Maulana Karenga

Maulana Ndabezitha Karenga (born Ronald McKinley Everett; July 14, 1941) is an African-American professor of Africana Studies, activist and author, best known as the creator of the pan-African and African-American holiday of Kwanzaa. Karenga was a major figure in the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s and co-founded with Hakim Jamal the black nationalism and social change organization US.

Early life

Ron Everett was born in Parsonsburg, Maryland, the fourteenth child and seventh son in the family. His father was a tenant farmer and Baptist minister who employed the family to work fields under an effective sharecropping arrangement. Everett moved to Los Angeles in 1959, joining his older brother who was a teacher there, and attended Los Angeles City College (LACC). He became active with civil rights organizations CORE and SNCC, took an interest in African studies, and was elected as LACC's first African-American student president. After earning his associate degree, he matriculated at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and earned BA and MA degrees in political science. He studied Swahili, Arabic and other African-related subjects. Among his influences at UCLA were Jamaican anthropologist and Negritudist Councill Taylor who contested the Eurocentric view of alien cultures as primitive. During this period he took the name Karenga (Swahili for "keeper of tradition") and the title Maulana (Swahili-Arabic for "master teacher"). While pursuing his doctorate at UCLA, he taught African culture classes for local African-Americans and joined a study group called the Circle of Seven.