On this day, in 1966, Dr. Maulana Karenga began the first observance of Kwanzaa. There are seven days in the Kwanzaa Festival. Each embodies a different principle. Today is the first day of Kwanzaa, and it is called UMOJA which means UNITY. 

Rosa Parks, with her courageous defiance of segregation on a bus in Alabama 
in 1955, ignited a comprehensive, UNIFIED movement of African Americans in Montgomery, Alabama that spread across the country consuming the vicious vestiges of legalized segregation that kept much of America in virtual chains. For 13 months, the Black citizens of Montgomery,  completely abandonned the bus system and walked, and drove each other, back and forth to work day after day after day, until the "authorities" capitulated....

During the Civil War, the Massachusetts 54th regiment, TO A MAN, refused to 
accept pay from the US government less than that given to white soldiers. They fought, and died, without compensation, until the government was shamed into admitting, and rectifying, its deplorable behavior....

Also, during the Civil War, Sojourner Truth, after escaping from bondage on the Underground Railroad, returned to the South, over a dozen times, to lead bands of her fellow African Americans to safety, without thought of her own safety and well-being.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s many of thousands of Cuban soldiers fought, and many died, in SOLIDARITY with the liberation struggles of Africans in Mozambique, Angola and Namibia. Today, as then, thousands of medical personnel and technicians are hard at work helping to better the lives of the people in the Motherland.

Michael Manley, as prime minister of Jamaica, never hesitated to make COMMON  CAUSE with the peoples of Cuba, and oppressed peoples around the world, no matter which  owerful nations objected to his actions. Kwame Nkrumah, one of the foremost proponents of Pan Africanism, did likewise, putting into actual effect the doctrines of Marcus Garvey who believed that African peoples are, ultimately, one nation.

Dekembe Matumbo, the Congolese American basketball player, has pledged 3 MILLION
DOLLARS OF HIS OWN funds to build a hospital in the capital city of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and he is attracting other donors to meet the goal of 14 million dollars so that the groundbreaking can begin....