By Bashir Muhammad Akinyele -Imamu Amiri Baraka White supremacy and systematic racism left Black people as one of the most oppressed groups in America. Many Afrikan American leaders came forward to help liberate Black people from centuries of socioeconomic disparities caused by racial discrimination. During the high levels of the Black Liberation Movement in the 1950s to the early 1970s, Civil Rights and Black power became the world wide rallying call for social justice. We as Afrikan people in the United States have been in a protracted struggle to protect our blackness and our humanity ever since 1619. That is the year Black people arrived on the American shores in chains. Like millions of Afrikans before us, we were kidnapped in Afrika and forced into an European-American slave making system that totally disconnected us from our land, language, and culture for the sole purpose to be exploited by whiteness and capitalism. But Afrika’s children were not the only thing Europeans wanted for their possessions. They wanted the entire continent of Afrika itself. During the late 1800s, Mother Afrika was subjected to nearly a century of colonialism. Therefore in Afrika, and throughout the Afrikan diaspora, whiteness made us believe that we had no history of being the very first people on the planet earth that initiated the world’s humanity, civilization, religion, and culture. But throughout our sojourn in America, some Black leaders came forward to rebuild the Afrikan American community through Afrikan centered cultural empowerment and advocating for Black political power. In the 20th century, a respected Los Angeles, California community activist named Ronald McKinley Everett, a spokesperson for pan-Afrikan self -determination in the 1960s, created a Black nationalist political and cultural empowerment philosophy called Kawaida. The word Kawaida is a Kiswahili word meaning “tradition” or “reason.” It is pronounced as the following ka-wa-EE-da. Ronald McKinley Everett would later change his European name to the Afrikan name of Maulana Karenga, and eventually become a major leader for Black power.