- Kuumba, meaning creativity: the principle
of building as opposed to destroying and
of being proactive as opposed to reactive or
fluid. - Imani, meaning faith: the principle of being
committed to the collective as well as the self.
From 1967 to 1968 Karenga worked with Con-
gressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., to hold the
historic 1967 Black Power conference in Newark,
New Jersey. This conference called for a partition-
ing of America into two separate states. One state
was to be the homeland of black people, the sec-
ond to be the homeland of white people.
Karenga, through his scholarship, helped shape
the BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT and concepts of Afro-
centricity, which were popularized by Molefi As-
ante in Afrocentricity (1989). In 1978 Karenga
authored Introduction to Black Studies, a compre-
hensive and perhaps the most widely used intro-
ductory text in black studies curricula.
In 1979 Karenga took the post of chair of the
black studies department at California State Uni-
versity at Long Beach. His contemporaries have
recognized Karenga’s career as an activist scholar
and awarded him with the National Leadership
Award for Outstanding Scholarly Achievements in
Black Studies from the National Council for Black
Studies, the Diop Exemplary Leadership Award
from the department of African-American stud-
ies of Temple University, among numerous other
awards for scholarship, community service, and
leadership.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Franklin, John Hope, and Alfred A. Moss. From Slav-
ery to Freedom: A History of African Americans. 8th
ed. Vol. 2. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000.
Karenga, Maulana. Introduction to Black Studies.
3d ed. Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press,
2002.
———. Kawaida Theory: An African Communitarian
Philosophy. Inglewood, Calif.: Kawaida Publica-
tions, 1966.
Gwinyai P. Muzorewa
Kaufman, Bob (1925–1986)
Committed, as biographer Mel Clay notes in Jazz,
Jail and God, “to a lifestyle where all behavior was
directed to fulfillment of his art and muse” (x),
poet Bob Kaufman was born in New Orleans, the
son of a black mother and a Jewish father. Choos-
ing the sea over a classroom during his early teens,
he became a merchant marine, using the nine
times he traveled around the world and the many
cultures he experienced during his travels as liv-
ing textbooks and simultaneously exploring the
creative worlds of F. García Lorca, Hart Crane, T.
S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, Vladimir Lenin, and Karl
Marx. Abandoning the sea after 20 years, Kaufman
embraced the political left and became a union or-
ganizer in post–World War II America, a role that
left him with lifelong psychological and physical
scars. Kaufman, according to Clay, “learned the
dreams and fears of his fellow men first hand in
prisons, in meeting halls, and in hospital wards”
(x), environments that reflect Kaufman’s eclectic
and, given his unconventional and anarchistic be-
havior, troubled life.
Kaufman’s life as poet formally began in the
1950s when he traveled to New York, where he
met Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs and
became, like LeRoi Jones (AMIRI BARAKA) and TED
JOANS, a meaningful player in Greenwich Village’s
“experimentation and heresy” (Clay, x) in art, the
Beat movement. Kaufman, together with Ginsberg,
Bill Margolis, and John Kelley, became one of the
movements leading architects in San Francisco’s
North Beach when they founded and published
Beatitude magazine in 1959. Although a contem-
porary of such black poets as MARGARET WALKER,
GWENDOLYN BROOKS, ROBERT HAYDEN, and MELVIN
TOLSON, and although “a caustic critic of American
culture” (214), according to Hayden, like many of
the writers of the BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT Kaufman
was seldom associated with them, although he
identified himself as black. Writing to the editors
of the San Francisco Chronicle (October 5, 1983),
Kaufman declared, “One thing is certain I am not
white. Thank God for that. It makes everything
else bearable” (quoted in Henderson, 206).Kaufman, Bob 295