ABSTRACT

Getting the word out would not be solely left to the US Organization. In fact, Kwanzaa moved beyond the promotional and celebratory purview of Maulana Karenga and the US Organization as early as 1967. If Kwanzaa’s 1966 birth was a result of one organization, then the early growth of the holiday from 1967 through the late 1980s was a black community effort. At the forefront of this effort were black cultural nationalists and panAfricanists affiliated with local community-based organizations. Though the US Organization in Los Angeles breathed life into Kwanzaa, the Committee for a Unified Newark (CFUN) in New Jersey, the EAST Organization in New York, and other activist groups in Chicago, Washington, DC, Philadelphia, and New Orleans nurtured the infant holiday in urban centers. Also instrumental in establishing Kwanzaa in black neighborhoods were an assortment of groups and institutions such as black independent schools, local Kwanzaa committees, black theater companies, and the Black Student Unions (BSUs) on college campuses. In addition, black media, black churches, public schools in black neighborhoods, and local neighborhood museums played a vital role in introducing the holiday to the larger African-American community. Although Kwanzaa is presently celebrated by many African-Americans and familiar to some whites and other people of color, what follows examines Kwanzaa’s local roots prior to the holiday’s acceptance into the American mainstream. By centering activist men and women as well as apolitical blacks, this chapter underscores Kwanzaa’s emergence as a

public celebration in black neighborhoods across the United States prior to its appropriation by white corporate and mainstream public culture.1

Kwanzaa’s public presence in black neighborhoods speaks to the holiday’s connection to a broad-based social movement that was national in scope but local in character.2 To explore Kwanzaa within its black neighborhood context, however, is to acknowledge the existence of a Black Power geography.