Karenga, Maulana

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Karenga, Maulana

1941

The activist and educator Ronald McKinley Everett, later known as Maulana Karenga, was born in Parsonburg, Maryland, the youngest of fourteen children of a Baptist minister. He moved to Los Angeles in 1959 and received his B.A. (1963) and M.A. (1964) in political science from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He became active in local civil rights battles and in 1965 he helped rebuild the Watts community following the riots earlier that year. At that time he embraced cultural nationalism and adopted the African name Maulana (master teacher) Karenga (keeper of the tradition). In 1966 Karenga founded US (indicating us as opposed to them ), a small vanguard nationalist organization that maintained that a black cultural renaissance was the first step in the revolutionary struggle for black power.

Karenga was deeply influenced by Pan-Africanists such as Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah, the American W. E. B. Du Bois, the Negritude movement epitomized by Senegal's Leopold Senghor, and the African socialism pioneered by Tanzania's Julius Nyerere. Domestically, Karenga was influenced by the black nationalist tradition epitomized by Marcus Garvey, the Nation of Islam, and especially Malcolm X. To achieve true liberation, Karenga increasingly argued, African Americans needed to embrace a culture that reflected their African heritage. Karenga called this ideology Kawaida. In effect, Kawaida stressed that black liberation could not be achieved unless black people rejected the cultural values of the dominant white society. Under his leadership, US's guiding principle became "back to black." Members wore traditional African garb, promoted the teaching of Swahili, sponsored Afro-centric events, and often attempted to work in coalitions with other black organizations. Although consisting of fewer than one hundred members, US played an important role in promoting and building independent schools, black studies departments, and black student unions.

Karenga believed that African Americans should base their lives on seven African values: umoja (unity), kujichagulia (self-determination), ujima (collective work and responsibility), ujamaa (cooperative economics), nia (purpose), kuumba (creativity), and imani (faith). In 1966 he founded the holiday of Kwanza, a seven-day celebration based on these principles. Karenga coplanned and helped to convene Black Power conferences in Washington, D.C. (1966), Newark, New Jersey (1967), and Philadelphia (1968).

His popularity declined, however, in the late 1960s and early 1970s due to internal turmoil within US as well as intense struggles with the Black Panther Party over the control and direction of the West Coast black nationalist movement. The Black Panther Party viewed socioeconomic struggle, not cultural reaffirmation, as the key to black liberation. Confrontations too often escalated into violence because of both groups' reliance on arms. In 1968, following a bitter debate and violent confrontation over the appointment of a director of the Afro-American Studies Center at UCLA, three US members were ultimately convicted of the shooting deaths of two Black Panthers. In 1976, the FBI admitted to abetting the warfare between US and the Black Panther Party in an attempt to undermine both organizations.

In 1971 Karenga was charged with and later convicted of aggravated assault on two female US members. He received an indeterminate sentence of one to ten years. Upon his release from prison in 1975, he embraced socialism and called for black people to struggle against class, as well as racial, oppression. One year later he received a doctorate in leadership and human behavior from U.S. International University in San Diego.

Throughout the 1990s and during the early twenty-first century, Karenga has remained a vocal proponent of Afrocentrism. He served as director of the African-American Cultural Center in Los Angeles as well as chairman of the black studies department at California State University at Long Beach. In 1993 Karenga earned another doctorate, this one in social ethics, from the University of Southern California. He is the author of numerous articles and texts, including The Quotable Karenga (1967), Introduction to Black Studies (1982), Kemet, the African World View: Research and Restoration (1986), and Kwanzaa: A Celebration of Family, Community and Culture (1998).

See also Afrocentrism; Black Power Movement; Black Studies; Du Bois, W. E. B.; Kawaida; Nationalism in the United States in the Nineteenth Century; Pan-Africanism