Most famous for sounding off against the "white establishment," Quanell is not afraid to point his finger at black leaders, too.
"A pastor said recently on the radio that Quanell X used to be the pit bull for the black community," he says. "And I say to that pastor, I am still the pit bull for the black community, I've just taken my leash out of your hand, out of the hands of black leaders who want to play politics, out of the hands of those black leaders who would vote and stand with what's in the best interest of a party before they stand with what's in the best interest of the black community. To hell with them. I'm not going to play that game whether they like it or not."
Daniel Kramer
Seldom without a crowd, Quanell X keeps his bodyguards close while praying at the Islamic Da'wah Center.
Revolutionary Muslim and teacher Khalid Abdul Muhammad of the Nation of Islam trained an impressionable Quanell X how to stir a crowd with hateful statements.
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One of the reasons, Quanell says, that some supporters in his own community are turning against him is his recent less aggressive stance against white people.
"When I met Quanell in 1996," says Pastor Chris Wright of Grace Temple Ministries, who has long been one of Quanell's allies, "he was a young man. We're talking sworn enemy from the womb to the tomb, from the cradle to the grave, I will fight you all the way, I will dig up your dead and kill them again because they didn't die hard enough the first time. That individual was a very hardened individual. It was very difficult for him to totally trust a Caucasian."
Quanell does not disagree with Wright.
"There was a time when I would have said he's absolutely right," Quanell says. "But not today. I've met too many good white people."
Says Michael Berry, "Quanell sometimes rushes to the lowest common denominator, which is screaming racism. And he's therefore marginalizing himself. And I think he recognized that. I think that he has matured and he has gone about taking up some new causes, and being more thoughtful and deliberate before he speaks."
One of the comments Quanell made that continues to haunt his public image occurred at a 1999 rally protesting the scheduled execution of an African American convicted of murder, when he reportedly said, "If you feel that you just got to mug somebody because of your hurt and your pain, go to River Oaks and mug you some good white folks."
Quanell insists that his comment was a premeditated publicity stunt aimed at shocking white Houstonians in hopes of forcing a desperately needed discussion between whites and blacks at a time when he especially felt the city's white elite did not care about the problems in the black community. To a degree, Quanell regrets the words he chose that day.
"What they heard was shock and awe," he says. "I did not know how many young white people I frightened. I was aiming at their parents. But years later, I learned that young white youth were afraid to go to school. I felt sad and I felt bad, because they were like collateral damage of a statement that I didn't mean to harm them. But what I learned was that language affects more than just your target audience. And so I didn't mean to frighten the youth, I didn't mean to put the white youth at odds with the black youth. I was screaming out to white people who have the ability, the talent, the political connections, the power to stop and say, 'What is happening in the black community, we have a duty to help them and to change the shameful, wretched conditions that they're living in.' And that's why I said what I did. It just had more than the planned effect."
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The epiphany that sent Quanell hurtling down the road to change, he says, happened several years ago when Houston's Arab Muslim leaders asked him to help organize a protest against Israel for its actions against Yasir Arafat. Wanting to help his Muslim brothers, Quanell agreed.
He says he did not expect to get slapped in the face.
The night before the protest, Quanell says, several Arab leaders voiced concern over letting a black man be their spokesman at the event.
"Boy, when I saw them debating my skin color," says Quanell, "it broke my heart. I believed that in Islam, racism didn't exist. Remember, Malcolm X said there was no color in Islam, but Malcolm didn't live long enough to see the real manifestations of the hypocrisy of those who call themselves Muslim."
The bitter sting of racism within his own religious circles launched Quanell into deep study, he says, and he began reading history books — about how the Arabs began trading in African slaves before the Europeans — and the Qur'an, which, to his surprise, he discovered says no sex or race is superior to any other.
At the same time that Quanell was coming to grips with his own hateful comments from the past, he also began revising his priorities for the future. It was time, he decided, to use all his energy previously consumed by hating and focus it on finding solutions to what he now saw as the greatest problem in the black community: itself.
