Qubilah Shabazz

Qubilah Bahiyah Shabazz (born December 25, 1960) is the second daughter of Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz.

Shabazz was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1960.

Her father named her after Kublai Khan.

Photographer and film-maker Gordon Parks was her godfather.

In 1965, she witnessed the assassination of her father by three gunmen.

In February 1965, when Qubilah was four years old, she 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, she witnessed the assassination of her father.

As a youth, Qubilah Shabazz attended a Quaker-run summer camp called "Farm and Wilderness" in Vermont.

At age 11, she became a Quaker, converting from Islam.

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, she enrolled at Princeton University but was uncomfortable there, feeling that the white students were shunning her and that the African-American students resented her apparent lack of interest in their efforts to force the university to divest its investments in South Africa.

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.

Their relationship subsequently ended.

When Malcolm was a few months old, Qubilah 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.

For many years, Shabazz's mother, Betty, harbored resentment toward the Nation of Islam—and Louis Farrakhan in particular—for what she felt was their role in the assassination of her husband.

In a 1994 interview, her mother was asked whether Farrakhan "had anything to do" with Malcolm X's death.

She replied: "Of course, yes. Nobody kept it a secret. It was a badge of honor. Everybody talked about it, yes."

Shabazz began to obsess about Farrakhan.

Like her mother, she believed he was responsible for killing her father.

Now, she feared, he would kill her mother.

In May 1994, she contacted Michael Fitzpatrick, a friend from high school, and asked if he would kill Farrakhan for her.

She later told the FBI that she chose Fitzpatrick because "I knew he was capable of doing it".

However, Fitzpatrick became an FBI informant.

He sometimes acted on their behalf as an agent provocateur.

He had been arrested for drug possession shortly before Shabazz called him.

He reported their conversation to the FBI.

Fitzpatrick and Shabazz spoke frequently during June and July.

She believed he was romantically interested in her.

She told her neighbors that he had proposed marriage.

Fitzpatrick encouraged her, allowing Malcolm to call him "my dad".

In September, Qubilah and her son moved to Minneapolis, where Fitzpatrick lived.

Fitzpatrick asked for money and she gave him $250.

She was arrested in 1995 in connection with an alleged plot to kill Louis Farrakhan, by then the leader of the Nation of Islam who she believed was responsible for the assassination of her father.

She has maintained her innocence.

She accepted a plea agreement under which she was required to undergo psychological counseling and treatment for her substance use disorders to avoid a prison sentence.