Dr. Maulana Karenga

The fortieth anniversary of the Watts Summer Festival offers us another important opportunity to pause and pay rightful hommage to the struggling men and women, the way-makers and martyrs who for six days in August, 1965, compelled this country and the world to understand and approach African Americans in a whole ‘nother way. But proper appreciation of a past event is not automatic or inevitable. It depends on a people’s understanding of and commitment to their own history. And it depends on their resistance to the established order’s continuous attempts to reinterpret and tame that event, to lift it from its legacy and history of struggle and make the celebration simply another consumer site for forgetful fun and deadening diversion.

Some wish to detach the Festival from its roots and deny the centrality and relevance of the Watts Revolt and its place in the long history of African resistance and reduce the Festival to a harmless gathering in the remembrance of days gone by or a multicultural mix devoid of focus on the particular people, culture and struggle that produced it. Others can participate in it, but like Cinco de Mayo, Chinese New Year, Ramadan, Hanukkah and St. Patrick’s Day, the holiday must focus on the culture and people who brought it into being and in whose history it finds its deepest and most enduring meaning. Thus, to hold the Watts Summer Festival and attempt to detach it from the Watts Revolt, which is its foundation and fundamental focus, and from the larger history of African American struggle in which they both are located and lifted up, is to dishonor the legacy and give artificial life to a gross and grotesque lie. Indeed, it would make the celebration little more than a cold, formal ritual of official remembrance, tailored to the safe, sanitized and senseless speeches most politicians make, even on good days. And instead of focusing on the lessons and labors of history, the lost, injured and interrupted lives, the unfinished struggle and the hard and heavy work still to be done, it would lead to a drunken forgetfulness thru fun and games and an official interpretation empty of truth, life and worthy legacy.

No one has fought to preserve the integrity of the Festival and its fundamental meaning and message of struggle as consistently and commitedly as Tommy Jacquette-Halifu, the executive director of the Watts Summer Festival. It is he who has rescued the Festival from numerous premature pronouncements of its death and countless proposals to dilute, distort and deform it beyond recognition and respect. A student of Malcolm X and an early advocate of the organization, Us, he knows the value and meaning of a people’s history, and remembers well Marcus Garvey’s teaching that “Our history is too important to leave in alien hands.”

And so the Watts Summer Festival is about commemoration, celebration and recommitment to struggle. For there is no real honoring the dead or uplifting the living except thru continuing the unfinished struggle and completing the heavy work of history in the African and human quest to expand the realm of freedom, justice and other good in the world. Certainly, the ongoing issues raised by the Watts Revolt and the Black Freedom Movement of which it was a part remain with us—issues of self-determination, self-respect and self-defense.

There is still the need for self-determination—to control the space we occupy, represent ourselves in critical social space, and participate effectively in every decision that affects our destiny and daily lives. There is  also the need for self-respect, to understand and assert ourselves self-consciously as bearers of dignity and divinity, to struggle for economic, political and cultural conditions of life which support and sustain this conception and reality, and to insist on the same undeniably due respect from others. And we still need self-defense—from the structured violence of a race-and-class society that savages the body and mind of the oppressed in and thru its various institutions, denies lives of dignity and decency, and uses its police to suppress rather than serve, and to profile and prey on the people rather than protect them.

Indeed, the extraordinary importance of a people’s history cannot be denied. There are laws that compel us to learn the history of the ruling race/class from grade school thru college under various functional names and false necessities. Moreover, there are signs and celebrations of themselves and their history throughout the country and year. Even when we turn on the TV and radio or go to the movies, they are the subject and center of all that is done or is worthy of being noted or made into news.

Furthermore, there are those who see their histories as sacred narratives and themselves as an elect, chosen and holy people set above and apart racially and religiously from all the other peoples of the world. And they tell their narratives in schools, colleges and other critical sites as if they were the origin, end and owners of the world. Then, there are those without knowledge of their history who see themselves as children of a less accommodating God, as people cursed and confined to the outer limits of life and history, hoping to be included in the exclusive club of the elect of the world in some meaningful, though admittedly minor way.

And then, there are those like us, who are an ancient, resourceful and resilient people, the elders of humanity, who know their history is sacred, their people holy and the awesome responsibility history and heaven have placed on them. And yet they find no moral or rational reason to deny others the same sacredness of their history or the holiness of their persons. For it is in the sacred teachings of our ancestors in the Odu Ifa that all humans are chosen, sacred and elect in the world. And they are chosen, not over and against anyone, but chosen with everyone to do one main thing—to bring good in the world and not let any good be lost. It is thru love, memory, work and struggle that we strive to accomplish this. The Watts Summer Festival and similar celebrations of struggle pay due hommage to our ancestors, way-openers and martyrs and reinforce our rightful attentiveness to the awesome task they’ve left us.