Voletta Wallace, the mother of the Brooklyn rapper the Notorious B.I.G., whose stewardship of her son’s career and legacy after he was killed in 1997 helped cement him as a hip-hop legend, died on Friday. She was 78.

Her death, in hospice care at her residence in Stroudsburg, Pa., was confirmed by the Monroe County coroner, Thomas Yanac. A cause was not specified.

A middle-class immigrant and single mother from Jamaica, Ms. Wallace was forced into the hip-hop spotlight after the Notorious B.I.G., born Christopher Wallace and also known as Biggie Smalls, was killed at 24 in a Los Angeles drive-by shooting.

Biggie’s death came just six months after the Las Vegas slaying of the rapper Tupac Shakur, a onetime friend turned bitter rival. The killings abruptly ended a formative and fruitful moment in mainstream gangster rap amid a tangled East Coast-West Coast beef that went far beyond music.

For decades, both cases remained unsolved, fueling an ecosystem of true-crime books, documentaries, articles and more that have tried to explain the possible links between the two killings, including the involvement of national gangs and crooked cops. (In 2023, prosecutors in Las Vegas charged Duane Keith Davis, a former gang leader known as Keffe D, with murder in the Shakur case; he is set to stand trial this year.)

Ms. Wallace, a preschool teacher, took on the mantle of her son’s career almost immediately. Biggie’s second album, “Life After Death,” came out two weeks after he died; six months later, Ms. Wallace accepted the MTV Video Music Award for best rap video (“Hypnotize”), telling the New York crowd, “I know if my son was here tonight, the first thing he would’ve done is say big up to Brooklyn.”

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