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Newsmaker: Turhan Shabazz / Ex-con delivers hope in poetry
Monday, September 03, 2001 By Milan Simonich, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Turhan Shabazz has gone from street criminal to poet of the streets.
Shabazz, 64, is known to thousands of radio listeners as the sweet-voiced man who reads at least one of his poems each weekend on Chris Moore's KDKA talk show.
His lyrical messages about hope and perseverance are gobbled up as pearls of wisdom by Moore's listeners. Shabazz's poems about school and drugs and guns also have circulated widely because of the Internet and his eight self-published books.
One of his works was noticed by the Society of International Poets, a Washington, D.C., organization that last month inducted Shabazz into its ranks.
He aims his poetry at residents of urban black neighborhoods, but says his messages have crossed the color line in a way that has startled him.
"You know who buys my books? White folks," he says.
With his soothing, grandfatherly voice, Shabazz comes across as a messenger of wisdom and reason. It is hard to imagine that he lived the type of life denounced in his poems.
He was a thief and a thug. At heart, he says, he also was a racist who targeted white people as his victims.
"I was not stealing," he says of the way he justified his wrongdoing in the 1960s and '70s. "I was liberating."
These days, Shabazz uses his poems to try to connect with young black people who, he fears, are poised to repeat his sins.
"He's made a number of mistakes and he wants others to avoid them," Moore said. "He can get his point across because he has a way with rhyme that appeals directly to young people."
In his own youth, rage consumed Shabazz. Skin color was at the heart of it.
Born Ray Casey, Shabazz discarded the name when he learned of its origins.
"My people were owned by a man named Colonel Tom Casey in Roanoke, Virginia. My grandfather was born a slave in 1855."
He chose his new name to free himself from that ugly chapter in his family's history. Turhan means "seeker of truth." Shabazz means "from the lost tribe." By putting the two names together, he was creating a new man, not one that white people could consider inferior to themselves.
Shabazz grew up in East Pittsburgh and learned to use his fists at a young age. He saw physical strength as the surest way to silence white boys who taunted him.
By age 17, he also was channeling his anger into poetry. He hid that interest from his buddies, knowing they would consider his passion for poetry to be "sissified."
After graduating from Turtle Creek High School in 1955, he joined the Army and immediately became embittered. While riding a bus through the South, he and two other black soldiers were denied service at a North Carolina restaurant. A few of the 36 white soldiers who were with them refused to enter the establishment to protest the mistreatment of their comrades.
Their gesture did not impress Shabazz nearly as much as the restaurateur's bigoted stand. He said that moment of segregation caused him to hold whites in contempt.
Shabazz was a winning featherweight boxer in the Army, so military life was not a grind for him. Still, he was anything but a model soldier. He turned a three-day leave into a 45-day vacation and was court-martialed. He eventually was separated from the Army with a general discharge.
Back in the Pittsburgh area, he dabbled in college classes but devoted himself to crime. His stealing, he said, escalated after the 1968 assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
On the surface, Shabazz presented himself as a successful community organizer who enlivened neighborhoods with entertainment and festivals.
"I was stealing to get most of the money," he said.
Caught twice and convicted of burglary, larceny and receiving stolen property, he served 9 1/2 months and 11 months in the Allegheny County workhouse. He said his second conviction awakened him.
"I ain't going to say I seen the light, but I felt the heat," Shabazz said.
He worked a variety of jobs to make a living, including managing a bar. To break up a disturbance one day, he said, he grabbed a handgun kept in the safe and smacked an unruly man on the head. He knew he was facing a parole violation, so he fled to Atlanta.
Shabazz says he remained there as a fugitive for about eight years. He worked as a security guard until police discovered his identity in a 1985 traffic stop.
After serving three months in the Fulton County Jail, he was freed. The parole violation against him was not pursued. Shabazz had flaunted the law and, in this instance, gotten away with it.
Given this reprieve, he wrote with a vengeance, producing thousands of poems. He also steered clear of trouble.
These days he lives in Penn Hills, helps manage a Homewood bookstore and tutors teen-agers at the Kingsley Association in East Liberty.
Trim and clear-eyed, Shabazz could pass for a man of 50. He can still box a little, but now he prefers to win people over with his head instead of his hands.
It's an enormous job. Shabazz likes to tell of speaking to some 400 young black men in Philadelphia. He asked how many of them could get hold of a gun that very day. Nearly everyone said he could. Then he asked how many had a library card. Perhaps 25 raised their hands.
Days like those inspire the sense of urgency in his poetry. If the angry ones take the time to read him, Moore said, they may not follow in his tortured footsteps.
"I think his misspent youth has helped him shape his message," Moore said. "He finally got it right."
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Date of birth: Jan. 27, 1937