[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]

In 1965, Ronald McKinley Everett changed his name to Maulana Karenga, in 1966, he invented the fictional holiday of Kwanzaa, in 1969, members of his US black nationalist organization got into a gunfight with Black Panthers at UCLA, in 1971, he was arrested for torturing two women, and in 1989, he was hired as the chair of the black studies department at a California State University college where he currently teaches on subjects such as “the socio-ethical thought of Malcolm X” and “Ancient Egyptian Maatian Ethics” (after the goddess Maat).

The story of Kwanzaa and Karenga is a small part of the larger story of how California’s public colleges, its UC (University of California) and CSU (California State University) systems, incubated, financed and inflicted some of the worst racial political extremism on America.

When Chancellor Charles Young (later the head of the Qatar Foundation) took office, UCLA had a 12% minority population. Young, like many radical administrators, was on a mission to rapidly increase the minority population through affirmative action and make it more appealing to them with identity politics courses of the kind being championed by the Ford Foundation.

Karenga (pictured above) was admitted to UCLA despite being a high school dropout. UCLA had created the ‘High Potential Program’ as a form of affirmative action to enable black students with poor grades and not much of an academic track record (but ‘high potential’) to be admitted ahead of more qualified students on account of their race. Or at least that was the theory.

The reality however was quite different.

While UCLA’s ‘High Potential Program’ was supposed to favor race, the radicals in control of it used it to favor black radicals, rather than black students in general, and to turn those radicals into a campus army rioting in the streets and lobbying for more black studies. The ‘High Potential Program’ was not being overseen by the campus administration, but by young black radical students who were quickly being elevated to leadership roles in Black Studies.

Black Studies had undergone many name changes (and would undergo many more) since it was invented by Melville J. Herskovits, a Jewish leftist, a generation earlier. Herskovits had set out to trace the connections between Africa and African-Americans in a crude anthropological fashion. And while he did not create black nationalism, he gave academic credence to what had formerly been the unhinged ravings of Marcus Garvey and the Nation of Islam.

By the 1960s, the Black Panthers and Karenga’s US were both making use of Herskovits’s work before burying it to avoid the implication that a white liberal had created their entire movement. Their battlefield was academia where generations of radicals had found a comfortable home, obtaining financing, political support and a recruitment center to get fresh troops for their cause.

Karenga was influenced by Donald Warden and his Afro American Association. Other members of the ‘Association’ included Huey Newton and Bobby Seale with whom Warden helped set up the Black Panther Party, as well as the parents of Kamala Harris, whose Indian mother was the only non-black participant (a unique honor since the hate group normally barred admission to other races.) Warden later converted to Islam, changed his name to Khaled Al-Mansour, developed ties to the Saudis and worked to promote Barack Obama during his academic career.

By the time 1969’s infamous UCLA shootout rolled around, the Panthers and Karenga’s US were at each other’s throats over control of the college’s Black Studies Union. The Panthers wanted a modern militant Marxist movement while the US, which included Malcolm X’s cousin, urged Africanist separatism. The Panthers accused Karenga of secretly working for Reagan (who had been elected governor a few years earlier) and the FBI. US dismissed the Panthers as stooges and a front group that sought to use black people for white leftist special interests.

It all came to a head at a Black Students Union meeting. Karenga wanted to head the Black Studies program at UCLA and he appeared to have the support of Chancellor Young, but the liberal chancellor was too cowardly to get involved in an internal dispute between the black militant groups he had brought to campus. And the Marxists had the inside track.

So the two academic political gangs settled it with guns and bullets. The ‘Simba Wachukas’ (the military corps of the US whose name meant ‘Lions of Another Country) opened fire taking out a Black Panther ‘Captain’ and the Black Panther ‘Deputy Minister of Defense’.

Both the US shooters and the Panthers they shot had come to UCLA through the ‘High Potential Program’ and truly showed their high potential.

Rather than reconsider the ‘High Potential Program’ and the control wielded over the affirmative action system by the radicals killing each other to control Black Studies, Chancellor Young disavowed all responsibility and doubled down. That same year, Angela Davis, an open Communist who would shortly be involved in a black nationalist terror case, became a UCLA professor. Young fought to keep her on the faculty before being overruled by the Regents.

While the Panthers took the bullets at the Black Studies Union meeting, the shooting discredited Karenga and the US. The Panthers took over and Angela Davis was one of their more visible signs of control over the black studies system. Karenga spiraled into paranoid delusions until he was arrested for torturing two female members of the group whom he accused of poisoning him, stripping them naked, whipping, burning and waterboarding them. After he got out, Karenga adopted a more ‘Marxist’ approach to black studies and became a successful academic.

Black Panthers like Angela Davis continued to resent Karenga, suggesting in an interview that Kwanzaa and cultural nationalism had “been commodified and therefore it has been worked into the whole institution of capitalism.” But many black nationalists struggled to reconcile both streams of the movement by blaming the whole thing on the FBI and ‘COINTELPRO’.

Malcolm X’s assassination by the Nation of Islam after he critiqued the sexual misconduct of its leader has been blamed on an FBI ‘COINTELPRO’ conspiracy, and the clash between US and the Panthers was also blamed on a supposed FBI plot to forge nasty letters to US members.

Black nationalists were forced to blame the FBI because the Stiner brothers who were arrested in the case became heroes after they successfully escaped from San Quentin in the 1970s and made it to South America, before being imprisoned again in the 1990s and then later released.

The Golden Gate Conservancy writeup, which featured Watani Steiner, described him as a “revolutionary elder, a storyteller, a Cointelpro survivor, and a social justice advocate passing the historical baton on to the next generation.” In reality, the Stiners barely survived fighting between Marxist and Socialist factions in Guyana and then struggled to survive in Suriname during its endless civil war by selling t-shirts and living without electricity or running water, before surrendering to the U.S. embassy, asking it to get them out of there because life in San Quentin was an improvement over any of the socialist ‘decolonized’ third world dictatorships.

But no one involved appeared to have learned anything from the experience. The Marxists and Africanists consolidated into one movement that was united around a hatred of white people. The growth of Black Studies and other ‘ethnic studies’ departments created a corps of activists, DEI experts and other radicals who went on to transform colleges and then wreck the country.

UCLA added a ‘Chicano’ (later Latinx) program along with other ethnic studies. By the time Chancellor Young left office, UCLA was a majority minority campus and has become notorious for its occupations by violent radical groups and by the administration’s sympathy for them.

Kwanzaa has become a national holiday even though hardly anyone except major corporations and government offices celebrates it in real life. And you can take a course in  “Ancient Egyptian Maatian Ethics” named after an Egyptian goddess from Karenga at the California State University in Long Beach whose other past faculty members included Kevin MacDonald, the leading white racist antisemitic academic, all of which is paid for by California taxpayers.

The same California university system that helped give us Kwanzaa, Angela Davis, Barack Obama and Kamala Harris wrecked the state and the country. And it isn’t done yet.

Imagine if we stopped funding it.