by Rosana Modugno

Created on: December 06, 2009

Growing up in New York, I only remember two holidays being celebrated; Christmas and Hanukkah. Kwanzaa never came up in history books. It was only until recently that I heard the name and of course needed to research more .

Ronald McKinley Everett was born in Maryland on July 14th, 1941 and later changed his name to Ron Karenga. The word Karenga means Nationalist. He is now known as Dr. Maulana Karenga. The word Maulana literally means Our lord or Our master in Arabic and taken from the Swahili language. It is a title used out of respect for reversed members of a community, religious or secular party. Earlier in his life, he had called himself Ron Ndabezitha Everett-Karenga; Ndabezitha, which in Zulu means your majesty."

In 1950, he moved to California and later attended the University of California, better known as UCLA. It was around this time that he met Bobby Seale and Huey Newton of the Black Panther party. As some of you may know, this was a violent racist group in the 1960's. It was also around this time that he met Malcom X, where together they embraced black nationalism.

It was in college that Ron Karenga was influenced in the creation of his ethos by a well known figure, Malcolm X. This is an excerpt from Ron Karenga's 170-page dissertation entitled Afro-American Nationalism: Social Strategy and Struggle for Community:

"Malcolm was the major African American thinker that influenced me in terms of nationalism and Pan-Africanism. As you know, towards the end, when Malcolm is expanding his concept of Islam, and of nationalism, he stresses Pan-Africanism in a particular way. And he argues that, and this is where we have the whole idea that cultural revolution and the need for revolution, he argues that we need a cultural revolution, he argues that we must return to Africa culturally and spiritually, even if we can't go physically. And so that's a tremendous impact on US. And US saw it, when I founded it, as the sons and daughters of Malcolm, and as an heir to his legacy." - Ron Karenga.

After the Watts riots of 1965, Ron Karenga took a break from his doctoral studies at UCLA to join the Black Power movement. It was around this time that he took on a title of Maulana.

Ron Karenga founded a group called US Organization, a very outspoken black nationalist group, which was even more radical than the Black Panthers in those days.

In 1969, the Black Panthers and the US Organization started to argue over who should head a new Afro-American Studies Center at

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