It amazes me that this Kwanzaa business has been washed of the real life criminal activity of its creator. The man was a race monger, a violent thug, a rapist, a torturer... just a horrible human being.
Yet never a word of this man's evil is ever uttered when his pseudo holiday is discussed in the MSM.
And the Cox News Service did it again on Christmas in theirs titled Kwanzaa glows even brighter after 40 years.
Kwanzaa turns 40 today. The colorful holiday, invented by California professor Maulana Ron Karenga in 1966, is like a jazz musician who fuses bits and pieces of music into a vibrant mosaic of sound. Kwanzaa, "first fruit" in Swahili, is a fluent, nonreligious holiday that borrows liberally from a patchwork of cultures and traditions.Karenga originally created the seven-day observance to empower black communities and uplift black culture and identity.
Yes, kindly professor Ron Karenga. What a great guy.
Of course, his name wasn't really Ron Karenga originally. It was Ronald McKinley Everett.
In 1969 the organization called US (as is "us"--blacks--against "them" --whites), a black power militant group Everett founded, frequently clashed in violence with police and even other black power groups. Members of his group even killed two Black Panthers in 1969.
Nice and peaceful, eh?
In 1971 Everett served time in jail for assault. By then Everett had changed his name to Maulana Ron Karenga and began to affect a pseudo African costume and act a native African.
It wasn't mere assault he was convicted of, either. It was sexual assault and torture perpetrated against some of his female followers. The L.A. Times then reported that he placed a hot soldering iron in one woman's mouth and used a vise to crush another's toe.
As writer Lynn Woolley wrote of Professor "Karenga":
And so this is Kwanzaa. The militant past of the creator is now ignored in favor of the so-called seven principles of Nguza Saba – principles such as unity, family and self-determination that could have come from Bill Bennett's "Book of Virtues." The word "Kwanzaa" is Swahili, meaning something like "fresh fruits of harvest."No one remembers the part about "re-Africanization" or the sevenfold path of blackness that Dr. Karenga once espoused. Hardly anyone remembers the shootings, the beatings,the tortures and the prison terms that were once the center of his life. It's just not PC to bring that sort of stuff up now that Kwanzaa is commercialized and making big bucks.
And the Cox News Service just helped a criminal and sexual pervert skate by again, hidden behind his false holiday, and has allowed him to continue to dupe millions of black Americans. A man who has never denounced his past criminal activity and extremist ideas.
Happy Kwanzaa, indeed!