Houston’s own Quanell the Tenth was profiled this week in the LA Times. Here’s an excerpt:
Quanell X was once just Quanell Evans, a Houston street urchin from a shattered home who was slinging crack and staring at a future he knew would put him in prison or a coffin before age 25.
He sought a new start through the Nation of Islam, but his hate-filled diatribes against white America — which have included anti-Semitic remarks and exhortations to “mug you some good white folks” — proved too much even for a black Muslim organization used to helping angry hoodlums out of the gutter.
So he left to join a splinter group of gun-toting black separatists, and he advocated racial justice by any means necessary in a misguided fantasy that he was the new Malcolm X — a self-aggrandizing pose that brought him more ridicule than respect.
Now 36, Quanell X is morphing again, this time into a self-appointed spokesman for the black underclass that he came from, and his services are in high demand.
“They come to me because they know I am not afraid to challenge the powers that be,” he said. “I’m not tiptoeing through the tulips and pussyfooting around. I’m saying what other people think but don’t have the courage to say.”
RELATED: Who is Quanell X? (Owen Courr
