He also took a job as a spokesman for an old weed-smoking partner: Scarface of the Geto Boys, who pioneered gangsta rap with graphic tales of life in South Acres. Quanell X had cameos on rap records and music videos.
Then something horrible happened: His younger brother, who never left the drug-dealing life, was killed in a quadruple homicide. Quanell X found the bodies in his brother's apartment, the safe open, the crack gone.
"I kissed my brother for the last time that day: July 17, 1992," he said, choking back tears as he retold the story outside the cinder-block apartment where his brother died. "I had a choice: plot my revenge or try to make a positive change. Change was the choice I made."
That positive side took a while to emerge, however. First came anger.
Quanell X's vitriolic speech escalated to a pitch that made some in the Nation of Islam uncomfortable. During the Million Man March in 1995, he told a Chicago Tribune reporter, "I say to Jewish America: Get ready ... knuckle up, put your boots on, because we're ready and the war is going down."
He left the Nation of Islam in 1997 to start his own paramilitary squad and a year later joined the New Black Panther Party, a group then led by another Nation of Islam dissident that pushed a strident brand of black separatism.
When James Byrd was dragged to death by whites in Jasper, Texas, in 1998, civil rights leaders preached unity. Quanell X showed up in the town with armed guards and a trunk filled with guns.
Those later shenanigans convinced former supporters in the Nation of Islam that the parting of ways had been inevitable.
"We know the Nation of Islam does not preach the use of weapons," said Deric Muhammad, a Nation of Islam minister in Houston. "So of course when we saw Quanell X riding down the street surrounded with armed men, we thought, This brother has to know better than that."
Though he still styles himself a revolutionary, Quanell X has since ratcheted down his rhetoric. Deric Muhammad, who remains a friend, said he has matured.
Quanell X said he had fallen under the spell of black Muslim dissidents who had led him astray, and has begun to see that he doesn't need weapons or shock talk to shake up the establishment.
Two years ago, he broke away from the New Black Panther Party, which was regarded as a hate organization by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and started the New Black Panther Nation, a smaller activist network. Watchdog groups continue to monitor what he says.
