Malik Shabazz, founder of the Detroit New Black Panther Nation/New Marcus Garvey Movement.

“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.

In 2001, Shabazz left the party — not because of the scorn its leaders heaped on Jews, which Shabazz prefers to call “Zionists”

What makes the 42-year-old Shabazz more than a fringe figure is, at least in part, his ability to obtain the blessings of mainstream politicians. Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick calls him “one of the most dedicated public servants I know”

The same year Shabazz founded the New Marcus Garvey Movement, he also met Khallid Muhammad. Muhammad, who died in 2001, was a former member of the Nation of Islam who became leader of the New Black Panther Party.

“He was the blackest man ever,” Shabazz says of Muhammad. “He was Malcolm X times 20. He wanted me to roll with him in 1992 but I was afraid of him. I wanted to live, was why. He had a mission. But if you’re Malcolm, you get killed. I was a bad motherfucker in 1992, but he was the shit, and I was afraid.”

In 1993, Muhammad made an infamous speech at Kean College in New Jersey. The harangue was so anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, anti-white and anti-gay that it got him kicked out of the Nation of Islam and censured by the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. Shabazz says Muhammad opened his eyes. That eye-opening included what came to be Shabazz’s view of what he calls Zionists.