On Monday, December 26, around 20 Greenbelters celebrated the first day of Kwanzaa at the Kwanzaa and Kulture Unity Breakfast at the Greenbelt Youth Center, organized by Greenbelt Station resident Chiquita Jackson. Kwanzaa, first celebrated in 1966, is an annual celebration of African American culture, drawing on African traditions.
Last year Jackson hosted a celebration with about eight close family members and friends at her apartment in Greenbelt Station. This year she rented space at the Youth Center to be able to include more people in the celebration. “I wanted to take it to the next level,” said Jackson, who publicized the event through social media and interviews on WAMU. As an event planner, she is skilled at bringing people together and organizing celebrations. Jackson even cooked the soul food for the event herself, beginning early in the morning on Monday.
At the unity breakfast, most of those who attended already celebrated Kwanzaa but they were looking for a space to celebrate together, especially after the online celebrations of recent years, Jackson told the News Review. “I had great conversations with people who are now planning to incorporate more community events into their celebration,” said Jackson.
Kwanzaa is organized around seven principles, one for each day of the holiday. They are:
- Umoja (Unity): To strive for and to maintain unity in the family, community, nation and race.
- Kujichagulia (Self-determination): To define and name ourselves, as well as to create and speak for ourselves.
- Ujima (Collective work and responsibility): To build and maintain our community together and make our brothers’ and sisters’ problems our problems and to solve them together.
- Ujamaa (Cooperative economics): To build and maintain our own stores, shops and other businesses and to profit from them together.
- Nia (Purpose): To make our collective vocation the building and developing of our community in order to restore our people to their traditional greatness.
- Kuumba (Creativity): To do always as much as we can, in the way we can, to leave our community more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it.
- Imani (Faith): To believe with all our hearts in our people, our parents, our teachers, our leaders and the righteousness and victory of our struggle.
Jackson says she likes to kick off the Kwanzaa holiday celebrations on the first day, reflecting on the principle of unity, which for her means community. The event was a great success and one of the enjoyable aspects was the diversity of ages of participants, including children, teens, young and older people. The youth were playing games, families gathered and ate together, participants had great conversations about why they started celebrating Kwanzaa and how they have been inspired to incorporate community events into their celebrations.
“There aren’t any other Kwanzaa celebrations in Greenbelt that I know of,” said Councilmember Ric Gordon, who attended Monday. “This may have been the first public event. Certainly, in a city building – that’s never been done before,” he told the News Review.
For Gordon the breakfast was the only Kwanzaa event he’ll attend during the period, which runs from December 26 to January 1. For the rest of the holiday, he says he’ll observe Kwanzaa by taking each day, incorporating the principles of Kwanzaa and what it means.
As for Jackson, she’s already planning for a bigger celebration next year, exploring the possibility of partnering with the City of Greenbelt, and considering a space that could accommodate more people than the Youth Center.
Chiquita Jackson has just been appointed to the Greenbelt Reparations Commission.