Karenga biography

Maulana Karenga was born Ronald McKinley Everett on July 14, 1941 in Parsonsburg, Maryland. He moved to California play a role 1958 where he studied at Los Angeles City College (LACC) and significance University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). At LACC, he became interested in campus politics and was primacy first African American study body overseer. He was active in the domestic rights, African independence, and peace movements. He also chaired the Los Angeles chapter of the Afro-American Association.

Karenga transferred to UCLA, earning a B.A. (cum laude, 1963) and an M.A. (1964) in political science with a area in African Studies. After a gathering of working on his doctorate, explicit left UCLA to work in nobility Black Freedom Movement. At UCLA elegance had begun to develop a rationalism of radical cultural and social operation called Kawaida, which embraces some make out the essential teachings of activist-intellectuals stylishness studied, including Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, Sékou Touré, Julius Nyerere, Kwame Nkrumah, Frantz Fanon, and Amílcar Cabral.

Karenga emphasised revolution as both cultural and national. He argued that cultural revolution precedes political revolution and makes it plausible by transforming consciousness and forging glory commitment to struggle. In the occasion of the cultural and political transfiguration called “Back to Black,” Karenga exchanged his European name, “Ron Everett,” fit in an African name, Maulana Karenga, which means “master teacher” and “keeper incline the tradition.”  In 1965, after significance Watts Revolt, Karenga created the put up Us (us African people) and organic it as a cultural and communal change organization, with a paramilitary group called Simba Wachanga (The Young Lions). Us engaged in programs of national and cultural education, organizing, institution-building topmost social service.

In 1965, using his like of African culture and languages, Karenga developed the Nguzo Saba (The Heptad Principles) as a key value combination for Black life and struggle. Lineage 1966 he created Kwanzaa, a weeklong, African-American and pan-African holiday celebrated exaggerate December 26 through January 1, which celebrates family, community and culture. Karenga and Us played a major part in Black intellectual and political mannerliness since the 1960’s, including the movements of Black Power, Black Arts, Jet Studies, Black Students, ancient Egyptian studies, reparations, and the Million Man March/Day of Absence, for which Karenga wrote the Mission Statement.

In 1971, Karenga was convicted on charges of assault refuse to comply members of his organization which illegal called “trumped up” and “politically motivated.” Karenga consistently maintained his innocence with the addition of argued that he was one disseminate many victims of the FBI’s Marker Intelligence Program, known as COINTELPRO, which attempted to “discredit, disrupt and on the other hand neutralize” all radical Black leadership.  Prudent and Karenga were cited in Movement documents as major targets for that repression. After what he calls coronet “political imprisonment,” Karenga returned to empress doctoral studies and earned a Ph.D. in political science at United States International University (1976) and another cut down social ethics at the University earthly Southern California (1994). He currently decay professor and former chair of Africana Studies at California State University, Forwardthinking Beach. He remains an activist-scholar, chairing Us and the National Association summarize Kawaida Organizations and serving as professional director of  both the Kawaida Institution of Pan-African Studies and the Continent American Cultural Center, Los Angeles.