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The city of Oakland has, over the years, offered up its tributes to Tupac Shakur, who called the place home for a few pivotal years during the early 1990s. Oakland is proud today to be associated with such an important figure in the history of pop culture.

But while Oakland streets have been named in Tupac’s honour, with June 16, Pac’s birthday, being declared “Tupac Shakur Day” throughout Oakland in 2016, the late rapper’s relationship to the city wasn’t straightforwardly positive. For all the love he had for the place, and for all the city proclaims to love him back now, Oakland’s authorities once treated Pac appallingly.

In 1991, before Pac’s first solo album, 2Pacalypse Now, had been released later in the year, the young, aspiring rapper was walking through Oakland when he made a mistake. He jaywalked across the street, which was noticed by some cops. They approached and stopped him.

Pac later described what went down during a conversation with a hip-hop journalist called Davey D. “For everyone who doesn’t know,” he said, “I, an innocent young black male, was walking down the streets of Oakland minding my own business and the police department saw fit for me to be trained or snapped back into my place.”

Pac claimed that the cops asked him for some ID, and, once he handed it over, they started bothering him over his name “Tupac.” They aggravated Pac to the point that he swore and, as he recounted during a press conference after the incident had taken place, told them “that I wasn’t a slave, and they weren’t my master.”

The cops, Pac claimed, responded with profound racism. “Hey,” one of them allegedly said. “I like the sound of that… master.”

Things escalated from there. Pac said the cops wrestled him to the floor, keeping him in place with a chokehold. He was “arrested for resisting arrest,” taken to the city jail and held for seven hours before being let out again.

Tupac was furious about what had happened to him, and he had no intention of accepting it without a fight. He decided to take legal action, filing a $10 million lawsuit against the cops for police brutality.

Pac admitted to jaywalking, but, explaining to the press his rationale for pursuing legal action, he said what followed his minor offense “shows that what I’ve been rapping about isn’t just rhetoric… that I’m not just another angry young Black man.” Systematic racism was real, and he had experienced it firsthand in all its brutality.

In the end, Pac was not awarded the $10 million he had initially sought. The case reached settlement for a sum far lower than that, reported to be around $43,000. It wasn’t the justice he had originally hoped for, but it did, nonetheless, vindicate his decision not to be passive. He fought back against police brutality and racism, and, at least in this small way, he won.