Minister Malik Shabazz truly embodies the spirit of this award because he has spent the bulk of his adult life serving as an activist and community organizer. 

Shabazz grew up in Detroit’s North End, an area centering around Oakland Street north of East Grand Boulevard.

He credits the Shrine of the Black Madonna as a big inspiration for his activism, which in part led to him founding the New Marcus Garvey Movement. Under Minister Shabazz’s leadership, the group focused on community activism, either to get bad actors out of the community or to use public attention to force them to clean up their act.

Protests in the early 90s targeted neighborhood grocery stores selling foods past the expiration date. According to articles in the Michigan Citizen, his group’s efforts led to the closing of as many as 10 stores by 1998.

Around the same time, Minister Shabazz took on an even tougher opponent: Drug houses. Day in and day out, the group marched in front of drug houses, including even staging a protest on Christmas. While there is no exact count, the group was successful in closing down several drug houses.

In 2010, along with motivational speaker Raphael B. Johnson and the late Angelo Henderson, a former Detroit News reporter, Minister Shabazz founded the Detroit 300 patrol group after a 90-year-old woman was raped. The armed citizen patrols, which grew to more than 1,500 members, led to multiple arrests and helped to reduce crime.

Minister Shabazz has organized citizen patrols, mobilized searches for unsolved crimes and spoken out about any number of policy issues, ranging from quality local government to quality schools. For many years he raised his voice through his weekly radio show on WHPR 88.1 FM.

For a warrior who spent more than four decades working to bring justice to our communities, Minister Shabazz is this year’s honorary winner.