Fifty years ago, at the inaugural celebration of Kwanzaa, 60 black Americans gathered in a California living room to celebrate their distant African past.
It was 1966. They wore dashikis and hand-woven headwear. A troupe of musicians played drums. Men and women bowed to each other and poured libations to the ancestors. Later, someone switched on the stereo and turned up the music of James Brown and Curtis Mayfield as the crowd danced.
But the central ritual of the entire evening — the ceremony everyone had come for — involved lighting a modified Hanukkah menorah.
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