For many Black families in the United States, Kwanzaa was once a new and unfamiliar holiday. Desiree Williams-Rajee recalls her uncle describing early celebrations at home with her father as uncertain, with few established rituals.
“It was more of a concept,” Williams-Rajee said. “They did a little bit here and there, but they didn’t really know what they were doing.”
Decades later, seeing hundreds of people gather in Beaverton to celebrate Kwanzaa — with music, food and Black-owned businesses — is a reminder of how the holiday has grown into a tradition Beaverton’s Black community has defined for itself.
Hosted by the Beaverton Black People’s Union, the third annual Joyous Kwanzaa Celebration will return Dec. 27 to the Tualatin Hills Park & Recreation District in Beaverton. Board chair and co-founder Williams-Rajee said the organization aims to make this year’s free and family-friendly celebration its largest yet.
The growth has left her uncle “just flabbergasted,” Williams-Rajee said, “to know that we have really built something to make it a holiday that is our own.”
The Kwanzaa holiday has been around only since the 1960s, when it was created by activist and professor Maulana Karenga. The tradition’s popularity spiked in the 1990s and has since leveled out. Today, around 3% of Americans celebrate Kwanzaa, according to a 2019 survey from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Karenga’s “intent really was to create something that reinforced and supported these Afrocentric values that folks could connect with,” said Williams-Rajee.
The Beaverton event, which takes place on the second day of Kwanzaa, honors the value of kujichagulia or self-determination. The holiday, celebrated over seven days, highlights a new principle each day: umoja (unity), kujichagulia (self-determination), ujima (collective work and responsibility), ujamaa (cooperative economics), nia (purpose), kuumba (creativity) and imani (faith).
Saturday’s celebration will be Beaverton’s largest yet, with over 30 vendors and a full lineup of performances that include storytelling, African drumming, a youth step team, soul dancing demonstrations and a visit from Uncle Kwanzaa, who will share the history and symbolism of the holiday.
“We’re celebrating local businesses that are exemplifying that self determination,” said Freedom Rajee, marketing coordinator for the celebration, and Williams-Rajee’s son. People who are “going out and becoming entrepreneurs and creating businesses that serve the community.”
Since 2019 the Beaverton Black People’s Union has hosted events that bring the Black community together. The union began as a way to unite parents and advocate for their children while the Beaverton School District was working on the Student Success Act. Organizers saw the union as an opportunity to organize parents on the Portland metro area’s west side.
After advocating on local issues and organizing a march days after George Floyd’s death in 2020, the nonprofit went on to host a rites of passage ceremony for graduating seniors and later its first Kwanzaa celebration.
“What we’ve been trying to do is really build familiarity, but also build community within Beaverton and really more broadly on the west side,” Williams-Rajee said. “We service folks as far as Forest Grove and as far down as Lake Oswego and West Linn.”
Growing up in Beaverton, Rajee can’t remember many community events in his neighborhood, and almost none that celebrated Black heritage and culture. Since joining the Beaverton Black People’s Union, Rajee has participated in graduation ceremonies, nature walks, block parties, barbecues and celebrations that uplift and connect the Black community in Beaverton and surrounding areas.
“We just wanted to be a reason for people to love living in Beaverton,” Rajee said. The Beaverton Black People’s Union “creates those spaces that I didn’t always have growing up. I’m happy to see that they’re giving that to the next generation.”
Organizers hope Saturday’s celebration will be an opportunity for people of all backgrounds to learn more about and experience Kwanzaa while connecting more deeply with Beaverton’s Black community, which accounts for just under 3% of the population.
“I think in Beaverton, even though we’re so incredibly diverse as a community, our community can be invisibilized,” Williams-Rajee said. “There is just a beautiful, beautiful community in Beaverton and on the west side. And this gives a sample of tradition, of culture, of the people, of the music, of the rhythm of everything in one spot.”
If you go: Joyous Kwanzaa Celebration: 5-8 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 27; Tualatin Hills Park & Recreation District, 15707 S.W. Walker Road, Beaverton; free; beavertonblackpeoplesunion.org
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