IGX

baffled wrote:

dead man walking wrote:our ancestors come from africa, every one of us. we should celebrate kwanza.

kaz should embrace his inner mandingo.

Ka dens wrote:So that's what the candle holder at the Irongarm logo was all about. I thought it was some Jewish holiday. Anyway, Happy Kwanza!

As for torture, Karenga took that more personally. The accounts of his personal role in a particularly sadistic episode of brutality have been largely lost to history. The episode seems to exist only on a few microfilmed pages of the Los Angeles Times. It took two days of research and phone calls to track them down. Here is an excerpt from an article headlined "Woman describes two days of torture" on the May 1971 trial of Karenga for torturing two dissident members of his group:

''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."

Karenga was convicted and served more than three years in a state prison.

This was not an isolated incident. In 1967, Karenga was accused of having his thugs beat up a student who asked him an impertinent question at a college forum. In 1969, US got involved in a struggle with the Black Panthers for control of the black studies program at UCLA. All involved carried guns on campus. The US guys were quicker on the draw; they killed two Panthers in a shootout at the student center.

It would be nice to say that after Karenga got out of jail in 1975 he repented, saw the error of his ways and invented Kwanzaa as a means of atoning for his past. Nice, but untrue. Karenga has never atoned for his thuggery, probably because no one ever asked him to. And his sole concession to repentance was his 1975 conversion to Marxism. For him, this was considered to be a sign that he had moderated his views.