Front Page Magazine
On December 24, 1971, the New York Times ran
one of the first of many articles on a new holiday designed to foster
unity among African Americans. The holiday, called Kwanzaa, was
applauded by a certain sixteen-year-old minister who explained that the
feast would perform the valuable service of "de-whitizing" Christmas.
The minister was a nobody at the time but he would later go on to become
perhaps the premier race-baiter of the twentieth century. His name was
Al Sharpton and he would later spawn the Tawana Brawley hoax and then
incite anti-Jewish tensions in a 1995 incident that ended with the arson
deaths of seven people.
Great minds think alike. The
inventor of the holiday was one of the few black "leaders" in America
even worse than Sharpton. But there was no mention in the Times
article of this man or of the fact that at that very moment he was
sitting in a California prison. And there was no mention of the curious
fact that this purported benefactor of the black people had founded an
organization that in its short history tortured and murdered blacks in
ways of which the Ku Klux Klan could only fantasize.
It was in newspaper articles
like that, repeated in papers all over the country, that the tradition
of Kwanzaa began. It is a tradition not out of Africa but out of Orwell.
Both history and language have been bent to serve a political goal.
When that New York Times article appeared, Ron Karenga's crimes
were still recent events. If the reporter had bothered to do any
research into the background of the Kwanzaa founder, he might have
learned about Karenga's trial earlier that year on charges of torturing
two women who were members of US (United Slaves), a black nationalist
cult he had founded.
A May 14, 1971, article in the Los Angeles Times
described the testimony of one of them: "Deborah Jones, who once was
given the Swahili title of an African queen, said she and Gail Davis
were whipped with an electrical cord and beaten with a karate baton
after being ordered to remove their clothes. She testified that a hot
soldering iron was placed in Miss Davis' mouth and placed against Miss
Davis' face and that one of her own big toes was tightened in a vise.
Karenga, head of US, also put detergent and running hoses in their
mouths, she said."
Back then, it was relatively
easy to get information on the trial. Now it's almost impossible. It
took me two days' work to find articles about it. The Los Angeles Times seems
to have been the only major newspaper that reported it and the stories
were buried deep in the paper, which now is available only on microfilm.
And the microfilm index doesn't start until 1972, so it is almost
impossible to find the three small articles that cover Karenga's trial
and conviction on charges of torture. That is fortunate for Karenga. The
trial showed him to be not just brutal, but deranged. He and three
members of his cult had tortured the women in an attempt to find some
nonexistent "crystals" of poison. Karenga thought his enemies were out
to get him...
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