Indy TV: Interview with Yusef Shakur
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Indy TV interviewed nationally recognized, author and activist Yusef Shakur while he was in town for the Indymedia 10 year convergence. Shakur represents the embodiment of transformation and a revolutionary at heart. Growing up in a single-parent household plagued by alcohol and physical abuse, Yusef would look for greater meaning in his life. At a young age, he started soldiering as a thug in his neighborhood, and when he turned thirteen, co-founded one of Detroit’s most notorious street gangs: Zone 8. Yusef struggled as a misguided youth, eventually being charged with a crime that he did not commit. Despite a nine year sentence, Yusef used this experience as an opportunity for personal growth. While incarcerated, Yusef met the father he never knew, who helped him begin his transformation from a Zone 8 thug to a father & freedom fighter.
Since his release, Yusef has returned to Detroit and, especially, the Zone 8 neighborhood, as a father, community organizer/activist, former Head Start teacher, youth mentor, business owner, author, motivational speaker, and college graduate. His self-published political memoir The Window 2 My Soul (compared to the Autobiography of Malcolm X) was one of many steps Yusef has taken to reach out and begin recreating society and our communities anew. In the wake of the publication, he opened Urban Network Bookstore and Urban Guerrilla Entertainment in January 2009, a DIY/community model business designed to help empower individuals to consider and achieve their dreams as entrepreneurs and creative artists in the face of corporate and circumstantial challenges as well as provide a community forum to engage in education and entertainment.
During the Interview Shakur described the centrality of accessing radical history in his prison transformation: "When I really started taking a political role, when I started reading books about the Black Panther Party, that analysis, the things they broke down to me, and now it allowed me to relate it to my own experiences. Now I went back to dig up my own dirt and it made sense. I was able to get that correct analysis of how classism exists in my family, in my community, how racism has always impacted me, how the court system has always been an enemy to me."
