Us

The Nature of the Organization

From the start, Us has seen itself as a revolutionary vanguard party striving to be not a mass organization but a highly disciplined, tightly organized, and philosophically grounded organization able to programmatically influence the black masses and the black liberation movement. Thus, it defined the three pillars of the group as the leadership, doctrine, and organization. The leadership is above all its founder and chair, Maulana Karenga, who at that time had left UCLA, where he had been a doctoral student, to participate in the movement, returning to school later to earn two doctorates. Its doctrine or philosophy, developed by Karenga, is Kawaida. Its organization is expressed [Page 460]in the tight-knit, disciplined, and philosophically grounded relations and practice of its advocates or members. Kawaida is the ongoing synthesis of the best of African thought and practice, and thus has drawn on concepts and ideas from several major diasporic and continental African thinkers—Sekou Toure, Julius Nyerere, Malcolm X, Kwame Nkrumah, Marcus Garvey, Amilcar Cabral, Frantz Fanon, and others. These intensely studied and reshaped ideas include concepts of re-Africanization, self-defense, Ujamaa (cooperative economics and African socialism), cultural revolution, political education and organization of the masses, a vanguard revolutionary party, cultural nationalism, and pan-Africanism.

An Organic Relationship to Community

Focusing first on the Los Angeles community, Us soon established a national agenda and practice that stressed cultural revolution, institution building, organization, service, and struggles. Thus, Us held political education classes, initiated several organizing projects, and worked with various educational, welfare, economic and political groups in black united-front efforts to improve education, end police abuse, build cooperative economic projects, increase political participation, build affordable housing, and provide quality health care.

The group's first national initiative was coplanning and cohosting the three National Black Power Conferences in 1966, 1967, and 1968. Karenga became the Black Power Conference movement's chief theorist, introducing his philosophy Kawaida in the process. Us, at its inception, had seen itself as heir to the legacy of Malcolm X and had early on incorporated his thinking in Kawaida. This is reflected in the Kawaida definition of the black power movement as a collective struggle of black people to achieve and affirm three things: self-determination, self-respect, and self-defense. Moreover, Karenga introduced at the first conference the concept of operational unity—that is, unity in diversity, unity without conformity—which he understood as an essential idea and call in Malcolm's classic speech “Message to the Grassroots.”

Operational Unity

Based on this principle of operational unity, Us established black united fronts in several cities—Los Angeles, San Diego, Newark, and Dayton. Embracing Malcolm X's Bandung model, with its stress on the unity and common struggles of people of color, Us began to build “third world” (i.e., people of color) alliances and to work with groups such as the Brown Berets, the Crusade for Justice, and Alianza Federal de Pueblos Libres, as well as to support the organizing efforts and strikes of the United Farm Workers. In 1967 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Us—along with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panther Party of Northern California— signed a peace treaty titled Treaty of Peace, Harmony and Mutual Assistance with the Alianza Federal de Pueblos Libres led by Reies Tijerina, the Crusade for Justice led by Rudolfo Corky Gonzales, and the Hopi Nation represented by the spiritual leader Thomas Banyaca. Us also trained black and brown organizers at the Social Action Training Center in Los Angeles, taught Spanish classes, and established an Olmec Club dedicated to researching and building on African and Mexican links using Olmec civilization as a point of departure.

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