Dr. Maulana Karenga, Professor and Chair of Africana Studies, California State University-Long Beach; Executive Director, African American Cultural Center (Us); Creator of Kwanzaa; and author of Kwanzaa: A Celebration of Family, Community and Culture, The Message and Meaning of Kwanzaa: Bringing Good Into the World and Essays on Struggle: Position and Analysis, ww.AfricanAmericanCulturalCenter-LA.org; www.OfficialKwanzaaWebsite.org; www.MaulanaKarenga.org.
To refresh our memories of ourselves at our best, to recommit ourselves to principles and practices that demand and draw from us the excellent, uplifting and enduring, and to rebuild our Liberation Movement and go forth to repair and renew ourselves and the world, we must reaffirm and reconstruct our culture as a culture of struggle.
Regardless of persistent post-racial rumors, urban legends and lingering plantation hopes about the declining significance of race and the deserved death of racism, the recent construction of celebratory social relevance around the latest “discoveries” of Whites in Black beds, bodies, bloodlines and history offers abundant evidence to the contrary.
Each August brings with it a commemoration of the 1965 Watts Revolt and thus rightful reflection on how it fits within our history as a people, how it spoke and speaks to vital issues of life and struggle, especially to the right and responsibility of resistance.
The month of August opens for us a special space and time to pay rightful homage to the life and legacy of one of the great pan-African leaders of the 20th century, and the father of modern Black nationalism as an emancipatory political and cultural project, the Honorable Marcus Mosiah Garvey (August 17, 1887).
Kawaida philosophy was forged in the fire and water of the ideological and practical struggles waged in the Sixties and thus, it became a philosophy born of struggle, kneaded and nurtured in deep reflection and tested and tempered in the practice of liberation as both a psychological and political project.
It is a revealing measure of the meaning and importance that our ancestors in the classical African civilization of ancient Egypt placed on knowledge, teaching and learning that they called their educational institutions, per-ankh, the house of life.
In his classic work, The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon laid out an extensive explanation of how an oppressed people, which does not fight fiercely and self-consciously against its own oppression, will witness the emergence of those who turn the pent-up anger, disdain and righteous rage they have for their oppressor…
When Rodney King was snatched up into the whip and whirl of the winds of racial history in this country thru his savage beating in 1991 and the resultant revolt in 1992, it was an invitation of history he had no idea would come, no interest at first in accepting and ultimately, no way to engage it except as the man he was and tried to be.
With all due respect to the eminence and awesome insightfulness of W.E.B. Du- Bois, it is not only de-centered and dislocated Blacks who suffer a “double-consciousness,” but also self-centered and supremacy-committed Whites …
It is in this month of June that we pay special homage to Kwame Ture (June 29, 1941— November 15, 1998), tall and unwavering tree in the revered forest of Pan-Africanist freedom fighters; tireless unifying organizer of our people in their righteous pursuit of liberation, justice and power over their destiny and daily lives…
Surely, as it is written in the sacred texts of our ancestors, the Husia, “to do that which is of value is for eternity. A person called forth by his work does not die for his name is raised and remembered because of it.” And so it is with this man of immeasurable meaning to us all, our beloved brother and attorney for our people, John Morgan Caldwell, Jr.
Let us begin by saying, we send greetings of solidarity and increased and continuing struggle to all African people throughout the world African community and to all the oppressed and…
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