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Kwanzaa: Black Power and the Making of the African-American Holiday Tradition
Since 1966, Kwanzaa has been celebrated as a black holiday tradition – an annual recognition of cultural pride in the African American community. But how did this holiday originate, and what is its broader cultural significance? Black Power and the Making of the African-American Holiday Tradition explores the political beginning and later expansion of Kwanzaa, from its start as a Black Power holiday, to its current place as one of the most mainstream of the black holiday traditions. For those wanting to learn more about this alternative observance practiced by countless African Americans and how Kwanzaa fits into the larger black holiday tradition, Keith A. Mayes gives an accessible and definitive account of the movements and individuals that pushed to make this annual celebration a reality, and shows how African-Americans brought the black freedom struggle to the American calendar. Clear and thoughtful, Kwanzaa is the perfect introduction to what is now the quintessential African American holiday.
312 pages, Paperback
First published July 31, 2009
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January 2, 2024
PROBABLY THE MOST INFORMATIVE BOOK ABOUT KWANZAA HISTORICALLY, ETC.
Author Keith Mayes wrote in the Introduction to this 2009 book, “[This book] examines the creation and development of Kwanzaa as a response to racial oppression that manifested in black cultural and holiday invisibility in the twentieth century… For Black Power activists, Kwanzaa was just as important as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Kwanzaa was their answer to what they understood as the ubiquity of white cultural practices that oppressed them as thoroughly as had Jim Crow laws. This book explores how Kwanzaa fits into the larger black holiday tradition, bridging older black observances that preceded it with those that came after its creation in 1966… The appropriation of Kwanzaa by American corporate and cultural institutions in the 1980s and 1990s captures the holiday’s development and yields how Kwanzaa served the needs of institutions outside black America. By the last decade of the twentieth century, Kwanzaa … had been embraced by a broader segment of African-Americans, corporate and religious bodies, cultural and media institutions, and the federal government… this book will explore two different Kwanzaas… the Black Power Kwanzaa created ay Maulana Karenga… and secondly, the ‘multicultural’… holiday of corporations and mainstream cultural institutions… this book addresses how the Civili Rights and Black Power movement changed course, re-envisioning itself by making ‘holiday’ civil rights a central concern before being co-opted by American public culture.” (Pg. ixx-xx) Later, he adds, “Kwanzaa… is about taking aim at the American calendar… by developing separate observances … to simultaneously develop a black protest calendar and bring the black freedom struggle to the American calendar.” (Pg. xxiv)
He observes, “One of the most striking features of the black protest calendar … has been its holiday alternativity. Late twentieth-century black holidays upped the oppositional ante, making alternativity a strident enterprise and a calendar way of life. The deliberate attempts by the makers of Kwanzaa (alternative Christmas), Umoja Karamu (alternative Thanksgiving) and Black Solidarity Day (alternative Election Day) to take blacks from their dominant calendar neighbors fit comfortably with the politics and approach of Black Power. But the Black Power Movement did not have a monopoly on making black alternative observances ... [and] was just as much a feature of Election Week/Negro Election Day and July 4/5 observances in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.” (Pg. 19)
He notes, “The greatest contribution made by many twentieth-century black holidays is their radicalization of the black holiday tradition. Kwanzaa and other Black Power holidays diverge from their foundational freedom commemorations in that they deliberately sought to challenge observances on the mainstream American calendar.” (Pg. 28) Later, he adds, “More than just a black Christmas, Kwanzaa’s appearance on the calendar one day after December 25 was meant to attack one of Christmas’ basic manifestations---a crass commercialism that had come to embody Christ’s birth. Instead Kwanzaa called for hand-made gifts to be at the center of any exchange, and for blacks not to fall prey to overconsumption.” (Pg. 43)
He recounts, “in 1963 ... Ron Everett retired his family name ‘Everett,’ taking on the name Karenga… One year later he added the title ‘Maulana’---which means ‘master teacher’ in Swahili… For the rest of the decade, he was known by the name Ron Karenga or ‘Maulana’ Ron. Sometime in the late 1960s … he dropped ‘Ron’---his given first name---and went solely by the full name Maulana Karenga (master teacher, keeper of the tradition).” (Pg. 60) He continues, “Karenga earned… a Bachelor’s degree in political science in 1963… [In] 1964, Karenga earned a Master’s in African Area studies. After a year into the doctorate program with hopes of becoming an academic, the rebellion in Watts intervened. In August of 1965 Karenga terminated his studies at UCLA and refocused his energies from a life of the mind in Westwood to the organizing of black Americans in South Central Los Angeles. Holiday creation and calendar politics would play a major role in his social activism.” (Pg. 63)
He reports, “Karenga founded his own organization called US, meaning US (black people) as opposed to ‘them’ (white people or oppressors). US began as a small cultural nationalist collective … To concretize one’s cultural transformation and existence in US, changing the way one physically looked meant further re-defining oneself by wearing an Afro hairstyle, and donning African clothing… the greatest cultural statement US members made was… how they looked to the general public.” (Pg. 63-65)
He goes on, “In 1965, Karenga developed a philosophy he named Kawaida… the Swahili word meaning ‘custom’ or ‘tradition.’ … Kawaida as a whole was an ‘on-going synthesis’ of intellectual thought… Kawaida was never fully fleshed out because at its base, Kawaida was a cultural philosophy that integrated knowledge from Africa and black America’s present. The objective was to operationalize a new intellectual synthesis that could inform the black freedom struggle.” (Pg. 72-74) He adds, “Kawaida’s critique of Christianity, of which Kwanzaa is heir, bears out the black politics of inventing new traditions and reorienting values. When parts of Kawaida were created… the doctrine seemed like a quasi-religious attempt to challenge Christianity’s authority and perhaps supersede it with its own mythology…” (Pg. 75)
He summarizes, “Kwanzaa is: a hodgepodge of indigenous African practices placed inside a black American ritual framework. Africa provided the inspiration and the cultural raw materials at the level of language and ritualized ceremony. In the sense that Kwanzaa takes from Africa, it is an old-world original import. In the sense that Kwanzaa takes from nowhere in Africa, but rather is created in Los Angeles, it is imagined.” (Pg. 82) He adds, “Central to Kwanzaa’s invention was the manipulation of Swahili and the appropriation of celebratory elements from African harvest festivals… Because the name Kwanzaa was so reliably convincing and saturated with African veracity, many black Americans did not realize that the name Kwanzaa was only inspirationally African and not African in fact… In Kwanzaa’s early years, Karenga was forced to level with black America, clarifying: ‘Nowhere on the African continent is there a holiday named Kwanzaa.’” (Pg. 83-84) He acknowledges, “Promoting Kwanzaa in black urban neighborhoods oftentimes meant confronting the popularity of Christmas within the black community.” (Pg. 120)
He suggests, “[if you are] Still not convinced that Kwanzaa is everywhere and has hit the mainstream running, then take note of where Kwanzaa is being talked up and promoted and where the holiday now appears. Two decades ago Kwanzaa was the stuff of home-made pamphlets and Black Power periodicals… Some twenty odd years later, Kwanzaa children’s books flooded the market in the 1990s due to the commercial efforts of white publishers. It is no longer necessary to go into the heart of an urban black neighborhood to attend a Kwanzaa celebration.” (Pg. 136-137) He adds, “Kwanzaa’s growing visibility in late twentieth-century American public culture appeared endemically tied to the marketplace decision-making and appropriation of corporate, cultural, and media institutions.” (Pg. 139)
He notes, “As a legitimate part of the festive celebration season … Kwanzaa had indeed arrived in the name of diversity and goodwill. The 1990s was the decade Kwanzaa rose to the level of other traditional celebrations in visibility, if not in stature.” (Pg. 167) He continues, “Kwanzaa’s principles and Christian religious doctrine coexisting became more pronounced in the last decade of the twentieth-century. The appeal of Kwanzaa had not only to do with its growing status as a holiday, but also with the universal applicability of its principles… Some Christians went further, often discerning a Christian foundation in most, if not all, of Kwanzaa’s seven principles.” (Pg. 170)
He reports, “In 1920, Marcus Garvey used the colors red, black, and green as a symbol of the ongoing black freedom struggle. In the 1960s, Karenga and the US organization … slightly altered the color’s definitions.” (Pg. 181)
He concludes, “Kwanzaa has raised the black holiday bar to the degree to which there is a growing tendency to ask the question: ‘how popular is Kwanzaa among blacks?’ Answering this all important question is something we should attempt to do. [He admits in a footnote, ‘There is indeed no reliable data on the number of Kwanzaa celebrants… Karenga reported that over 20 million blacks worldwide celebrated the holiday… without attribution… U.S. News & World Report and Newsweek provided a more conservative number: five million in 1992.’ pg. 248] However, I have found it fascinating that we do not ask the same question of other black holidays…” (Pg. 184)
This book will be “must reading” to anyone seriously studying Kwanzaa.
Author Keith Mayes wrote in the Introduction to this 2009 book, “[This book] examines the creation and development of Kwanzaa as a response to racial oppression that manifested in black cultural and holiday invisibility in the twentieth century… For Black Power activists, Kwanzaa was just as important as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Kwanzaa was their answer to what they understood as the ubiquity of white cultural practices that oppressed them as thoroughly as had Jim Crow laws. This book explores how Kwanzaa fits into the larger black holiday tradition, bridging older black observances that preceded it with those that came after its creation in 1966… The appropriation of Kwanzaa by American corporate and cultural institutions in the 1980s and 1990s captures the holiday’s development and yields how Kwanzaa served the needs of institutions outside black America. By the last decade of the twentieth century, Kwanzaa … had been embraced by a broader segment of African-Americans, corporate and religious bodies, cultural and media institutions, and the federal government… this book will explore two different Kwanzaas… the Black Power Kwanzaa created ay Maulana Karenga… and secondly, the ‘multicultural’… holiday of corporations and mainstream cultural institutions… this book addresses how the Civili Rights and Black Power movement changed course, re-envisioning itself by making ‘holiday’ civil rights a central concern before being co-opted by American public culture.” (Pg. ixx-xx) Later, he adds, “Kwanzaa… is about taking aim at the American calendar… by developing separate observances … to simultaneously develop a black protest calendar and bring the black freedom struggle to the American calendar.” (Pg. xxiv)
He observes, “One of the most striking features of the black protest calendar … has been its holiday alternativity. Late twentieth-century black holidays upped the oppositional ante, making alternativity a strident enterprise and a calendar way of life. The deliberate attempts by the makers of Kwanzaa (alternative Christmas), Umoja Karamu (alternative Thanksgiving) and Black Solidarity Day (alternative Election Day) to take blacks from their dominant calendar neighbors fit comfortably with the politics and approach of Black Power. But the Black Power Movement did not have a monopoly on making black alternative observances ... [and] was just as much a feature of Election Week/Negro Election Day and July 4/5 observances in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.” (Pg. 19)
He notes, “The greatest contribution made by many twentieth-century black holidays is their radicalization of the black holiday tradition. Kwanzaa and other Black Power holidays diverge from their foundational freedom commemorations in that they deliberately sought to challenge observances on the mainstream American calendar.” (Pg. 28) Later, he adds, “More than just a black Christmas, Kwanzaa’s appearance on the calendar one day after December 25 was meant to attack one of Christmas’ basic manifestations---a crass commercialism that had come to embody Christ’s birth. Instead Kwanzaa called for hand-made gifts to be at the center of any exchange, and for blacks not to fall prey to overconsumption.” (Pg. 43)
He recounts, “in 1963 ... Ron Everett retired his family name ‘Everett,’ taking on the name Karenga… One year later he added the title ‘Maulana’---which means ‘master teacher’ in Swahili… For the rest of the decade, he was known by the name Ron Karenga or ‘Maulana’ Ron. Sometime in the late 1960s … he dropped ‘Ron’---his given first name---and went solely by the full name Maulana Karenga (master teacher, keeper of the tradition).” (Pg. 60) He continues, “Karenga earned… a Bachelor’s degree in political science in 1963… [In] 1964, Karenga earned a Master’s in African Area studies. After a year into the doctorate program with hopes of becoming an academic, the rebellion in Watts intervened. In August of 1965 Karenga terminated his studies at UCLA and refocused his energies from a life of the mind in Westwood to the organizing of black Americans in South Central Los Angeles. Holiday creation and calendar politics would play a major role in his social activism.” (Pg. 63)
He reports, “Karenga founded his own organization called US, meaning US (black people) as opposed to ‘them’ (white people or oppressors). US began as a small cultural nationalist collective … To concretize one’s cultural transformation and existence in US, changing the way one physically looked meant further re-defining oneself by wearing an Afro hairstyle, and donning African clothing… the greatest cultural statement US members made was… how they looked to the general public.” (Pg. 63-65)
He goes on, “In 1965, Karenga developed a philosophy he named Kawaida… the Swahili word meaning ‘custom’ or ‘tradition.’ … Kawaida as a whole was an ‘on-going synthesis’ of intellectual thought… Kawaida was never fully fleshed out because at its base, Kawaida was a cultural philosophy that integrated knowledge from Africa and black America’s present. The objective was to operationalize a new intellectual synthesis that could inform the black freedom struggle.” (Pg. 72-74) He adds, “Kawaida’s critique of Christianity, of which Kwanzaa is heir, bears out the black politics of inventing new traditions and reorienting values. When parts of Kawaida were created… the doctrine seemed like a quasi-religious attempt to challenge Christianity’s authority and perhaps supersede it with its own mythology…” (Pg. 75)
He summarizes, “Kwanzaa is: a hodgepodge of indigenous African practices placed inside a black American ritual framework. Africa provided the inspiration and the cultural raw materials at the level of language and ritualized ceremony. In the sense that Kwanzaa takes from Africa, it is an old-world original import. In the sense that Kwanzaa takes from nowhere in Africa, but rather is created in Los Angeles, it is imagined.” (Pg. 82) He adds, “Central to Kwanzaa’s invention was the manipulation of Swahili and the appropriation of celebratory elements from African harvest festivals… Because the name Kwanzaa was so reliably convincing and saturated with African veracity, many black Americans did not realize that the name Kwanzaa was only inspirationally African and not African in fact… In Kwanzaa’s early years, Karenga was forced to level with black America, clarifying: ‘Nowhere on the African continent is there a holiday named Kwanzaa.’” (Pg. 83-84) He acknowledges, “Promoting Kwanzaa in black urban neighborhoods oftentimes meant confronting the popularity of Christmas within the black community.” (Pg. 120)
He suggests, “[if you are] Still not convinced that Kwanzaa is everywhere and has hit the mainstream running, then take note of where Kwanzaa is being talked up and promoted and where the holiday now appears. Two decades ago Kwanzaa was the stuff of home-made pamphlets and Black Power periodicals… Some twenty odd years later, Kwanzaa children’s books flooded the market in the 1990s due to the commercial efforts of white publishers. It is no longer necessary to go into the heart of an urban black neighborhood to attend a Kwanzaa celebration.” (Pg. 136-137) He adds, “Kwanzaa’s growing visibility in late twentieth-century American public culture appeared endemically tied to the marketplace decision-making and appropriation of corporate, cultural, and media institutions.” (Pg. 139)
He notes, “As a legitimate part of the festive celebration season … Kwanzaa had indeed arrived in the name of diversity and goodwill. The 1990s was the decade Kwanzaa rose to the level of other traditional celebrations in visibility, if not in stature.” (Pg. 167) He continues, “Kwanzaa’s principles and Christian religious doctrine coexisting became more pronounced in the last decade of the twentieth-century. The appeal of Kwanzaa had not only to do with its growing status as a holiday, but also with the universal applicability of its principles… Some Christians went further, often discerning a Christian foundation in most, if not all, of Kwanzaa’s seven principles.” (Pg. 170)
He reports, “In 1920, Marcus Garvey used the colors red, black, and green as a symbol of the ongoing black freedom struggle. In the 1960s, Karenga and the US organization … slightly altered the color’s definitions.” (Pg. 181)
He concludes, “Kwanzaa has raised the black holiday bar to the degree to which there is a growing tendency to ask the question: ‘how popular is Kwanzaa among blacks?’ Answering this all important question is something we should attempt to do. [He admits in a footnote, ‘There is indeed no reliable data on the number of Kwanzaa celebrants… Karenga reported that over 20 million blacks worldwide celebrated the holiday… without attribution… U.S. News & World Report and Newsweek provided a more conservative number: five million in 1992.’ pg. 248] However, I have found it fascinating that we do not ask the same question of other black holidays…” (Pg. 184)
This book will be “must reading” to anyone seriously studying Kwanzaa.
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October 28, 2016394.2612 M4688 2009
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