http://therightcoast.blogspot.com/2004_12_01_therightcoast_archive.html#110436900614567035
On the First Day of Kwanzaa, My True Love Tortured Me … (Reprise)
By Gail Heriot
I have been prevailed upon by my colleagues to repeat my post from
last year. Rumor has it that we have picked up some readers since then
…
If you visit a card shop at your local shopping mall these days,
chances are you will see Kwanzaa cards. It’s big business. (Well,
maybe it’s just medium-sized business, but it is evidently lucrative
enough for card companies to bother with.) And if you go to swanky
private schools like the one attended by the children of my fellow
Right Coaster Chris Wonnell, you may well receive instruction on this
traditional African-American holiday. Taking Kwanzaa seriously is all
part of the spirit of multiculturalism.
Except, of course, Kwanzaa isn’t traditional at all. It was invented
in the late 1960s by convicted felon Ron Everett, leader of a
so-called black nationalist group called United Slaves. I use the word
“so-called” because United Slaves’ veneer of black nationalism was
very thin; most of its members had been members of a South Central Los
Angeles street gang called the Gladiators, just as the Southern
California chapter of the Black Panthers drew its members from the
Slauson gang.
In the early 1960s, these gangs were mostly concerned with petty and
not-so-petty crime in the Los Angeles area, including the ever-popular
practice of hitting up local merchants for protection money. By the
late 1960s, however, they discovered that if they cloaked their
activities in rhetoric of black nationalism, they could hit up not
just the local pizza parlor, but great institutions of higher learning
as well, most notably UCLA. Everett re-named himself Maulana Ron
Karenga (“Maulana” we are told is Swahili for “master teacher”),
donned an African dashiki, and invented Kwanzaa. And the radical chic
folks at UCLA went into paroxysms of appreciation.
In theory, Kwanzaa is a Pan-African harvest holiday, except that it is
not set at harvest time. And in theory, it celebrates the ties of
African Americans to African culture, except that it purports to
celebrate those ties using the East African language of Swahili when
nearly all African Americans are descended from West African peoples.
But those are just details. Many of the best-loved holidays in the
Christian calendar have traditions connected to them that don’t quite
fit if you examine them too closely. But those rough edges have now
been smoothed over by the long passage of time. No one really cares if
the Christmas tree was once used to celebrate pagan holidays; many
generations of credible Christians have earned the right to claim it
as their own.
Kwanzaa is different. It has connections to still-living violent
criminals. To suggest that it is an “African American holiday” is an
insult to the Black community, very few of whom celebrate Kwanzaa and
even fewer of whom would celebrate it if they knew the full story of
its recent history.
UCLA soon found that a bunch of street thugs calling themselves United
Slaves can dress themselves up in colorful clothing, learn a few words
of Swahili but they will still be … well … street thugs. The
beginning of the end for United Slaves as an organization came with a
gun battle fought on the UCLA campus against the Black Panthers over
which group would control the new Afro-American Studies Center (and
its generous budget). In the end, two Black Panther
leaders–Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter and John Jerome Huggins–were
dead. Two members of United Slaves were convicted of their murder.
(Under UCLA’s High-Potential Program, which admitted
politically-active minority students during the late 1960s, often
regardless of their academic credentials or even whether they had
graduated from high school, many members of the Black Panthers and
United Slaves were registered as students at UCLA.)
No, Maulana Ron Karenga was not among them. But not long after the
incident, Karenga proved himself to be every bit as brutal as his
followers when he was charged and convicted of two counts of felonious
assault and one count of false imprisonment.
The details of the crime as reported in the Los Angeles Times (and
quoted last year by Paul Mulshine in an article for FrontPage
magazine) are horrific. The paranoid Karenga began to suspect that the
members of his organization were trying to poison him by placing
“crystals” in his food and around the house. According to the Los
Angeles Times:
“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.”
The Los Angeles Times went on the state that "Karenga allegedly told
the women that ‘Vietnamese torture is nothing compared to what I
know.’ "
Karenga spent time in prison for the act. But if you are worried about
what has become of him, you needn’t be. He served only a few years.
When he got out, he somehow convinced Cal State Long Beach to make him
head of the African Studies Department. Happy Kwanzaa.