President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris offered up greetings Thursday for those celebrating Kwanzaa, a holiday whose creator was a member of the Black nationalist movement of the 1960s and who served prison time after being convicted in the torturing of two women.
"This week, millions will gather with their families to light the seven candles of the Mishumaa Saba and commit themselves to the Seven Principles – from unity and self-determination to faith," Biden posted on X. "Jill and I hope that your Kwanzaa is blessed with peace and light this season."
Harris also posted on X: "When I was growing up, Kwanzaa was a special time of reflection with family and friends. Let us carry the wisdom of the seven principles with us as we work to build a brighter future. Happy Kwanzaa."
Kwanzaa runs from Dec. 26 to Jan. 1 and was created in 1966, two years after Harris was born, by Maulana "Ron" Karenga, founder of the Black nationalist group U.S. Organization, as an alternative to Christmas for Black people and to "celebrate themselves and their history, rather than simply imitate the practice of the dominant society," according to the Washington Examiner. He believed that "Jesus was psychotic" and that Black people should shun Christianity.
Karenga stated this holiday was a necessary precursor to the violent revolution he hoped would come about. "You must have a cultural revolution before the violent revolution," Karenga said, according to the Examiner.
Karenga created seven principles – unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity, and faith – each of which gets its day during the weeklong holiday.
Karenga served four years in a California prison after being convicted of felony assault and false imprisonment. Two women being held by him reportedly had been whipped with cords, beaten with batons, and seared with irons — while naked — to elicit confessions that they were conspiring against him.
The late conservative columnist Tony Snow wrote in 1999 that Kwanzaa, which didn't gain traction in the U.S. until the Afrocentric movement in the 1980s and 1990s, "is the ultimate chump holiday – Jim Crow with a false and festive wardrobe."
"It praises practices – 'cooperative economics, and collective work and responsibility' – that have succeeded nowhere on Earth and would mire American blacks in endless backwardness," he wrote. "Our treatment of Kwanzaa provides a revealing sign of how far we have yet to travel on the road to reconciliation. The white establishment has thrown in with it, not just to cash in on the business, but to patronize Black activists and shut them up."