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Don't wait, fix problems

That's what this father and leader tells the black community although his views against affirmative action aren't always embraced.

By SHERRI DAY
Published March 31, 2006

BELMONT HEIGHTS — Wali Shabazz preaches black self-help in the tradition of Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X and Nat Turner and Bill Cosby.

As the southern regional director of the National Trust for the Development of African-American Men, Shabazz has a laserlike focus. He’s after the minds of black men, particularly boys tempted by the pull of the streets.
His is a message of self-reliance and self-respect.

“It’s the schools’ responsibility to teach reading, writing and comprehension,” Shabazz said.

“It’s the community’s responsibility to teach values. We aid the education process because we teach values and the importance of education in the African-American community and in our development from slavery into dignity.”

Working with youth in Hillsborough County schools for more than 20 years, Shabazz uses a curriculum that’s partly designed by prison inmates. His talks focus on crime and delinquency, educational attainment, health and longevity, family and community life, and economic development.

To encourage young men to reject the notion that education is akin to “acting white,” Shabazz reads from slave journals and tells his charges of times when blacks could face death for learning to read. Using history as a context, Shabazz challenges the young men about their oft flippant use of the “n-word” or about calling women derogatory names.

An avid reader and skilled orator, he is both professorial and down to earth. Shabazz studied history at the University of California at Los Angeles on a track scholarship. He’s also been educated in the school of hard knocks, having spent time in a state prison for attempting to rob a bank in his mid 20s.

Darrell B. Daniels , acting president of the Tampa-Hillsborough Urban League, says Shabazz’s transformation resembles Malcolm X’s.

“Here’s a guy who has done all the things wrong in society and turned (himself) around completely, so he can tell the guys where they’re headed is going to be a dead-end road,” Daniels said. “He can talk about going from worst to first.”

Some educators call Shabazz a godsend.

“I worship the ground the guy walks on,” said Jeff Rawlins, an assistant principal at Jefferson High School, where Shabazz works with a group of African-American students twice a month.

“As a Caucasian, I can bring some things about manhood to them. As a black man, Wali can do a lot more. He would go in there and tell it like it is and bring them up to date on this they should know. If we could clone Wali and put him everywhere, we would be better off.”

Despite his work to strengthen the African-American community, Shabazz often finds himself at odds with Tampa’s black establishment. Maybe it’s because he disapproves of affirmative action and thinks blacks often use racism as a crutch.

Perhaps it’s because he insists that blacks shed what he calls the “victim mentality” and “plantation thinking” and instead get busy solving their own community’s problems instead of expecting help from others.

If his ideas sound a little far right, it could be because he’s a Republican. But make no mistake, Shabazz tows no party’s line. He votes values. Fall in line with his way of thinking, or get out of the way.

“Wali might be considered an in-your-face type of person when it comes to issues,” said School Board member Doretha Edgecomb, who asked Shabazz to join a task force to address crime among young black men last year. “He’s going to be open. He’s going to be honest and sometimes he’s going to be brutally honest. Some people may find that a bit too much. (But) getting to know him is getting to respect him.”

Growing up in Harlem tenements in the 1950s, Shabazz remembers an Uptown where people didn’t lock tdoors. He also recalls when heroin swept through the community, sending it into a decadeslong downward spiral from which it is only recently beginning to recover.

Shabazz went to high school with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, saw Malcolm X preach on Harlem street corners and converted from Christianity to Islam in 1969. A year later, Shabazz changed his name — he won’t say what it was — to his current one. Wali, he says, is Arabic for “companion of God.” Shabazz is a tribal name.

Since coming to Tampa in 1981, Shabazz has headed up the Urban League’s crime prevention program, worked as a consultant with numerous community and governmental organizations and lectured worldwide on cultural relations.

In 1994, he received the mayor’s Brotherhood and Sisterhood Award for outstanding community service.

In 1998, he visited the Vatican to talk with bishops and cardinals about interfaith issues. He’s also worked as a consultant to the federal Justice Department and has been honored by the State Department for his work with the Russian government and religious officials.

Earlier this week, Shabazz turned 59. For now, he’s banished thoughts of retirement. He’s got a community to wake up. “This kind of work, you die with your boots on,” he said.

Times researcher Cathy Wos contributed to this report. Sherri Day can be reached at sday@sptimes.com or 226-3405.

Wali Shabazz
AGE: 59
WORKS: Southern regional director, National Trust for the Development of African-American Men
FAMILY: Wife, Kareemah; 10 children ages 5 to 28 from multiple marriages
HOME: Belmont Heights
LOVES: Jazz
READING: The Myth of Male Power by Warren Farrell; Genghis Khan or the Emperor of All Men by Harold Lamb; and The Developmental Psychology of the Black Child by Amos N. Wilson
TREASURES: A brick from Sugar Ray Robinson’s nightclub on 122nd Street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem
CONDUCTED SEMINARS IN: Senegal; Montreal; and several U.S. cities
TELLS YOUTH: “There are no police standing in front of the public library preventing (you) from getting an education.”

[Last modified March 31, 2006, 13:08:13]