Quanell X

It's a familiar sight: activist Quanell X standing in front of a row of television news cameras, waiting for his close-up.

As always, the man looks sharp. For today's event, Quanell has selected a crisp white dress shirt, a gold-colored necktie, a gray suit with yellow pinstripes and a heavy trench coat to battle the frosty 40-degree weather outside the Phillips 66 gas station on the corner of Cullen and Bellfort in Houston's predominantly ­African-American Third Ward. A fresh haircut and an oversized pinkie ring complete the ensemble.

"Soldier, how you feeling?" he says to a stranger standing nearby. "Get that door for that sister," he orders someone as a young girl tries to get past the crowd and into the convenience store.

Quanell is denouncing the sale and marketing of a "pro-relaxation" beverage called Purple Stuff that critics say glamorizes and promotes the abuse of codeine and Robitussin by young people. He begins the press conference the same way he's started them all over the last decade and a half, with a prayer.

"In the name of Allah the beneficent and merciful, the one God to whom we give prayer to forever," he says. "We thank you for your presence, we thank you for your patience and we thank you for your [news] station sending you out to brave the cold."

Quanell's squat 5-foot-10-inch body looks like one bulging muscle. His handsome face is angular and chiseled. Everything about him booms power, particularly his voice.

"We are here today," Quanell begins, "to say that we are angry and outraged that ConocoPhillips, a corporate brand name, a household corporate giant, would participate in exploiting and making a dollar from the ignorance of the young masses of African Americans in this community. We have young people dying in the black community and in the Hispanic community every day because this product is being used as a gateway drug and they are dying as a direct result of drinking codeine."

Then he growls, "This is a ­disgrrraaace."

Quanell finishes by saying he just got off the phone with Purple Stuff's marketing director, who assured the activist that his company will be pulling the drink off the shelves in nine states and repackaging it because of the public outcry.

When the TV cameras stop rolling, an African-American woman in a pink ski parka stops filling her car with gas and skips toward Quanell to ask if she can get her picture taken with him. Quanell's security detail, a man wearing a 1970s-era military jacket, a beret and a sophisticated electronic earpiece, who may or may not be armed, stands just far enough away so as not to get caught in the photo.

An instant later, Quanell and his entourage are on the move. They've climbed inside a black Cadillac Escalade with tinted windows and are off to Quanell's next press conference, where reporters are already waiting.

He pulls up to a home across from a waste-processing plant in a rundown neighborhood. Twice in as many months, explosions at the CES Environmental Services plant have sent metal flying into people's yards. There's also the sickening odor coming from the plant that neighbors have complained about for a long time.

Quanell is here to bring attention to the problem and persuade the city to kick the plant out of the neighborhood. (Less than a month later, the Houston City Council decided to do just that, agreeing to sue the facility under public nuisance laws.)

Two press conferences in less than an hour railing against injustice may, at first blush, seem like the same old Quanell. Yet something feels different. His causes, his words, they don't smack of racism, the refrain Quanell is most famous for singing. He's not pitting African Americans against The World or preaching racial hatred or intolerance of any kind. On this mid-December day, at least, all Quanell is trying to do is keep kids off drugs and keep exploding pipe shrapnel from crashing through low-income neighborhood roofs.

A former drug dealer and street thug whom friends still describe as "very nice with his fists," Quanell turned 38 in December, ten years after he changed his birth name, Quanell Ralph Evans, to Quanell X for religious reasons. He's garnered a reputation over the past 15 years as a talented orator, Muslim activist and black-power broker bringing public attention to inequities and injustices within the African-American community, while simultaneously earning the label of hatemonger for his media-seeking statements on whites, Jews and homosexuals. The fact that he wears expensive-looking suits, drives luxury cars and won't exactly account for how he earns a living adds to the man's mystery and controversial allure. As does the fact that he travels with a cadre of ­serious-looking bodyguards and seems to do a better job than the cops of putting high-­profile fugitives behind bars.

Most politicians won't touch him, including Mayor Bill White and U.S. Representatives Al Green and Sheila Jackson Lee, all whom declined to respond to requests for comment. So did the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Even the Anti-Defamation League, which has so often publicly condemned Quanell, decided to suck on a lemon.