma in the Black community through therapeutic resources, creative arts, and education.
Sekyiwa’s work in mental health is very personal to her. Throughout her life, she’s struggled with social anxiety, depression, suicidal tendencies, and has been hospitalized 3 times, beginning at 20. At 21, her brother’s death had an even more significant impact on her mental state.
“I did not believe that Black was beautiful anymore, in that way. I couldn't see it in our community. I couldn’t see it the way that other people treated our community. So I didn’t have an answer to all of the darkness in my brain,” Sekyiwa said.
Therapy finally gave her a place to speak, and allowed her to understand the things she had experienced throughout her life weren’t normal experiences that she could just work through on her own. Therapy is an important tool in healing from traumas.
The Foundation began as the Tupac Shakur Center for the Arts and was established one year after the passing of Tupac Shakur. One of his dreams was to create a space for Black youth to be able to speak their minds about what they were seeing and experiencing growing up, as most of these kids were experiencing poverty. This is why the Foundation was created, to be a safe space for kids in these communities to express themselves, just like Tupac envisioned.
For 16 years, the Arts were the main focus of the Foundation, offering annual Performing Arts Day Camps for kids. The Foundation would put on a theatre production yearly, and the last play to be put on happened to fall on the night that Treyvon Martin’s killer would be acquitted of his crimes, Sekyiwa reminisced. The reactions of her students at the moment are forever stuck with her.
“They did this production. They went up there, they choreographed it, they were so proud of themselves, and as the show ended, the verdict came in and all of that was lost, they looked completely broken, and felt almost as if we had lied to them,” she said.
This moment demonstrated to the leaders of the Foundation that there was a need for a shift in their mission. Although the Foundation encouraged these kids to express themselves and told them that their voices mattered, the world outside those walls was still traumatizing and painful to these children.
“There was no answer for them. We had no answer,” Dr. Shakur said, expressing her hopelessness for her students. She realized that the Foundation could become a tool to educate the Black community and others about mental wellness, mental health, and mental and emotional support options.
Zuri Primos is an Intern for Hope Magazine. She is a student at Dillard University and the Editor-in-chief of the Dillard University student paper, the Courtbouillon.