Africana Studies Professor

So, we were talking about your high school years where you would work for your grand aunt [Eunice Crews (ph.)] (simultaneous)--$$(Simultaneous) She--$$--with her shipping business, right?$$My father's [Kriston ben-Jochannan] sisters, all of them had independent business. My Aunt Sophia [ph.], agriculture. She had married a man and she, they produced agriculture. That's Aunt Sophia, then my Aunt Jane [ph.], her husband, he had a estate with food. He sold food, yeah, he sold mangos, yams, potatoes, pumpkins, something, all in a productive stage. They, they never worked for people. They worked for themselves.$$And they owned their own land?$$Yeah.$$Okay, so while you were in high school, did you begin to think about what type of job you would have or (simultaneous)--$$(Simultaneous) No.$$--or whether you would--$$No, I, you see--$$--also own land?$$You see, you were brought up to be independent.$$Um-hm.$$And always you would think of starting your own project, and you'd be--you were gonna be big, you were gonna make it.$$So what was your project that you began to--$$Nothing, just I'm going to be--I'm going to go to college, and I'm gonna come back from college. I was going to be a lawyer, but I started to study engineering without my father's knowledge. And one, for instance, when my father was invited to my graduation, he was happy. And when I was graduating, he was happy. But then when he came and found that I took anthropology, and then that even though I was graduated, he was very unhappy because the boy always do as the father does. You're gonna be like your father.$We teach what pleases us. We don't teach necessarily what's truth. But me, I am more interested in truth than what you got to say. And it was a hard thing to distinguish because I find that I have had better education, going into the Hebrew community, the Hasidic in Brooklyn [New York], when I would go be with them, just ordinary folks, speaking to them. They had greater insight to my mind than men with big lofty degrees.$$Do you speak Hebrew?$$Yeah, but, you see, I speak a lot of things in books. And I look at them, and I ask, what is it about? I speak of some people with labor and people, and there's more honesty from them. I am asking what it really is. Who is a God, for instance? Do we mean what, Jehovah, Jesus Christ, Allah, what makes one better than the other? Isn't Allah the same as you say Jehovah or you say Jesus the Christ? How one come better than the other? I got a friend upstairs. He's Muslim. He's a member of Muhammad church--synagogue, one of my closest friends. He buys everything for me. But I say, I don't eat all that thing because it's not kosher, because it's got pork, I find that a piece of pigtail may be better than a piece of beef. Is this a pigtail, you know, it's hard to understand. My way isn't good. It's too easy because I found honesty in people. You know, for instance, you are here with this brother. I don't think to ask you what you believe. You would tell me because you're gonna tell me the truth. So tell me what--I don't care. I'm, for instance, you've got on a cross. Does it make you bad or good? Nah. Don't make you bad or good. You like the cross.

So professor you were awarded your Doctor of Laws [J.D.] degree from Cornell Law School [Ithaca, New York] in 1977?$$Right.$$And what came next?$$Well I, I got my master's in 1975, so I got the master's in '75 [1975], and '77 [1977], I got the law degree and then I moved to Boston [Massachusetts]. We moved to Mattapan in Boston, we bought a house there for $28 thousand, nice old Victorian house, huge yard, about fifteen fruit trees, and started to raise a family.$$Um-hm.$$In, in terms of--I was married to Renda [ph.] Johnson, or Renda Harriston [ph.] was her maiden name and we had two children, my daughter was born in Ithaca, New York, Anika Johnson, so, two kids, Gary and Anika.$$Um-hm.$$One of the first things I had to decide is their schooling and I did not want them to go to the public schools, 'cause the public schools were terrible and I saw what education had meant for me and so I sent them to private schools. My daughter went to the Advent School [Boston, Massachusetts] and then the Beaver Country Day School [Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts] and then my son went to Chestnut Hill School [Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts], and I forgot the other school he went to.$$Um-hm.$$And then I started to work at Massachusetts Board of Regional Community Colleges as affirmative action officer, and, and I wanted a job that would have an influence in the black community and bring about some kinda social change. So, I met Alan Jackson, I knew Alan Jackson, Alan Jackson put me in touch with Betty Johnson, Betty Johnson was on the board of directors for the Mass Board of Regional Community Colleges [Massachusetts Board of Regional Community Colleges], there was a brother who was chairman of the board, I can't recall his name, Pat--Patrick Jones from Lena Park [Boston, Massachusetts], he was on the board, he was head of the committee, personnel committee but he was head of the affirmative action committee. So I met with Betty, and Betty said, "Robert, with your legal background, we can do some really good stuff in the community colleges," so I said fine, so I came and, and worked there which was great because we set up the policies for the community colleges, and the policies were very explicit. Everyone, every professional position had to be signed off in the, in the central office, I reviewed all--everything that came through and I remember in Massasoit Community College--no, at Mass Bay Community College [Massachusetts Bay Community College, Wellesley, Framingham, and Ashland, Massachusetts] they were looking for a dean of faculty and there was a brother who had applied, he was from some community college in New Jersey and they didn't recommend him, they recommended a white person, now we'd, we'd setup these procedures where they had to set forth the reason why a black person was not give- being recommended. So, the reason they put was that he couldn't communicate well, so I went to Betty, I called Betty, I said, "Betty, you know I got this thing here, you know this position and there's a brother who applied and, you know, they say he can't communicate, I said I wanna hold it up." And she said, "Yeah Bob, I'm with you, you know tell the president that, you know you're gonna hold it up." So we held it up and we said to them, brought 'em in the president of the college came into the central office, and we said, "What's this here, you know, about this guy can't communicate?" I mean here's a guy who was the dean of the faculty and of a school in New Jersey.$$Um-hm.$$He did well, all of his references are well, no problem with communication, he has a Ph.D. [degree], from a major university, he had to defend his dissertation, he's been teaching, excellent teaching records, and you're saying he can't communicate. So, we said, we're not gonna sign off on it.$$Um-hm.$$And the president told the president of the college you better go back and bring the brother in, which is what he did, so we did that kinda stuff--$$Um-hm.$$--As a result, we integrated the community colleges--$$Um-hm.$$--In the state.$So, I did that in my sabbatical, and of course I did a lot of research on my family history while I was down there [Tennessee] and then came back to Boston [Massachusetts] and then went up for my promotion to full professor. When I went up for full professor, I had published two additional books, one book was called 'Race, Law and Public Policy,' first and second edition, and then I had another book called, 'Returning Home: a Century of African-American Repatriation,' that one was with publishers, I had a contract and, and was subsequently published in November of last year. Then I have a book that's with University of the West Indies Press [University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica], called 'Fighting for Africa,' and that's based about interviews I did with Dudley Thompson, who is a Jamaican attorney, whose is now close to ninety, but he was the lawyer for Jomo Kenyatta, when, in the Mau Mau Rebellion, and his descriptions of going to visit Jomo up in the Hinterlands of Kenya, and seeing him in a cell that's underground and just hearing his voice it's just amazing, I mean, it's just--firsthand interviews that I did with Dudley Thompson, so he represented Jomo, he also represented Julius Nyerere with the founding of Tanzania, he drafted the constitution for Julius Nyerere, so and then the other person is Bill Sutherland, I interviewed Bill Sutherland who is the brother of Murial [S.] Snowden, and he's lived in Africa for like thirty-five years or so.$$I've met, I've met him.$$Yeah. So that book hopefully will come out within the next year, this is University of West Indies Press.$$Um-hm.$$And then I have one other book--$$Go head.$$--That's ca--supposed to come out in June and that's the one where I'm editing 'Nantucket's People of Color,' and that was a result of the James Bradford Ames Fellowship, the program and Bob Hayden [Robert C. Hayden] was our first James Bradford Ames scholar and the scholars go to Nantucket [Massachusetts] and do research on the history of blacks and Cape Verdeans, so we have ten essays in the book, I wrote the introduction and I have an article in there on Patience Cooper, and that's coming out this June [2006].

Now, so Malcolm [X] was very important to us as, as, as a teacher, as a mentor. I met Malcolm in '62 [1962], and the first time I met him we, he took me home afterward. We went and talked. We--it's a restaurant, it used to be a restaurant on 51st and Main, a Muslim restaurant. And you--after the mosque, you would go over there and eat bean pie and talk abstract. So Malcolm welcomed us. We were right from UCLA [University of California Los Angeles]. He welcomed us back there. We talked a long time, and every time since when he would come in town, I would try to get there. And, in fact, when there was a crisis, Malcolm asked me to be the emcee for a memorial for, Ronald 26X [sic, Stokes] actually, that was shot by the police. I don't know if you remember that. But--$$Is that the scene with him, even in the movie shows the picture of the man, the poster, the famous picture of Malcolm showing a poster of the body was full of holes--(simultaneous)?$$Yes, shot, that was it. Yes, that was the major police shooting of the Muslims at that time. And I learned a lot from Malcolm, and I always enjoyed his company and the brilliance of his intellect. See, I'm, I'm writing now a book on his social, ethical thought because people usually think of ethics, they think King [Martin Luther King, Jr.]. And they think Christianity. But Islam has ethics and certainly Malcolm had an ethical philosophy, and I, I think he has a rich legacy that's still to be taped. And I challenge all those people who have written books on him, who seem to be janitors of history, looking for stench and stain, and reductively translating his message. Mine is to speak his special culture, true, and to show the brilliance of his mind and incisiveness of his analysis. That's what I want to show. The rest, FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation], [J. Edgar] Hoover, got data for all this, you know. It's just like writing a book on King and trying to talk about King, what he didn't do and all that. The question is, what does he mean to us? You see, and one of the problems I find with modern intellectuals, black intellectuals, is that they've so limited themselves to deconstructionism, that mainly what they do is janitorial service and look stench and stain, peeling paint and criticize and condemn things, but they have no capacity for conceptual generation, that is, the production of concepts to enrich and expand our lives, to give us the capacity to understand ourselves and assert ourselves in dignity-affirming ways in the world. That's a whole different kind of project.$I wanted to ask you about the development of Kwanzaa out of Kawaida theory.$$Yes, right. So first, I'm, I'm at UCLA [University of California Los Angeles] in '64 [1964], just got my Master's. I decided to go on to get my doctorate. I'm studying on my doctorate. The revolt comes. I quit and join the Movement, and I create my organization. And I fur--[The Organization] Us, and I further developed my philosophy, Kawaida. And I call it Kawaida because I believe that culture and tradition are the foundation for our life, our future and our effective assertion in the world. I think culture is a fundamental way of being human in the world. And so at the heart of Kawaida philosophy is this argument that we must constantly dialogue with African culture, asking it questions and seeking from it, answers, to the fundamental issues of human life. How do you create a just and good society? What does it mean to be human? What is our moral obligation to each other? What is our rightful relationship with the environment? Those questions, we usually don't ask Africa those questions. We usually ask Europe or Israel. We ask Greece or Israel or some other culture, but we don't ask Africa. You know, we don't--we just don't ask Africa what does it mean to be human? What is my relationship with God or anything like that? What is, what is that? So, I wanted to do that. And so I began to draw from the best of African culture, synthesize it and put into this philosophy called Kawaida. And it's subconsciously called Kawaida, a Swahili word, it means tradition because that is the core of it, tradition and reason.$$Can you spell Kawaida for us (simultaneous)?$$K-A-W-A-I-D-A, Kawaida, okay. Now, I've already--as I said earlier, I've already decided to use Swahili to do this, okay, because the language itself contains philosophical concepts I need to stress the communitarian value system I'm going to create with the seven principles, Nguzo Saba. So I'm in the philosophy, and I'm asking how can I teach this philosophy in a simple, but profound way? How can I produce concepts that would create both a discourse and a practice of being African? Okay. And I decide I, I need a value system that is manageable. And I decide the way I can do that is study African cultures, and I studied African culture, and I asked myself, what is the social cement and the social glue that holds these cultures together and give them their humanistic, moral content? And I believe that it is their communitarian values, values that stress family, community and culture. And so the question is how do I choose these values? Okay. I choose ten, twenty, thirty? Well I choose seven, and I choose seven for several reasons, because first of all, the spiritual significance of seven in African culture, all the way back to ancient Egypt. Seven is like a sacred number, okay. Second--so it has special value as well. Then the second thing I do is manageable. People would be saying, why didn't you do ten? Well, try to get seven, you know, then we can talk about the other. If we could just do some of these some of the time, a whole new change would come in our life. So, my argument was let's do these seven. So now, I have to choose seven values, communitarian values that form a system of thought and practice. And I have to choose them according to what I think is most important, not just now, but of enduring importance. And that's a very important thing. I can't be a faddist. I can't choose values like Green Power, I mean that goes out, you see. I have to choose that which endures in the midst of that which is overthrown, as the Husia said. And so what I do, is I choose what is enduring values, and I organized them such--there are seven values, Nguzo Saba. First of all, look at the name, Nguzo means "pillar," okay. It's both a pillar as a strength in the community and as a protection for the community, okay. Okay, so Nguzo is pillar, and it means principle. And Saba, of course, means seven. So I start with Umoja, unity. Why? Because unity in the family community, nation and race. Why unity? Because without unity, you can't even start a project. I mean the fundamental requirement for a people to actually understand and realize itself and assert itself successfully is unity. So Umoja, unity, is the first principle. Second principle is Kujichagulia, to define ourselves, create for ourselves, name ourselves, be up for ourselves. That's a very important thing, to speak our own special culture truth, make our own unique contribution to the forward flow of human history. Third, Ujima, collective work and responsibility, to make our sisters and brothers' problem our problem and to solve them collectively. We, we have to see ourselves as responsible for each other, and we have to, together, build the world we want and deserve to live in, okay. Ujamaa, cooperative economics, shared work and shared wealth. People want to do the wealth, shared wealth, but a lot of times they don't want to do the shared work. So we say to build our sisters and brothers stores, shops and other business and to profit from them together, just to tell people, you have to work together and you have to get profit together. That's a very important discourse in the '60s [1960s], whether we go capitalist or whether we go communal. Okay, we say we have to go communitarian. We have to do communalism. We have to do cooperative economics. The cooperative economics comes from the word Ujamaa, and jamaa, the root word of jamaa is--Ujamaa, jamaa, which means "family" or "kinship." And so what it says is we must do economics as if we are related, related not just as a human, but related to the environment too. That's a whole different discourse. So what I'm doing is giving categories. This has been Kawaida's main strength and Us organization's main strength, it's creating a series of categories, philosophical concepts that encourage a discourse about African life in a way it has never been done before. That's what we did with Kwanzaa. That's what we did with the Husia. That's what we did with Odo Ifa. That's what we did with Operation Unity, etc. Okay, now, next, Nia, purpose, the collective vocation of rebuilding our nation so that we can restore our people to their traditional greatness, okay, to bring good into the world and to give black people both permanence and power in the world. And then the sixth principle, Kuumba, creativity, to do all we can in the way we can to leave our community and this world better and more beautiful than when we inherited it. And finally, Imani, faith, faith in ourselves, our leaders, our teachers and the righteousness and victory of our call and faith that through hard work, long struggle and a whole lot of love and understanding, we can again step back on the stage of human history subconsciously as a free, proud and productive people, speak our own special culture truth to the world and make our own unique contribution to the forward flow of human history. Now, the question is, how do I build an institutional process to, in fact, teach those? I mean I could just put them out there, but it doesn't work. So I think of, what about a holiday? Again, I'm a scholar. I have to do research. I'm very concerned with culture and with authenticity. I can't just--they just don't drop from the sky for me. I have to study them from a social context, from a historical context. So I studied, I decided that I would use the oldest celebrations, and that way, I thought they would be more authentic--authentic, than one that was later created and might be influenced by Europe. So what are the oldest celebrations? They're agriculture celebrations. It's the same way when we go to Egypt. It's before the European comes, before there is this question of influence, you see, back then. And so I studied first fruits celebrations, harvest celebrations, okay. And I'm very struck by umKhosi, a Zulu celebration, which is seven days, and happens at the end of the year. Part of it is in the beginning, part of it at the end. So I straddled Kwanzaa the same way. Most of it is in the first of the year, and then there's one day in the new year. And that day I set aside for meditation, January first. So I put Kwanzaa December the twenty-sixth to January first, and it duplicates the umKhosi celebration of the Zulus, okay. I don't even tell everybody all this. I'm, I just do this, okay, because I'm, I'm, I'm saying, this is my culture. I, I can do it. I study also the Yoruba and the other festivals, and always, there are five fundamental activities that they engage in regardless. The first is that, the holidays are a time of ingathering of the people, a time when the people come from all over to reaffirm the bonds between them. Second, is the time for thanksgiving for the Creator and the creation, okay, a time not only to give thanks for a good harvest, but to recommit ourselves to the protection and preservation of the earth which provided the harvest. Third, is the time for commemoration of the past, time to raise and praise the names of those who gave their lives so that we could live fuller and more meaningful one; time to remember Fannie Lou Hamer's teaching that there are two things we all should care about, "Never to forget where we came and always praise the bridges that carried us over." Fourth, is a time for the reaffirmation and recommitment, a time for recommitment rather; time for recommitment to our highest culture values, values that stress and strengthen family, community and culture, speaking truth, doing justice; honor thy elders and the ancestors; cherishing and challenging our children, caring for the vulnerable among us, having a rightful relationship with the environment, constantly struggling against evil and always raising up, praising and pursuing the good, but especially time for recommitment to the seven principles, Umoja, unity, Kujichagulia, self-determination, Ujima, collective work and responsibility, Ujamaa, cooperative economics, Nia, purpose, Kuuma, creativity, Imani, faith. And finally, the fifth activity of Kwanzaa after ingathering of the people, a special reverence for the Creator and the creation, commemoration of the past, recommitment to our highest culture values, is celebration of the good, the good of family, community and culture, the good of life, the good of the environment, the good of our history, the good of our awesome march through human history, the good of existence itself, just the good of the world. And so we celebrate that, I mean, the good of the harvest, it used to be, but the good, above all, of the ongoing challenge to constantly bring good into the world and not let any good be lost. Now, people often say, why did you create Kwanzaa? I mean I think I've said, but I've--in the context of my discussion, but I created it for three basic reasons, one to reaffirm our Africanist, to reaffirm the fact that we're an African people. When you're in the process, you know, Kwanzaa is, is created in the context of the Black Freedom Movement. The Black Freedom Movement is from ninety--1955 to 1975, and there are two sections to it. From 1955 to 1965 is the black, is the Civil Rights Movement, and from 1965 to 1975 is the Black Power Movement, and I'm more in the Black Power Movement. In the Black Power Movement, even though I participated in the Civil Rights Movement, in the Black Power Movement, one of the core elements is the return to Africa, to step back to black. In fact, we used to say in Us, the first step forward is a step back to your own culture and your own self, okay. And so what we argued is that we have to reaffirm that we're African. We must say we are African people, okay. So Kwanzaa gives us a time to do that. And if you look at it, more than any other time in the, in the, in the year, black people talk about Africa, even corporate types wear African clothes, want their kinara and their Kwanzaa set to be aside other end-of-the-year celebration sets, right? They talk it. Okay, we've got a discourse, a conversation around Africa. Second, I created it to give us a time as African people all over the world to come together, reaffirm the bonds between us and meditate on the meaning and awesome responsibility of being African in the world. And if you look at it all around the world, you see that that has happened. Twenty-eight million people celebrate this holiday on every continent in the world, throughout the world African community. And finally, of course, as I said, early, I created Kwanzaa in order to introduce and reaffirm the importance of community and values, especially, Nguzo Saba, the seven principles.