For nearly 40 years, Audrey Hadden of Freeport has been spreading the message, and principles, of Kwanzaa

On the first night of Kwanzaa, Audrey L. Hadden typically settles in her Freeport home to reflect on the meaning of the African American and Pan-African holiday focused on family, culture and community — a holiday that has been an important part of her life for nearly 40 years.

She lights the first candle, the black one that stands in the middle of the candle holder, called the kinara. It represents the first principle of Kwanzaa, Umoja, or unity. There are seven principles of Kwanzaa, called the Nguzo Saba.

She plays music, usually something “that invokes the spirit of drumming. And I envelop myself in that, because that also helps me . . . to start reflecting on the new year that’s coming. I want to sit down and analyze some of my achievements through the year, but also some of my challenges, some of my lessons. How can I take them and make them help me in 2024?” Hadden, 59, said. “I’m about growth.”

Hadden said she turned to Kwanzaa, which starts each year on Dec. 26 and ends on Jan. 1, as a way to cope after a difficult high school experience. And as the holiday and its principles have helped guide her over the past four decades, she has been keen to introduce it to others.

Hadden has presented Kwanzaa celebrations and educational workshops in communities on Long Island and, since 2012, she has been responsible for the holiday program at the Joysetta & Julius Pearse African American Museum of Nassau County, in Hempstead Village.

“It’s about sharing Kwanzaa to a larger group of people” to help them learn about its principles, which Hadden thinks can “help with our mental health.”

For African Americans, she said, “Microaggressions are a part of daily life, and so we need to figure out ways to combat those things.” Kwanzaa, she said, “helps me do that.”

A celebration’s roots

Kwanzaa was created in 1966 by Maulana Karenga, a professor and chair of Africana Studies at California State University, Long Beach. The author and activist introduced the holiday at a time when the civil rights movement was changing, “as the freedom movement gained a little more unrest . . . in terms of people speaking more boldly, protesting boldly,” said Fatima Logan-Alston, an adjunct professor of American Studies at SUNY Old Westbury. She has celebrated Kwanzaa since the 1990s, and coordinated the college’s Kwanzaa celebration earlier this month, as well as others elsewhere.

Karenga’s approach with Kwanzaa, Logan-Alston said, was about “connecting to an African past, a past that’s beyond slavery and also then connecting to a sense of Pan-Africanism, where we’re trying to find commonality with people of the [African] diaspora.” She said for Karenga, the principles of Kwanzaa were “going to help African American people to rise, to elevate their position. He’s using culture as a way to build a national identity that is Pan-African in Kwanzaa.”

Its concepts are expressed in Swahili, one of the most widely spoken languages in Africa, and draws from community traditions and values found throughout the continent.

Logan-Alston said she has seen an increase in community celebrations of Kwanzaa. “It definitely is expanding,” she said.

Spreading the word

In early December, Hadden sat down at the Joysetta & Julius Pearse African American Museum of Nassau County, in a room replete with African masks and other symbols of African culture, to discuss what Kwanzaa means to her and how it encourages her and connects her to her African American heritage. She also spoke of her hope that a larger cross-section of Long Islanders learn about that heritage and gain insight from Kwanzaa’s seven principles — Umoja (unity), Kujichagulia (self-determination), Ujima (collective work and responsibility), Ujamaa (cooperative economics), Nia (purpose), Kuumba (creativity) and Imani (faith).

Hadden’s Kwanzaa celebrations began in the basement of her mother’s Hempstead home in 1985, when she was just 21 years old. Some years before, as a high school student at a Catholic school on Long Island, she said, “I experienced some things that weren’t pleasant, and I needed to figure out a way to have a tool kit for my mental health to help guide me in a lot of different ways.”

That led her to Kwanzaa, and planted the seeds for what has become for Hadden a labor of love: Presenting Kwanzaa celebrations for family, for students, for communities and now for the museum.

“My family and friends loved it,” Hadden said of those early celebrations.

In the beginning, Hadden said she didn’t have a traditional kinara. Instead, she said she simply bought seven candle holders, found red, black and green candles (the colors of Black liberation) and began setting up her Kwanzaa table.

“I had African cloth. We used a wine glass for the unity cup,” she said.

Hadden said the “elders” of her family were particularly pleased to learn about Kwanzaa and celebrate Black history in the “safe space” she created. They sang, prayed and remembered family and historical figures who had passed on.

Over the years, Hadden’s Kwanzaa celebration outgrew her mother’s home and she rented out a VFW hall in West Hempstead for family, friends and others in her community. “That was just me,” she said, explaining she was not representing any organization at the time.

“And then I volunteered with the Dr. Martin Luther King Birthday Celebration Committee in Nassau County, where Julius Pearse was president and Joysetta Pearse was on the committee,” Hadden said. Joysetta Pearse has since died.

When the Pearses began managing Nassau’s African American museum, Hadden said she started volunteering with their African Atlantic Genealogical Society and coordinating their Kwanzaa celebration at the museum in her capacity at that time as assistant program director. Currently, she is the genealogical society’s director of education, a volunteer position. This year’s Kwanzaa celebration at the museum will be held Dec. 30.

“Audrey is an expert in Kwanzaa,” said Monet Green, the museum’s program director. “She is very educated, well-versed in African culture and African American culture. . . . It’s the education that she brings that gives people a deeper understanding of what Kwanzaa is about.”

Principles in her tool kit

For Hadden, who is a unit president with the civil service employee union, CSEA Local 830 in Nassau County, and represents the county clerk’s office, human rights commission and records management, Kwanzaa has become part of her “tool kit” to overcome “microaggressions” and discrimination she said she has experienced as a Black woman.

Two Kwanzaa principles particularly resonate with her.

“One is Nia, which is purpose. There’s purpose in everything I do. I do not like optics,” Hadden said. “The second principle of Kwanzaa is Kujichagulia, and it’s self-determination. I believe that obstacles may come, but you look at things and you analyze them to see how you can continue and persevere and push forward.”

She added, “My personal value that I live by is courage, because sometimes you’re put in these spaces that don’t allow you to speak, and they want you to be silenced. And I will not allow myself to be silenced in these spaces. It’s 2023. I’m still in spaces where I am the only person that looks like me. And those people that I’m in the room with do not have cultural competency” for people like her.

In an auditorium in the museum, Hadden explained the Kwanzaa display she had prepared.

A large kinara with seven electrified candles was attached to a sculpture depicting African Adinkra symbols, or ideographs, created by David Byre-Tyre, a former executive director of the museum.

“You light the black candle first, which is unity,” Hadden explained.

And then on successive days, the other candles — red and green — are lighted to represent the other six principles.

On a nearby table were other symbols of the holiday: the fruit “to showcase the labor that we have gone through,” that has produced the harvest, Hadden said.

“We have our gifts, our Zawadi in Swahili, and those are usually handmade gifts to give to children,” she said. There is also corn on display, which, Hadden added, “represents the children of the family and of our community. There is the unity cup, and this is what we would have water in and pour libation for our ancestors.”

Hadden said the ancestors are “extremely important,” calling them “your guideposts for your life, because you don’t just represent yourself. You represent your parents, your grandparents and your family.”

So Hadden’s display at the museum includes photographs of “my personal ancestors,” she said, such as her late father, the Rev. Marshall Hadden, grandparents and others. Also pictured are historical figures of great stature, such as Rep. Shirley Chisholm, who became the first Black woman elected to Congress in 1968; civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.; labor leader and civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph; and poet and author Maya Angelou — all figures Hadden finds inspirational.

For the museum’s Kwanzaa event, Green said Hadden will generally include a speaker and encourages the audience to get involved.

“She does audience participation, with lighting of the kinara and reading of the principles,” Green said.

Hadden, speaking ahead of the Dec. 30 event, said her Kwanzaa program at the museum would include an “ancestral call,” honoring those “mighty people” in the community — some historical figures known to many, as well as local community leaders and family members. They are, she said, “people that have touched your life in a mighty way, that have been able to triumph and have resilience through struggles and barriers and obstacles.”

Those remembered, she said, would include “founders of organizations that have created community and touched many individuals’ lives. And it will be personally for people who are in the audience to be able to call out people in their lives that have passed on, that mean really a great deal to them. And so we could invoke their strength as we think about them and as we carry all of our ancestors personally in our heart.”

By Olivia Winslow

olivia.winslow@newsday.com@newsollie