- ON DECEMBER 24, 1971, the
New York Times ran one of the first of many articles on a new holiday
designed
to foster unity among African Americans. The holiday, called Kwanzaa, was
applauded by a certain sixteen-year-old minister who explained that the
feast would perform the valuable service of "de-whitizing"
Christmas.
The minister was a nobody at the time but he would later go on to become
perhaps the premier race-baiter of the twentieth century. His name was
Al Sharpton and he would later spawn the Tawana Brawley hoax and then
incite
anti-Jewish tensions in a 1995 incident that ended with the arson deaths
of seven people.
-
- Great minds think alike. The inventor of the holiday
was one of the few black "leaders" in America even worse than
Sharpton. But there was no mention in the Times article of this man or
of the fact that at that very moment he was sitting in a California prison.
And there was no mention of the curious fact that this purported benefactor
of the black people had founded an organization that in its short history
tortured and murdered blacks in ways of which the Ku Klux Klan could only
fantasize.
-
- It was in newspaper articles like that, repeated in
papers
all over the country, that the tradition of Kwanzaa began. It is a
tradition
not out of Africa but out of Orwell. Both history and language have been
bent to serve a political goal. When that New York Times article appeared,
Ron Karenga's crimes were still recent events. If the reporter had bothered
to do any research into the background of the Kwanzaa founder, he might
have learned about Karenga's trial earlier that year on charges of
torturing
two women who were members of US (United Slaves), a black nationalist cult
he had founded.
-
- A May 14, 1971, article in the Los Angeles Times
described
the testimony of one of them: "Deborah Jones, who once was given the
Swahili title of an African queen, said she and Gail Davis were whipped
with an electrical cord and beaten with a karate baton after being ordered
to remove their clothes. She testified that a hot soldering iron was placed
in Miss Davis' mouth and placed against Miss Davis' face and that one of
her own big toes was tightened in a vise. Karenga, head of US, also put
detergent and running hoses in their mouths, she said."
-
- Back then, it was relatively easy to get information
on the trial. Now it's almost impossible. It took me two days' work to
find articles about it. The Los Angeles Times seems to have been the only
major newspaper that reported it and the stories were buried deep in the
paper, which now is available only on microfilm. And the microfilm index
doesn't start until 1972, so it is almost impossible to find the three
small articles that cover Karenga's trial and conviction on charges of
torture. That is fortunate for Karenga. The trial showed him to be not
just brutal, but deranged. He and three members of his cult had tortured
the women in an attempt to find some nonexistent "crystals" of
poison. Karenga thought his enemies were out to get him.
-
- And in another lucky break for Karenga, the trial
transcript
no longer exists. I filed a request for it with the Superior Court of Los
Angeles. After a search, the court clerk could find no record of the trial.
So the exact words of the black woman who had a hot soldering iron pressed
against her face by the man who founded Kwanzaa are now lost to history.
The only document the court clerk did find was particularly revealing,
however. It was a transcript of Karenga's sentencing hearing on Sept. 17,
1971.
-
- A key issue was whether Karenga was sane. Judge Arthur
L. Alarcon read from a psychiatrist's report: "Since his admission
here he has been isolated and has been exhibiting bizarre behavior, such
as staring at the wall, talking to imaginary persons, claiming that he
was attacked by dive-bombers and that his attorney was in the next cell.
¬Ö During part of the interview he would look around as if
reacting
to hallucination and when the examiner walked away for a moment he began
a conversation with a blanket located on his bed, stating that there was
someone there and implying indirectly that the 'someone' was a woman
imprisoned
with him for some offense. This man now presents a picture which can be
considered both paranoid and schizophrenic with hallucinations and
elusions,
inappropriate affect, disorganization, and impaired contact with the
environment."
-
- The founder of Kwanzaa paranoid? It seems so. But as
the old saying goes, just because you're paranoid it doesn't mean that
someone isn't out to get you.
-
- ACCORDING TO COURT DOCUMENTS,
Karenga's real name is Ron N. Everett. In the '60s, he awarded himself
the title "maulana," Swahili for "master teacher."
He was born on a poultry farm in Maryland, the fourteenth child of a
Baptist
minister. He came to California in the late 1950s to attend Los Angeles
Community College. He moved on to UCLA, where he got a Master's degree
in political science and African Studies. By the mid-1960s, he had
established
himself as a leading "cultural nationalist." That is a term that
had some meaning in the '60s, mainly as a way of distinguishing Karenga's
followers from the Black Panthers, who were conventional Marxists.
-
- Another way of distinguishing might be to think of
Karenga's
gang as the Crips and the Panthers as the bloods. Despite all their
rhetoric
about white people, they reserved their most vicious violence for each
other. In 1969, the two groups squared off over the question of who would
control the new Afro-American Studies Center at UCLA. According to a Los
Angeles Times article, Karenga and his adherents backed one candidate,
the Panthers another. Both groups took to carrying guns on campus, a
situation
that, remarkably, did not seem to bother the university administration.
The Black Student Union, however, set up a coalition to try and bring peace
between the Panthers and the group headed by the man whom the Times labeled
"Ron Ndabezitha Everett-Karenga."
-
- On Jan. 17, 1969, about 150 students gathered in a
lunchroom
to discuss the situation. Two Panthers - admitted to UCLA like many of
the black students as part of a federal program that put high-school
dropouts
into the school - apparently spent a good part of the meeting in verbal
attacks against Karenga. This did not sit well with Karenga's followers,
many of whom had adopted the look of their leader, pseudo-African clothing
and a shaved head.
-
- In modern gang parlance, you might say Karenga was
"dissed"
by John Jerome Huggins, 23, and Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter, 26.
After the meeting, the two Panthers were met in the hallway by two brothers
who were members of US, George P. and Larry Joseph Stiner. The Stiners
pulled pistols and shot the two Panthers dead. One of the Stiners took
a bullet in the shoulder, apparently from a Panther's gun.
-
- There were other beatings and shooting in Los Angeles
involving US, but by then the tradition of African nationalism had already
taken hold - among whites. That tradition calls for any white person,
whether
a journalist, a college official, or a politician, to ignore the obvious
flaws of the concept that blacks should have a separate culture. "The
students here have handled themselves in an absolutely impeccable
manner,"
UCLA chancellor Charles E. Young told the L.A. Times. "They have been
concerned. They haven't argued who the director should be; they have been
saying what kind of person he should be." Young made those remarks
after the shooting. And the university went ahead with its Afro-American
Studies Program. Karenga, meanwhile, continued to build and strengthen
US, a unique group that seems to have combined the elements of a street
gang with those of a California cult. The members performed assaults and
robberies but they also strictly followed the rules laid down in The
Quotable
Karenga, a book that laid out "The Path of Blackness." "The
sevenfold path of blackness is think black, talk black, act black, create
black, buy black, vote black, and live black," the book states.
-
- In retrospect, it may be fortunate that the cult fell
apart over the torture charges. Left to his own devices, Karenga might
have orchestrated the type of mass suicide later pioneered by the People's
Temple and copied by the Heaven's Gate cult. Instead, he apparently fell
into deep paranoia shortly after the killings at UCLA. He began fearing
that his followers were trying to have him killed. On May 9, 1970 he
initiated
the torture session that led to his imprisonment. Karenga himself will
not comment on that incident and the victims cannot be located, so the
sole remaining account is in the brief passage from the L.A. Times
describing
tortures inflicted by Karenga and his fellow defendants, Louis Smith and
Luz Maria Tamayo:
-
- "The victims said they were living at Karenga's
home when Karenga accused them of trying to kill him by placing 'crystals'
in his food and water and in various areas of his house. When they denied
it, allegedly they were beaten with an electrical cord and a hot soldering
iron was put in Miss Davis' mouth and against her face. Police were told
that one of Miss Jones' toes was placed in a small vise which then
allegedly
was tightened by one of the defendants. The following day Karenga allegedly
told the women that 'Vietnamese torture is nothing compared to what I
know.'
Miss Tamayo reportedly put detergent in their mouths, Smith turned a water
hose full force on their faces, and Karenga, holding a gun, threatened
to shoot both of them."
-
- Karenga was convicted of two counts of felonious assault
and one count of false imprisonment. He was sentenced on Sept. 17, 1971,
to serve one to ten years in prison. A brief account of the sentencing
ran in several newspapers the following day. That was apparently the last
newspaper article to mention Karenga's unfortunate habit of doing
unspeakable
things to black people. After that, the only coverage came from the
hundreds
of news accounts that depict him as the wonderful man who invented
Kwanzaa.
-
- LOOK AT ANY MAP OF THE WORLD
and you will see that Ghana and Kenya are on opposite sides of the
continent.
This brings up an obvious question about Kwanzaa: Why did Karenga use
Swahili
words for his fictional African feast? American blacks are primarily
descended
from people who came from Ghana and other parts of West Africa. Kenya and
Tanzania - where Swahili is spoken - are several thousand miles away, about
as far from Ghana as Los Angeles is from New York. Yet in celebrating
Kwanzaa,
African-Americans are supposed to employ a vocabulary of such Swahili words
as "kujichagulia" and "kuumba." This makes about as
much sense as having Irish-Americans celebrate St. Patrick's Day by
speaking
Polish. One possible explanation is that Karenga was simply ignorant of
African geography and history when he came up with Kwanzaa in 1966. That
might explain why he would schedule a harvest festival near the solstice,
a season when few fruits or vegetables are harvested anywhere. But a better
explanation is that he simply has contempt for black people.
-
- That does not seem a farfetched hypothesis. Despite all
his rhetoric about white racism, I could find no record that he or his
followers ever raised a hand in anger against a white person. In fact,
Karenga had an excellent relationship with Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty
in the '60s and also met with then-Governor Ronald Reagan and other white
politicians. But he and his gang were hell on blacks. And Karenga certainly
seems to have had a low opinion of his fellow African-Americans.
"People
think it's African, but it's not," he said about his holiday in an
interview quoted in the Washington Post. "I came up with Kwanzaa
because
black people in this country wouldn't celebrate it if they knew it was
American. Also, I put it around Christmas because I knew that's when a
lot of bloods would be partying." "Bloods" is a '60s
California
slang term for black people.
-
- That Post article appeared in 1978. Like other news
articles
from that era, it makes no mention of Karenga's criminal past, which seems
to have been forgotten the minute he got out of prison in 1975. Profiting
from the absence of memory, he remade himself as Maulana Ron Karenga, went
into academics, and by 1979 he was running the Black Studies Department
at California State University in Long Beach.
-
- This raises a question: Karenga had just ten years
earlier
proven himself capable of employing guns and bullets in his efforts to
control hiring in the Black Studies Department at UCLA. So how did this
ex-con, fresh out jail, get the job at Long Beach? Did he just send a
rôsumô
and wait by the phone? The officials at Long Beach State don't like that
type of question. I called the university and got a spokeswoman by the
name of Toni Barone. She listened to my questions and put me on hold.
Christmas
music was playing, a nice touch under the circumstances. She told me to
fax her my questions. I sent a list of questions that included the matter
of whether Karenga had employed threats to get his job. I also asked just
what sort of crimes would preclude a person from serving on the faculty
there in Long Beach. And whether the university takes any security measures
to ensure that Karenga doesn't shoot any students. Barone faxed me back
a reply stating that the university is pleased with Karenga's performance
and has no record of the procedures that led to his hiring. She ignored
the question about how they protect students.
-
- Actually, there is clear evidence that Karenga has
reformed.
In 1975, he dropped his cultural nationalist views and converted to
Marxism.
For anyone else, this would have been seen as an endorsement of radicalism,
but for Karenga it was considered a sign that he had moderated his outlook.
The ultimate irony is that now that Karenga is a Marxist, the capitalists
have taken over his holiday. The seven principles of Kwanzaa include
"collective
work" and "cooperative economics," but Kwanzaa is turning
out to be as commercial as Christmas, generating millions in greeting-card
sales alone. The purists are whining. "It's clear that a number of
major corporations have started to take notice and try to profit from
Kwanzaa,"
said a San Francisco State black studies professor named "Oba
T'Shaka"
in one news account. "That's not good, with money comes
corruption."
No, he's wrong. With money comes kitsch. The L.A. Times reported a group
was planning an "African Village Faire," the pseudo-archaic
spelling
of "faire" nicely combining kitsch Africana with kitsch
Americana.
-
- With money also comes forgetfulness. As those warm
Kwanzaa
feelings are generated in a spirit of holiday cheer, those who celebrate
this holiday do so in blissful ignorance of the sordid violence, paranoia,
and mayhem that helped generate its birth some three decades ago in a
section
of America that has vanished down the memory hole.
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