The geopolitical landscape has clearly changed in the past several years. An Eastern block has expanded and now includes alliances from Russia to Iran to the Alliance of Sahel States, which is comprised of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger in West Africa.
The mother of Tasia Fortune, a 29-year-old Black woman whose body was found hanging from a tree on Aug. 3 in Jackson, Mississippi, told ABC News on Sunday afternoon that her daughter’s death has “just devastated" her family.
About 10,000 people were in the arena watching. One of them was Tupac Shakur, the number one-selling rapper who had already become a hip-hop icon at the age of 25.
Away from the ring on September 7, 1996, a bicoastal beef that had been brewing for years in the music industry was about to reach its tragic apogee. Hours after Tyson’s left hook sent Seldon face-first to the mat, Shakur was hit by four bullets in his vehicle – a drive-by shooting just off the Vegas Strip. Tupac’s right lung was destroyed. After six days on life support, he was pronounced dead.
It took 109 seconds to settle the boxing match. It has taken 30 years for anyone to face trial over Shakur’s murder.
Jury selection starts today for Duane Keith Davis – known as Keffe D – who was indicted in 2023 on one count of murder with a deadly weapon in Tupac Shakur’s death. Davis, 63, has entered a not guilty plea. Prosecutors do not claim he fired the fatal shots. They say Davis orchestrated the killing in retaliation for an assault on his nephew shortly after the Tyson fight.
Shakur’s death – and the similar drive-by murder of his rival Christopher Wallace, better known as Biggie Smalls or Notorious B.I.G., less than a year later – put an uncomfortable light on the increasingly angry rivalry between East Coast and West Coast rap and whether artistic disputes were turning into violent real-world battles. Now, the Keffe D case is exposing just how deeply gang culture had become embedded in the industry’s embrace of the gangsta lifestyle, embodied in an artist whose work both lamented the violence that cut many young Black lives short while also glorifying it.
“He was working through his trauma with his art, his music, his poetry,” said former MTV journalist Abbie Kearse, who interviewed Shakur in 1994, “and yes, the anger comes out in real life, too, through violence.”
Tupac Shakur wasn’t just about beats and rhymes. Coming up from a rough childhood with an absent father and addicted mother, Vanity Fair reported, Shakur combined a love of hip-hop and other performing arts with classical poetry and Shakespeare.
“Look at Romeo and Juliet,” he told the Los Angeles Times a year before his death. “That’s some serious ghetto sh*t.”
After moving from the East Coast to Northern California, he joined the largely apolitical, party-focused group Digital Underground, where he first adopted the name 2Pac and served primarily as a dancer. But he had much bigger plans ahead.
Recording tracks in his spare time, Shakur secured a solo record deal. The hype man for the group best known for “Humpty Dance” released 2Pacalypse Now, a politically conscious album touching on urban violence and police brutality. After a slow start, it was eventually certified gold.
Over the course of his next studio albums, Shakur’s work ran the gamut from a sensitive ode to his mother (“Dear Mama”) to “So Many Tears,” a sad reflection on “so many homies in the cemetery.”
The former student of the Baltimore School of the Arts also became a critically praised actor in films alongside Janet Jackson and Omar Epps, earning his first role in “Juice” on the strength of his own magnetism after crashing a friend’s audition. Three films starring Shakur were released after his death.
But outside the studio and off-camera, his rising success was accompanied by repeated legal battles and violent encounters.
Tupac was charged with shooting two off-duty police officers during a scuffle in Atlanta in 1993. Those charges were eventually dropped.
The following year, Shakur faced his most serious allegations, convicted of sexually abusing a fan during a hotel encounter he said was consensual, The New York Times reported.
During jury deliberations, Tupac dropped by a New York recording studio at the invitation of a producer to contribute to a track. He was held up in the lobby and shot five times while trying to get away.
After undergoing surgery, he left the hospital against doctors’ advice, the Los Angeles Times reported, to appear at his sexual abuse sentencing in a wheelchair, his left hand bandaged and the left side of his face swollen.
Sentenced to a minimum of 18 months in prison, Shakur appealed and reached a deal with Marion “Suge” Knight – cofounder and head of Death Row Records, the top hip-hop distributor on the West Coast – getting the label to front his bail money while the appeal was pending in exchange for a three-album deal, record executive Leslie Gerard told New Yorker journalist Sheldon Pearce.
Still stinging emotionally from the recording studio shooting and assault case that both happened in New York and Shakur feared were setups, Knight told Kearse a week after Shakur’s death that Tupac had more than a financial connection to Death Row.
“Tupac loved Death Row,” he said. “Tupac loved me. I loved him.”
That connection is ultimately what put Tupac’s life in jeopardy, Davis argued in the book Compton Street Legend, which has become a key piece of evidence in the case against him. Davis, a member of the Crips, says Shakur’s relationship with Knight caught him up in the Los Angeles gang turf battles that had become woven into the rap game. The Crips were tight with Bad Boy Records on the East Coast, while the Bloods, he said, supported and protected the Death Row music organization.
“At Death Row especially, there was no question about the gang affiliations,” said Kearse.
“Tupac mistakenly thought Suge and the Death Row crew they were rolling with were untouchable and would protect him,” Davis wrote. “He seemed to have lost touch with the reality of the streets that everyone can be touched.”
His fresh association with Death Row also brought a new sound to Tupac’s repertoire reminiscent of the label’s breakout stars, Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg.
Shakur quickly took to the intensity of the coastal rivalry, blasting his former friend Biggie Smalls, also known as The Notorious B.I.G., and Bad Boy’s top producer Sean “Puffy” Combs in “Hit ‘Em Up,” one of rap’s most unambiguously brutal diss tracks that took on almost all of East Coast rap royalty by name.
With a “THUG LIFE” tattoo emblazoned in an arc above his navel – the letter “i” replaced by a bullet casing – the Tupac of “Dear Mama” seemed to be in the rear view, at least publicly.
“It was very problematic to try to decipher which is his real life and which is fictionalized, you know,” Kearse told CNN. “I don’t know.”
Davis and his crew of Southside Compton Crips went to Las Vegas on the night of the boxing match strictly for recreation, not for trouble, he wrote. But the group was set off when Davis’ nephew, Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson, was attacked at the MGM shortly after the fight.
Word got to Davis that Anderson had been beaten by Tupac and his entourage in retaliation for an incident at a shopping mall where a group of Bloods were beaten by Crips in what Davis described as “another day” of back-and-forth violence between the gangs.
“We kept it moving, but there’s one thing that’s for sure when living that gangster lifestyle, you already know that the stuff you put out is going to come back to you,” Davis wrote of the mall incident. “You never know how or when, but there’s never a doubt that it’s coming.”
For Shakur, Davis said it came after the Tyson fight, when the white Cadillac Davis said he was riding in sidled up to the black BMW driven by Suge Knight on East Flamingo Road.
For such a complicated case, Keffe D’s defense is remarkably simple: You can’t trust what he says.
“I would definitely say he’s a liar,” Davis’ then-defense attorney, Carl Arnold, said to Las Vegas television station KLAS in 2024. Arnold left the defense team a year later, CNN affiliate KSNV reported.
Davis now says the book was a work of fiction, one he attached his name to strictly for the money.
“That was the ghostwriters (who) did it. I didn’t write that book,” Davis told KLAS in a jailhouse interview last month, noting its incongruous mention of a quote from Winston Churchill alongside its frequently profane descriptions of street-level gang life. “Just read the book. You know I didn’t write that book.”
But Davis’s book is part of a flurry of statements and interviews that, investigators say, taken together amount to an admission he was involved in the murder.
Davis said in the 2018 documentary “Death Row Chronicles” on BET the shots came from the back of his vehicle. In a later interview with YouTube content creator DJ Vlad, Davis said he had a “sense of remorse” for what happened.
Prosecutors say Davis gave information to investigators in a pair of recorded interviews lawyers call a “proffer.” Suspects share what they know privately, usually to see whether a deal can be worked out for a lesser charge or lighter sentence. If there’s no deal, prosecutors usually can’t use the information against them.
But after Davis’ arrest, Clark County Judge Carli Kierny ruled the proffer interviews are admissible in Keffe D’s trial because Davis made many of the same statements in his book and media blitz that he had previously told police.
“Ultimately, he just talked himself right into jail,” retired Las Vegas Metropolitan Police investigator Greg Kading told CNN’s Jake Tapper in 2023.
In his book, Keffe D acknowledged speaking to police and breaking the gangsta’s code in the process.
“The Feds had followed me around for fifteen years it was finally time to get the sh*t off my chest and over with,” the book said. “Everybody else from my neighborhood was getting off on the sh*t; why not get off on my sh*t? I sang because they promised I would not be prosecuted.”
Davis’s book is vague on who made the call to gun down Tupac, saying it was only coincidental his crew caught up to his vehicle on the street that night, but he is clear the shooting was about revenge for the assault on his nephew.
“I stand firm on the point that Tupac, Suge Knight and the rest of those n***as didn’t have any business putting their hands on my beloved nephew, Baby Lane, period,” he wrote. “Them jumping on my nephew gave us the ultimate green light to do something to their asses.”
Suge Knight, who was behind the wheel, was grazed in the head by a bullet and bleeding profusely as he continued driving, police said.
Although gang ties to Tupac’s killing had been suspected from the beginning, the search for the killer was long hampered by the refusal of potential eyewitnesses to testify.
“All of the people seem to be looking somewhere else,” Las Vegas police spokesman Phil Roland said shortly after Shakur’s death.
With no gun or other physical evidence tying Davis to the crime, prosecutors are relying on his own words, even though they acknowledge they don’t believe everything he has said.
In particular, Keffe D claims shots came from his vehicle after Knight or Shakur raised their own weapon. Investigators don’t believe it.
“At no point during the investigation of the vehicle were any cartridge cases found inside (Knight’s) car or any weapons,” retired Las Vegas officer Clifford Mogg told the grand jury in Davis’ case.
Davis’ decision to tell all was dramatically different from Shakur’s legendary final words as he was bleeding out near Las Vegas Boulevard.
Asked by Las Vegas police officer Chris Carroll if he could name who shot him, Shakur responded, “F*ck you,” Carroll said years later.
Investigators say they are not certain who shot Tupac – Anderson or DeAndre “Big Dre” Smith, who was sitting next to him in the back seat of the Cadillac. Keffe D, who was in the front passenger seat, willingly put out his own theory.
“Orlando shot Tupac and Suge?” Davis was asked in a 2021 interview.
“He did his thing, yeah,” Davis responded. The indictment against Davis alleges he provided the gun used in the shooting.
Anderson denied any involvement in the shooting, and Keffe D said Tupac was actually his nephew’s favorite rapper.
“He had some good-ass songs, I’m not going to lie,” Davis agreed.
Anderson was killed in a gang shootout in 1998, The Los Angeles Times reported. Keffe D, now a grandfather, is the only occupant of the Cadillac still alive.
Despite the death of his biggest star and his own close call, Knight appeared to believe nothing would change in the business after Tupac’s murder.
“Not at all,” Knight told Kearse in 1996. “We’re going to do the same thing we’ve been doing and sell records.”
But any sense of returning to normal was threatened less than a year later when The Notorious B.I.G. was gunned down – like Tupac, hit by four bullets – while leaving a party in LA’s Miracle Mile. Rumors flew that it was another act of vengeance in response to Tupac’s death, but an 18-month FBI investigation didn’t turn up proof, and no one has ever been charged.
“It was a very sad time and a time where you weren’t sure if it would continue, certainly not on the level that it was,” Kearse said.
When Kearse asked Shakur in 1994 what he thought he was best known for, he laughed.
“My big mouth!” he said, drawing out the word “big” into multiple syllables. “I got a big mouth. I can’t help it.”
The next year, a more contemplative Shakur told MTV he recognized most people knew him by then as “a survivor” of a shooting and prison time. The murder case now coming to court after so many years is a reminder of what he had hoped to become, his chance cut short.
“I want people to be talking about me like, you know, ‘Remember when he was real bad?’” said Tupac. “Everybody changes. Everybody becomes better people, you know? We all should get that chance.”
Black men and boys are facing an economic reality that stretches from the classroom to the workplace. Now, a new report says the problems are no longer just evident… In many critical areas, they’re getting worse.
The first annual “Economic State of Black Men and Boys in the United States “report, released by the John Mercer Langston Institute for African American Political Leadership in partnership with the Virginia Alliance for Black Men and Boys, takes a hard look at over 20 million Black American men and boys, finding a slew full of warning signs, from reading proficiency in elementary school to college enrollment, employment, pay and wealth.
“Even if you come from a ‘wealthy Black family,’ that still doesn’t prevent you from having to deal with systemic barriers, which is something we knew, but the data actually pointed that out,” author, educator and activist Dr. Wes Bellamy told The Root in an interview.
The report makes one thing clear: When Black men and boys are lumped into broader statistics about Black Americans, their specific struggles can disappear into the averages.
The problems start early.
In 2024, just 17% of Black fourth graders performed at or above the National Assessment of Educational Progress’ Proficient level in reading, according to the report. By eighth grade, that number dropped to 14%, while more than 60% of Black eighth graders performed below the Basic level.
Dr. Bellamy told us these issues are systemic. “The systems are playing out exactly as they were designed to, which is why we see some of the bleak numbers in which we have,” he said.
Then there’s college. Black male undergraduate enrollment dropped about 22% between 2010 and 2022. At historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), where Black men have historically played a critical role, the decline was even steeper. Black men now make up roughly 26% of HBCU enrollment, down from 38% in 1976, we previously told you.
And once they enter the workforce, the numbers aren’t much better.
In April 2026, Black workers had a 7.3% unemployment rate–the highest among the nation’s major racial and ethnic groups, according to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. In June, that number sat at 6.6%. As we previously discussed, high unemployment within the Black community usually points to greater implications for the rest of America.
“We’re not a monolithic group, [and] I think oftentimes for Black men, we don’t receive the same level of grace as other particular demographic groups,” Dr. Bellamy said.
The employment-to-population ratio for Black men also dropped between the first quarters of 2025 and 2026, with the decline concentrated among men without four-year college degrees, the study found.
For those who are working, the pay gap remains stubborn, but that’s no secret. Black men earned a median of $1,039 a week in 2025, compared with $1,354 for White men–roughly 77 cents for every dollar earned by White men.
And then there’s wealth–or, more accurately, the lack of a financial cushion when things go wrong.
Black households had a median transaction-account balance of $2,200, compared with $10,000 for White households. Black homeownership stood at 43%, compared with 73% for White households.
That means when a job disappears, an unexpected bill lands or an economic downturn hits, Black families often have less room to absorb the blow.
The report calls for earlier mentorship, stronger literacy programs, mental health and career support, expanded apprenticeships and skilled-trade opportunities, and targeted help for Black men facing long-term unemployment.
But it isn’t simply sounding an alarm. The report is demanding accountability. “What I was most happy about is the fact that we now know the data, and we can develop a plan,” Dr. Bellamy continued. “It’s one thing for us to talk about and synthesize and summarize what’s transpiring; it’s something completely different for us to actually have the figures all compiled in one particular area, and now we can plan to move forward.”
Because the data tells a story that can’t be ignored: Too many Black men and boys are falling behind at every stage of the economic pipeline. And until schools, colleges, employers, policymakers and communities treat those outcomes as a specific problem requiring specific solutions, the numbers aren’t likely to change.
Many of us are likely versed in the Harlem Renaissance. Even if it is vague, we have some notion of Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Duke Ellington.
What is less known is the level of organization behind these artists that supported their creative genius.
Harlem Rhapsody, an award winning novel by Victoria Christopher Murray places the less famous Jesse Redmond Fauset and her advocacy of Black art at the center of it all.
Jesse Redmond Fauset was a prolific artist herself, having produced numerous poems, short stories, essays, and four novels from 1925 to 1933.
But it was her administrative role as editor of the NAACP’s Crisis magazine that earned her the title as “midwife” of the Harlem Renaissance.
A good deal of Harlem Rhapsody is set at the NAACP headquarters on New York City’s Fifth Avenue. There, Fauset worked closely with W.E.B. Du Bois, head of the Crisis, who was also a writer in his own right and crusader for Black art.
This reflects the historical record as historians such as David Levering Lewis have uncovered Du Bois’s outsized role in promoting the Harlem Renaissance, largely through the Crisis, which at that time, was one of the nation’s leading Black periodicals.
Although cultural allies, it is the romantic relationship between Fauset and Dubois that provides much of the novel’s drama.
Here, Murray does a masterful job of reconstructing a complicated partnership based on their different levels of prestige, ages (Fauset was fourteen years Du Bois’s junior), and relationship statuses (Du Bois was married and had several other romantic relationships). And Murray does this by not reducing Fauset to merely an appendage of Du Bois as many at the time did. Instead, Fauset is presented as fully dimensional. More importantly, she is projected as Du Bois’s equal.
Yet given the confluence of race and gender, Fauset’s genius was not enough. Like many Black women, she needed the sponsorship of a man for wider professional recognition. This became a double edged sword. It provided Fauset with unprecedented opportunities while simultaneously making it extremely difficult to emerge from Du Bois’s professional and romantic orbit.
Though a historic novel, Harlem Rhapsody is deeply researched and stays true to actual events. Murray’s engrossing writing style provides an easily accessible entry point to the Harlem Renaissance and the many luminaries who made the borough legendary. Cameos are made by Jean Toomer, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Claude McKay, Nella Larsen, and Countee Cullen. There is also a concluding appendix where Murray lists those instances where she diverted from the historical record and her reasons for doing so.
Readers will come away from the book with a much more nuanced understanding of the Harlem Renaissance and the women who brought it into being.
A police shooting death of a homeless man who the chief said wounded an officer with a knife while resisting arrest has roiled Wisconsin’s capital city, with protesters and community groups demanding accountability and an end to racial injustice.
Corey Durell Ruiz, 38, was shot and killed on a city street Wednesday, the moments of his death captured in bystander videos that were later posted online. The race of the officer who fired his gun has not been released by police. Ruiz is identified as Black or Latino in Wisconsin court records.
“It does not matter who you are or what your past is, you should not lose your life as a result of an encounter with law enforcement,” Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway said during a news conference Thursday afternoon.
Wisconsin court records show Ruiz had been in and out of jail over the past decade for mostly misdemeanor offenses including disorderly conduct, drug possession, auto theft, battery and invasion of privacy. He was also convicted of felonies including possession of cocaine and marijuana, robbery, strangulation, resisting an officer and causing bodily harm.
“He’s a human being. He had a family. He has parents who loved him, who brought him home, who cared for him,” Common Council President Sabrina Madison said, adding that she’s struggling to understand what she’s seen in videos of the shooting that have circulated on social media.
“My first thought is, when the officer’s walking away, why isn’t he walking away in cuffs?” Madison said. “I’m angry, there’s no way around it.”
Ruiz’s family has retained Ben Crump, a prominent civil rights attorney, who said the case must be examined for excessive force.
Frustrated residents marched, and a memorial of flowers and signs grew near the place where Ruiz died. It was just blocks from where two other police killings happened in 2015 and 2012.
A group of about 20 protesters burst into Thursday’s news conference, taking the microphone from police Chief John Patterson and arguing with some attendees who said they wanted to hear more about the investigation.
One protester held a sign saying “Corrupt cops deserve to die too!!!”
Moments earlier, the mayor said the shooting would be “rigorously investigated.”
Once the protesters quieted down, the chief resumed his presentation, promising his department’s full cooperation with the state investigation.
None of the four officers who were detaining Ruiz wore body cameras, but passersby recorded the confrontation on video, and accused the officers of overreacting.
“I thought, ‘Holy cow — what could have warranted that?’ It looked to me like they had him under control,” David Ortiz-Whittingham, who saw officers swarming and heard the gunshots, said Thursday. “Even now, knowing about the knife, did he have to die for it? Could this have been de-escalated?”
The police chief released few details Thursday, saying a Wisconsin Division of Criminal Investigation probe of the officer-involved shooting must run its course.
Earlier Thursday, Madison’s independent police monitor, Aeiramique Glass, said police had not yet shared evidence or the officer’s identity with her office, which will review the case and can recommend to the district attorney that charges be filed if warranted. She said the department and city are “obstructing what the community and the public” want.
“Let me do my job,” she said.
Patterson said the police were committed to cooperating with Glass.
Patterson has urged caution in reading too much from the cellphone videos. He said none show the perspective of the officers, and additional unreleased video was being reviewed.
The officer who fired his weapon is an 11-year veteran of the force, the chief said. He and the three other responding officers will be placed on administrative leave.
Patterson said police were responding to calls that someone was attempting to enter parked vehicles, and the suspect fled on a bike before the officers surrounded him. One deployed a taser, but Patterson said the effort failed to control the man.
In the videos circulating online, the man can be seen standing before he’s brought to his knees as the officers struggle to force him into a prone position. Then he falls quickly to the pavement after what sounds like three gunshots, and seems motionless as the officers handcuff him behind his back. Arriving officers then escort one of the officers a short distance away.
Patterson said he did not know the extent of the knife injuries sustained by the officer.
“This situation was clearly dangerous,” Patterson said before adding he was saddened by the loss of life.
The shooting happened in the middle of an intersection in the popular Marquette neighborhood, less than 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) from the state Capitol. Bystander videos show numerous cars at the scene, with people watching as it unfolds.
“I saw everything! I saw everything! You did not need to kill him! ... We watched it all!” a woman yells in the video recorded by Ortiz-Whittingham.
Residents who dealt with two other police killings expressed frustration Thursday.
In 2015, a white police officer shot and killed Tony Robinson, who was biracial, on the same street. Large protests followed, but the district attorney filed no charges, determining the officer was justified. In 2012, Paul Heenan, a white musician, was fatally shot after he had been drinking and mistakenly entered his neighbor’s house. That officer was exonerated as well.
The chief acknowledged that the neighborhood “has experienced a lot of trauma” and urged people to support one another.
“I want transparency. I want accountability,” Patterson said.
Black advocacy groups, protesters and politicians are speaking out against the shooting, which has also focused attention on the Madison Police Department’s lack of body-worn cameras. The force of around 500 is among the largest in the Midwest that doesn’t use the devices.
Madison, the Common Council president, said Thursday that she expects a police request for $400,000 to be approved, enabling the cameras to be phased in over the next three years. Others lamented that cameras weren’t already being used.
The mayor said her budget, which has not yet been released, will include funding for body-worn cameras. Rhodes-Conway said the city needs to put together a policy for their use before the budget takes effect in January.
The shooting has quickly infused itself into the race to succeed Gov. Tony Evers, who is not seeking a third term. Voting is already underway in the Aug. 11 primary.
Democratic socialist candidate Francesca Hong called the shooting “state sanctioned violence.” Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, a Democrat, said the reports are “painfully reminiscent of the tragedies we have witnessed in Kenosha, Minneapolis, and far too many communities.”
Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany called on his rivals to let the state investigation “establish the facts without politicians rushing to judgment.”
