The celebration of Kwanzaa is a seven day festival commemorating African Americans lasting from December 26- January 1. Its sole purpose is to strengthen African cultural identity and community values. Each of the seven days of Kwanzaa is dedicated to one of the following principles, which are explained by Karenga as follows:
· Umoja (Unity) To strive for and maintain unity in the family, community, nation and race.
· Kujichagulia (Self-Determination) To define ourselves, name ourselves, create for ourselves and speak for ourselves.
· Ujima (Collective Work and Responsibility) To build and maintain our community together and make our brother's and sister's problems our problems and to solve them together.
· Ujamaa (Cooperative Economics) To build and maintain our own stores, shops and other businesses and to profit from them together.
· Nia (Purpose) To make our collective vocation the building and developing of our community in order to restore our people to their traditional greatness.
· Kuumba (Creativity) To do always as much as we can, in the way we can, in order to leave our community more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it.
· Imani (Faith) To believe with all our heart in our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders and the righteousness and victory of our struggle.
These principles correspond to Karenga's notion that "the seven-fold path of blackness is think black, talk black, act black, create black, buy black, vote black, and live black.
Although all this looks good there is another side to Dr. Ron Karenga. I do not want anyone to feel that The Righteous Griots are against this holiday but we would like to show the contradictory life Dr. Karenga leads.
Ron Karenga is most famously known as the founder of the seven day celebration Kwanza. However, Karenga has been involved in the Black Power struggle since the mid -1960’s. After meeting Malcolm X, Karenga embraced the idea of Black Nationalism. In 1965 he started the United Slaves Organization which was shortened to US Organization and gave himself the name of "maulana", Swahili for "master teacher.”
The US Organization became rivals with the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense which was founded by Dr. Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in 1966. US had different aims and tactics then the Panthers. The F.B.I. split the two groups even further apart by sending forged letters so that each would believe that the other was publicly humiliating them. Yet, at the same time there are alleged accusations that the US Organization helped the F.B.I. in countering the Black Panthers.
In 1969, the two organizations disagreed over who should head the new Afro-American Studies Center at UCLA. Each supported a different candidate. This disagreement came to a head when on January 17, 1969 Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter and John Huggins, two BPP members, were shot dead by George P. and Larry Joseph Stiner, US members, after a Black Student Union meeting at UCLA.
The LAPD responded to the attack by raiding an apartment used by the Black Panthers and arresting 75 members, including all remaining leadership of the chapter, on charges of conspiring to murder United Slaves members in retaliation. (These charges were later dropped.) This reaction fueled claims that United Slaves was being used by the FBI to target the Black Panthers. Later in 1969, two other Black Panther members were killed and one other was wounded by United Slaves members.
Excerpt from Seize the Time by Bobby Seale: Mr. Seale recounts the incident in his book and gives his interpretation of the event and the US organization.
“Alprentice ‘Bunchy’ Carter was killed because a group of blacks—black racists and cultural nationalist from Ron Karenga’s US organization—became enemies of the people and, in essence, sided with the capitalist power structure. These pig, black racists really work with the power structure against their own people, and do it out of a psychological need to hate white people just because of the color of their skin…Bunchy was concerned about the fact that the US organization had been running around intimidating, threatening, and beating up a number of the people in the community, in the B.S.U., and other small factionalized black organizations…From his [Karenga] past record and his meeting behind the scenes with the Rockefellers, we know that he got those little jive businesses as a handout, to trick the community on the concept of blackness and black is beautiful. Ron Karenga had no intention before and has no intention now of working in opposition to the power structure to change the system for the needs of Black America.”
Dr. Karenga was sent to prison in 1971 for assaulting and torturing two women from the US organization. In 1975 he was released from prison and embraced the idea of Marxism. He became the chairman of the Black Studies department at California State University, Long Beach a position he held from 1989 to 2002.
I have now showed the two different sides of an individual: On one side Karenga is liberator of black people, on the other side he can be seen as a fraud who only exploited the black community.
2 comments:
On what basis do you assert that Us was ever known as the "United Slaves" Organization?
This bit of misinformation has never been subtantiated by anyone who uses the term.
Your answer would be most illuminating.
Thank you for your comment. In response. I have seen both ways: United Slaves and Us. The latter is the more frequent. United Slaves I have seen in more conservative writing. I wanted to give both names so there is no mistake.
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