For years, Karen Warrington’s was the “Black Desk.” When folks from Philadelphia’s predominantly-African American neighborhoods swung by the office of former Mayor Wilson Goode, staffers pointed them to Warrington, his director of communications.
“If no one else wanted to hear their issues or their problems, it would be me,” said Warrington, a Klein ’92 alumna. She was so consistent, the “Black Desk” designation followed her to former United States Rep. Bob Brady’s local outpost.
As she aged, Warrington began having problems with Christmas. To her, the celebration of Jesus Christ’s birth had morphed into a circus of consumerism, made worse by tales of a flying white man rewarding her kids’ and grandkids’ for good behavior.
Warrington didn’t have any religious ties to Christmas. And she blanched at the idea of passing on what she saw as its shortcomings. So, she explored an alternative.
Kwanzaa arose at the dawn of the Black Power Movement in 1965: Assassins had gunned down the Muslim preacher and Black nationalist forerunner Malcolm X in Harlem that February. The Watts Rebellion six months later — sparked by police abuse of Black Angelinos — foregrounded inequalities in the North and West that the Civil Rights Movement had exposed in the South.
Against that backdrop, Los Angeles activist Maulana Karenga combined parts of sub-Saharan harvest festivals into a weeklong ode to Black culture — stamped with the phrase “matunda ya kwanza,” meaning “first fruits.”
Convinced that deeper connections to Africa could insulate Black communities from racism, Karenga assigned each day from Dec. 26 to Jan. 1 a concept from what he called the “Nguzo Saba” — Swahili for “Seven Principles.”
There was “Umoja,” for unity between Black people, their communities and society; “Kujichagulia”; the promise of Black self-determination; “Ujima” and “Ujamaa,” shared responsibility for prosperity and well-being; “Nia,” the mission of bringing glory to the pan-African world; “Kuumba,” using creativity to beautify one’s environment; and “Imani” the faith of Black people in one another and in the righteousness of their centuries-long struggle.
In September 1968, Kwanzaa arrived in Philadelphia through the Third International Black Power Conference at the Episcopal Church of the Advocate. Just four blocks from Temple’s Main Campus, Karenga laid out his vision for independent African American institutions and customs to an audience of roughly 4,000 delegates.
Queen Mother Falaka Fattah, a former Temple student who attended the conference, would later be known for the peace she helped broker and maintain among the city’s warring street gangs. She did so much work — even taking gang members into her home — that the state named Fattah and her late husband, David, salaried social workers. She’s also the mother of former U.S. Rep. Chaka Fattah, whose district covered Temple’s Main and Health Sciences campuses.
Awards and accolades from community groups crowd the walls of her West Philadelphia base, the House of Umoja. And Fattah considers former President Bill Clinton a family friend.
At the conference, however, she was Frances Ellen Brown Davenport — a former Temple student slogging through shock and grief at a pivotal time in the nation’s history.
Assassins’ bullets had felled Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., that April; former attorney general Robert F. Kennedy was shot to death in June. Davenport was grieving personally, too: She’d been a publicist for Otis Redding when the King of Soul perished in a December 1967 plane crash.
“I wasn’t trying to get all up into everything,” Fattah recalled at her West Philadelphia headquarters. She was just looking for her life’s next chapter.
By the end of the decade, Fattah had taken her new name, founded Umoja magazine as a megaphone for Afrocentrism and ascended to the role of explainer-in-chief for locals curious about the new winter celebration.
“All the press came to us to describe what Kwanzaa was about,” Fattah said.
At first, Karenga tried to make his festival a Christmas alternative — he questioned Christ’s sanity and saw the Christian church as a white supremacist tool. Now a researcher at Cal State Long Beach, he’s since pushed for Kwanzaa’s observance alongside other winter holidays, including Christmas and Hanukkah.
“It is neither Christian nor Muslim nor atheist,” as Fattah explained. “It’s just Black.”
Africology graduate student Daniel P. Roberts III first explored Kwanzaa while dabbling in African spiritual practices — the pouring of libations to honor the souls of dead ancestors, for example. But he converted to Christianity in 2022. Roberts’s new faith transcended race, he said, and ended his belief in spirits influencing earth. But they didn’t end his commitment to Black culture.
“Race is still a thing,” Roberts said, before referencing an early Christian apostle who retained his identity as a Jew: “Even Paul said, ‘I’m zealous for my people.’”
Kwanzaa’s fate ebbed and flowed with Afrocentrism’s: Roughly 48 million Americans self-identify as Black — more than all but seven African nations. Yet the historian Keith A. Mayes estimates only between 500,000 and 2 million mark the holiday.
In fact, Kwanzaa is a deeply American holiday. It’s celebrated far more across the African Diaspora — places where the scourges of slavery and colonialism carried Black people against their will — than on the continent itself, to say the least. Swahili is mostly spoken in East Africa; the Diaspora largely impacted West Africa. Karenga hails from Maryland and founded Kwanzaa in response to American events. And the U.S. president issues an annual proclamation at the festival’s beginning.
Kwanzaa even popped up in pop culture: Akayla Morris, a doctoral candidate in Africology, grew up in a family that celebrated the festival largely alone — so, she still remembers seeing The Brain celebrate the holiday on PBS Kids’ “Arthur.”
“As a kid, it was really nice to see,” Morris said. “Like, ‘Oh wait — somebody else celebrates it, too.’”
The centuries before the 1960s saw African Americans infuse the nation’s ideas and culture with their own; the decades since have seen those contributions recognized and recorded, openly, more than ever before. That’s one reason scholars say Kwanzaa didn’t quite catch on with most Black Americans.
Another is its founder: Karenga’s Organization Us clashed violently with the Black Panthers in the sixties, and a grand jury convicted him of kidnapping and torturing two women in the group in 1971.
Warrington, an expert in West African dance, hesitated to celebrate Kwanzaa at first; it wasn’t quite an African holiday. But she still found in it reasons to rejoice.
“So many of us are affected by the ‘no’ that we constantly hear from society,” Warrington said.
Black Americans often face negativity around skin tones, hair grades, and even mannerisms associated with them. Against that onslaught, Kwanzaa’s purpose has become clearer, even as its origins and message remain complex, Warrington said.
“Black people, you don’t have to be afraid of who you are,” Warrington said.
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