Baltimore Orioles honor Tupac Shakur with bobblehead giveaway, celebrating the rap legend’s formative years in Baltimore before stardom.
The Baltimore Orioles announced they will honor Tupac Shakur with a special bobblehead giveaway during their May 8 game against the Oakland Athletics.
The first 15,000 fans will receive a collectible featuring the rap legend in an Orioles uniform, a black bandana, and a baseball bat.
The tribute celebrates Shakur’s deep connection to Baltimore, where he spent four transformative years from 1984 to 1988. At age 13, Shakur moved to Baltimore from New York City with his mother, Afeni and younger sister, Sekyiwa, settling into a first-floor apartment in the Pen Lucy neighborhood.
Shakur attended Roland Park Middle School for eighth grade and spent his freshman year at Paul Laurence Dunbar High School. He auditioned for the prestigious Baltimore School for the Arts as a theater major.
At the Baltimore School for the Arts, Shakur studied acting, poetry, jazz, and ballet alongside future Hollywood star Jada Pinkett. He embraced theater completely.
Shakur’s Baltimore chapter ended abruptly in summer 1988 after his family was moving to Marin City, California, where his mother hoped for a fresh start.
The house at 3955 Greenmount Avenue, where Shakur lived, has no historic marker, but neighbors say tourists regularly take pictures of the modest brick row house.
And a rap Tupac wrote while living in the city is in the Pratt Library’s Special Collections archive, alongside works by Baltimore literary legends H.L. Mencken and Edgar Allan Poe.
Tupac Shakur was murdered in a Las Vegas drive-by shooting in September 1996 at age 25.
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