Pastor Jamal Bryant, leader of New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, is making headlines after publicly urging Clark Atlanta University to posthumously award Tupac Shakur an honorary degree. The proposed honor is based on the claim that the late rap icon once attended the school. However, multiple biographers and Hip-Hop historians have called the statement flat-out false.
During a recent appearance on The GAUD Show podcast, Bryant declared that Shakur went to Clark Atlanta University for a semester before joining Digital Underground and launching his music career.
“I grew up with Tupac in Baltimore,” he said. “A lot of y’all out in California lying, acting like he’s from L.A. He’s from West Baltimore. He went to the Baltimore School for the Arts. What a lot of people don’t know is he went to Clark Atlanta University for a semester. I didn’t know that—I know it! He came down with us. I went to Morehouse, he went to Clark. We were at homecoming together. Digital Underground came to perform, he volunteered to be a roadie, dropped out of Clark, and that’s how he got to L.A. That’s the real story. You heard it here first!’”
The problem? According to author and journalist Jeff Pearlman, this is completely wrong.
Pearlman has spent nearly three years researching Shakur for his forthcoming book Only God Can Judge Me: The Many Lives of Tupac Shakur. He says none of Bryant’s accounts hold up. “Literally none of that is true,” Pearlman said. “Tupac never attended Clark. He didn’t even graduate high school.”
AllHipHop contacted Pearlman to get his take on the matter.
“I can tell you, factually, he went to Atlanta to do the New Afrikan Panthers work, but he mainly spent a ton of time with a bunch of students at the Art Institute of Atlanta,” he said. “A handful of aspiring rappers lived in apartment H10 on the Lennox Woods Apartment Complex. They started a group called H10. One of the members was Steve Gibson, who would later be half Tag Team and damn the world with “Whoomp (There It Is)”. Tupac actually developed a good amount of style from those hangout sessions But he was never enrolled in college. Literally never graduated high school, so it’d have been impossible.”
Tupac Amaru Shakur was born in New York and moved to Baltimore as a teen, where he attended Roland Park Middle School, Dunbar High, and later the Baltimore School for the Arts. He relocated to Marin City, California, before his senior year and went to Tamalpais High School before dropping out. He met Digital Underground in the Bay Area, not Atlanta, as Pastor Jamal Bryant stated.
Pearlman also clarified that Tupac Shakur’s only known connection to Clark Atlanta University was a disastrous homecoming performance in 1993. It should be noted that New York rapper/producer Diamond D said he traveled to Atlanta with Pac for this infamous performance.
“He performed at their homecoming once. That show, by all accounts, was a disaster,” Pearlman said in an online post. “He was drunk, high, disoriented, didn’t perform his known songs, and about 70 percent of the crowd walked out. That same night, he shot two off-duty police officers in Atlanta.”
Pastor Bryant also claimed that his grandmother taught DMX how to read during the late rapper’s difficult childhood. This assertion remains unverified and has not been publicly confirmed by DMX’s family or official biographers. Our inquiries with DMX’s biographer or estate were not immediately returned.
Pearlman’s book comes out in October and said Bryant’s claims symbolize his difficulties writing the book on Tupac Shakur.
“This is one of the most frustrating parts about researching Tupac: people just invent stories. It’s been 30 years. Maybe their memories are foggy, or maybe they want attention. I don’t know what Jamal Bryant was thinking,” Pearlman said.
The remarks have reignited concerns about the spread of misinformation in Hip-Hop history, especially since the culture has surpassed 50 years. Meanwhile, other outlets have run the baseless Bryant claims.
“People want to feel connected to greatness,” said one historian who preferred to remain anonymous, “but rewriting history does more harm than good, especially for an artist like Tupac, whose real story is powerful enough without the embellishment.”
Clark Atlanta University hasn’t responded publicly to Bryant’s call for an honorary degree.
Head here to pre-order Only God Can Judge Me: The Many Lives of Tupac Shakur.
Chuck “Jigsaw” Creekmur contributed to this story.
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