Quanell, however, says he's found a new voice and that his days of racial, religious and sexual bigotry are behind him. He says he's matured, studied history and felt the sting of racism within his sacred Muslim community, all of which have contributed to his gradual evolution as a person and a leader.
A recent Northeastern University study shows that between 2000-2001 and 2006-2007, Houston experienced a 139 percent increase in African-American murder suspects, the highest increase in the nation. Quanell knows this problem and its root causes require his full attention. For the first time ever, he's publicly saying he's willing to build bridges across the same racial and sexual divides he's helped widen and work with whomever he can to aid his community. Even if it means alienating his hard-ass core of revolutionary African-American supporters.
Courtesy Michael Goldberg
At the Holocaust Museum Houston, Quanell X says he's apologized to Jews for his hateful comments and wants to build a positive relationship with the Jewish community.
Photos by Daniel Kramer
More tempered in many respects, Quanell X is still out in front of controversial issues as he rages against racial profiling at a protest outside the Bellaire Police Department.
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"White folks," he says, "you are now on the back burner. Hate is too consuming. It consumes the hater as well as the hated. This is a new philosophy for me. My main focus is on trying to implement solutions for the serious problems within the black community."
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Sitting alone in a Third Ward coffee shop, without the protection and chaos of his usual band of followers and bodyguards, Quanell insists that to appreciate where he is today, people must understand his upbringing and how he grew to be a fire-breathing hater.
Quanell was born in South Central Los Angeles in 1970. His father was a devout member of the Nation of Islam and from day one Quanell was taught that white people were the enemy. That life lasted five years, until one day Quanell's mother packed him and his brother up and jumped on a bus heading to Houston. She told her sons that their father wanted to bring a second wife into the house, as suddenly allowed by the Nation of Islam, and she wouldn't have it. From that day on, Quanell was consumed with hate for his father.
A year ago this past Christmas, Quanell finally sat down with his dad to talk about the past. What Quanell heard knifed through his heart: His father never wanted another woman; his mother had lied to escape the strict Muslim lifestyle.
Quanell immediately confronted his mother, who is living in a mental-care home. She confirmed the news.
"To live that many years hating your father, to live that many years with an opinion of your father that was not the truth," says Quanell, "that shook me."
Quanell has since moved his father to Houston, and they pray at mosque every morning at 5:30 a.m.
"It was a tremendous learning experience for me," says Quanell.
After moving to Houston in 1975, though, Quanell received a very different kind of education.
"What you called home we called hell," he says. "Growing up, the only men we knew were the gangsters, the players, the hustlers, the men in the street. These were our role models because we had no lawyers, we had no doctors in our community who were visible. So we patterned our lives on what we saw on a daily basis."
Quanell remembers being eight years old and hanging out with the "older fellahs" when he saw a man stab another guy to death during an argument.
"The brothers were telling me, 'Don't you snitch, little fellah. You better not say one word.' I never spoke about it. Well, the brothers on the corner thought I was a stand-up cat."
Quanell soon began working for pimps and getting in gang fights. School wasn't really a priority anyway. Quanell and his friends would compete for Fs and celebrate their dismal grades by chewing on their report cards and spitting them out onto the street.
Quanell, however, was curious to learn. To avoid being teased or beat up as a kid, he used to sneak books on Big Foot, the Loch Ness Monster and nuclear weapons home under his shirt from the library and read them in the bathroom at home with the water running.
"I have criticized Quanell publicly to a larger extent and more often than probably any human being," says Houston conservative talk-radio host Michael Berry, "but I have never said he's dumb. He's extraordinarily bright and if Quanell had a Harvard law degree and had the right backing in the early days, he could be trying cases in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. He's that good."
In Quanell's world, though, education was seen as meaningless.
At 14, he was involved in a summer program that paid students to go to school and do community service. At the end of the term, there was a citywide banquet and competitions in math, reading and job interview performance. When Quanell showed up alone in a baggy suit from Goodwill, he saw white kids and their parents pouring out of limousines in their tuxedos.
Later that evening, after announcing the math winner, the master of ceremonies declared that for the first time ever, one child had won the remaining two contests. It was Quanell. When he proudly showed his trophies to his family later that night, they made fun of him and stuck the awards in the back of a cabinet. For two years they sat there.
