“Please pardon me for the delay,” the mythical man known as Jamel Shabazz says to me in an email. “I had surgery on my back a couple of weeks ago, and I am in recovery right now.” Uncle Jamel, as I call him in emails and messages to others as a sign of respect, is absolutely still a man all about uniting people together and sharing love as he ever was. Recently, I had to dive back into our archives to find stories that we’ve written about Jamel. He asked me to be the person to write an essay to accompany his exhibit happening at the Hofstra Museum. And while going through the several interviews this website has done with him, I uncovered a tale that still needed to be told.
