- Jun 8, 2004
- 3,210
- 63
Good brothers and sisters, tell me what you think of this brother after reading this artilce... Here is an excerpt... Click on the website for the entire article...
Sitting outside a run-down barbershop on Detroit’s West Side, Malik Shabazz is in his usual Sunday spot, serving up home-cooked barbecue and laying groundwork for the revolution he envisions.
Even when wearing sweats and kicking back in a lawn chair, calling out to the folk in cars that slow when passing by, Shabazz radiates charisma. He’s tall, maybe 6 feet 5 inches, and good-looking, with a voice so smooth and resonant you might mistake him for an R&B singer, or maybe a politician.
The boxes of ribs and other soul food he sells for $6 to $10 a pop helps support Shabazz and his New Black Panther Nation/New Marcus Garvey Movement, the black separatist group he’s built over the past decade. Shabazz is a bona fide activist working to build a stronger African-American community by registering voters, staging protests, visiting homeless shelters and talking to schoolkids about the need for a good education.
In a way, though, this community-building is akin to road construction. Certainly, Shabazz has an eye on improving the here and now, but this activism is also a means of getting to what he sees as the final destination. His is a grandiose vision involving what the self-described revolutionary calls “complete, total, cosmic change.”
What he wants, ultimately, are separate societies, segregated on the basis of skin color. Whites here, blacks there, brown-skinned, red-skinned and yellow-skinned people there, there and there, each in control of their own pieces of real estate.
To achieve that, he says, the white capitalist power structures of the West must be eliminated. And if this vision is ever realized, it won’t be through peaceful means. Forget about the nonviolent civil disobedience of Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King.
“I love Dr. King,” Shabazz says, “but I’m not going to get beat up to share a toilet with anyone.”
The changes Shabazz wants, he says, will only come through armed insurrection. “Huey Newton said power flows through the barrel of a gun,” Shabazz says, invoking the name of one of the original Black Panthers. “We plan to make changes the same way George Washington did, the same way any oppressed people get power.”
He refuses to discuss or even acknowledge any specific plans for revolution, nor will he disclose what kind of weaponry his group has, though he does admit that they’re often armed and can shift from “Martin Luther King mode” to “Malcolm X mode” at any time.
He can also shift his rhetoric just as quickly. Over the course of several interviews with Metro Times, and being pressed repeatedly on his insistent advocacy of armed insurrection, he suddenly adopts a different tone. But even at its most expansive, Shabazz’s claims of benevolence are conditional: “We’re not against armed revolt, however, we’re going to overthrow the system with love. We’re teaching black-on-black love. We’re going to subdue the world with the Bible, the Quran, the Egyptian Book of the Dead. We’re as nonviolent as we’re allowed to be.”
http://www.metrotimes.com/editorial/story.asp?id=7648
Peace!
Isaiah
Sitting outside a run-down barbershop on Detroit’s West Side, Malik Shabazz is in his usual Sunday spot, serving up home-cooked barbecue and laying groundwork for the revolution he envisions.
Even when wearing sweats and kicking back in a lawn chair, calling out to the folk in cars that slow when passing by, Shabazz radiates charisma. He’s tall, maybe 6 feet 5 inches, and good-looking, with a voice so smooth and resonant you might mistake him for an R&B singer, or maybe a politician.
The boxes of ribs and other soul food he sells for $6 to $10 a pop helps support Shabazz and his New Black Panther Nation/New Marcus Garvey Movement, the black separatist group he’s built over the past decade. Shabazz is a bona fide activist working to build a stronger African-American community by registering voters, staging protests, visiting homeless shelters and talking to schoolkids about the need for a good education.
In a way, though, this community-building is akin to road construction. Certainly, Shabazz has an eye on improving the here and now, but this activism is also a means of getting to what he sees as the final destination. His is a grandiose vision involving what the self-described revolutionary calls “complete, total, cosmic change.”
What he wants, ultimately, are separate societies, segregated on the basis of skin color. Whites here, blacks there, brown-skinned, red-skinned and yellow-skinned people there, there and there, each in control of their own pieces of real estate.
To achieve that, he says, the white capitalist power structures of the West must be eliminated. And if this vision is ever realized, it won’t be through peaceful means. Forget about the nonviolent civil disobedience of Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King.
“I love Dr. King,” Shabazz says, “but I’m not going to get beat up to share a toilet with anyone.”
The changes Shabazz wants, he says, will only come through armed insurrection. “Huey Newton said power flows through the barrel of a gun,” Shabazz says, invoking the name of one of the original Black Panthers. “We plan to make changes the same way George Washington did, the same way any oppressed people get power.”
He refuses to discuss or even acknowledge any specific plans for revolution, nor will he disclose what kind of weaponry his group has, though he does admit that they’re often armed and can shift from “Martin Luther King mode” to “Malcolm X mode” at any time.
He can also shift his rhetoric just as quickly. Over the course of several interviews with Metro Times, and being pressed repeatedly on his insistent advocacy of armed insurrection, he suddenly adopts a different tone. But even at its most expansive, Shabazz’s claims of benevolence are conditional: “We’re not against armed revolt, however, we’re going to overthrow the system with love. We’re teaching black-on-black love. We’re going to subdue the world with the Bible, the Quran, the Egyptian Book of the Dead. We’re as nonviolent as we’re allowed to be.”
http://www.metrotimes.com/editorial/story.asp?id=7648
Peace!
Isaiah
