Re: Merry Kwanzaa
Mary Katharine Ham
I worked at a small newspaper before I came to The Heritage Foundation. Last December, I was asked to do a story on Kwanzaa. A local afterschool program had done a Kwanzaa art project, creating paintings and pottery that expressed the "Seven Principles" of the holiday. I had learned long before that Kwanzaa was essentially a mid-60s creation rather than a true African holiday, despite being told otherwise throughout my public school education.
To confirm the creation and history of the holiday, I Googled Kwanzaa and its creator, Maulana Karenga. On my first search, I came up with this column by Paul Mulshine, a columnist with the Newark (N.J.) Star-Ledger.
frontpagemag.com
Read it all. It's a doozey. According to Mulshine, Karenga was a black separatist, a member of a group more radical than the Black Panthers, who was convicted of brutally torturing two female members of his organization just a few years after he created Kwanzaa.
He was sentenced on Sept. 17, 1971, to serve one to ten years in prison. A brief account of the sentencing ran in several newspapers the following day. That was apparently the last newspaper article to mention Karenga's unfortunate habit of doing unspeakable things to black people. After that, the only coverage came from the hundreds of news accounts that depict him as the wonderful man who invented Kwanzaa.
I was supposed to have the story done that night, so I called Mulshine and asked him for some advice. I guessed my editors were not looking for a story with these particular facts about the creator of Kwanzaa, but I wasn't particularly anxious to become a part of his sanitizing. I talked to Mulshine about his own research and his experiences with Karenga (who is a professor in Calif. these days and has never responded to or legally challenged Mulshine's version of his past).
I decided to split the story into two parts. I reported on the after-school program's art project, giving it the positive coverage it deserved. After all, Karenga's past didn't take away from the artistic accomplishments of the kids. Then, I gave the story a subhead, "About Karenga." It wasn't all negative. I just did a brief run-down on his life, his accomplishments, his current professorship, and the torture conviction. All in all, the halves of the story ran about 8 in. each.
When I picked up the paper the next morning, I found my editor had cut 8 in. I'll let you guess which 8 in.
townhall.com
[12:00 PM 17-Dec-04 | Mary Katharine Ham |
