As a public service, then, The Daily Caller is once again here to tell you the true ‐ and truly bizarre ‐ history of the violent, deranged and radical black nationalist who concocted the completely artificial holiday of Kwanzaa in 1966.
The creator of Kwanzaa is Maulana Ndabezitha Karenga, a 76-year-old professor of Africana studies at California State University, Long Beach. His real name is Ronald Everett. He was born in rural Maryland, the fourteenth child of a sharecropping Baptist minister.
Karenga was convicted in 1971 for brutally torturing two naked women. The women were members of Karenga’s ultra-radical, paramilitary, black nationalist cult called the US Organization, which went by the acronym US, according to a May 1971 Los Angeles Times story.
"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," the LA Times article reports.
Jones "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."
The victims also said they were "were hit on the heads with toasters."
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A psychiatrist who examined Karenga in 1971 concluded he was insane. A sentencing hearing transcript shows that the unidentified psychiatrist believed that the founder of Kwanzaa was "both paranoid and schizophrenic."
Judge Arthur L. Alarcon read from the psychiatrist’s report in court in September 1971, according to a FrontPage Magazine report.
"Since his admission here he has been isolated and has been exhibiting bizarre behavior, such as staring at the wall, talking to imaginary persons, claiming that he was attacked by dive-bombers and that his attorney was in the next cell," the psychiatrist’s report said, in part. "During part of the interview he would look around as if reacting to hallucination and when the examiner walked away for a moment he began a conversation with a blanket located on his bed."
"This man now presents a picture which can be considered both paranoid and schizophrenic with hallucinations and elusions, inappropriate affect, disorganization, and impaired contact with the environment," the report said.
Karenga concocted Kwanzaa in 1966 as a secular, "nonreligious" pan-African holiday. At the time, he was a twentysomething graduate student living in Los Angeles.