Qubilah Shabazz - Early Years

Early Years

Shabazz was born in Queens, New York, on December 25, 1960. Her father named her after Kublai Khan. Photographer and film-maker Gordon Parks was her godfather.

In February 1965, when she was four years old, Shabazz roused her parents in the middle of the night with her screams: the family's house had been set on fire. One week later, together with her mother and sisters, Shabazz witnessed the assassination of her father.

As a youth, Shabazz attended Quaker-run summer camps in Vermont, and at age 11 she converted to the religion from Islam. Together with her sisters, she joined Jack and Jill, a social club for the children of well-off African Americans. As a teenager, Shabazz attended the United Nations International School in Manhattan.

After high school, Shabazz enrolled at Princeton University. She felt uncomfortable there, because the Caucasian students shunned her, and the African-American students resented her. They viewed her as disinterested in their efforts to force the university to divest its investments in South Africa, when she was merely shy. She left Princeton after two semesters and moved to Paris, where she studied at the Sorbonne and worked as a translator. In Paris, she met an Algerian man with whom she had a child, Malcolm, in 1984. The relationship with the Algerian was short-lived.

When Malcolm was a few months old, Shabazz moved with him to Los Angeles. In 1986, they went to New York City, where they lived in a series of apartments in bad neighborhoods. Shabazz drifted from city to city and job to job, supporting herself by waiting tables, selling advertising for a directory, telemarketing, and proof-reading texts at a law firm. She began to drink heavily, and her mother and sisters often cared for Malcolm while Shabazz lived with various friends.