December 28th 2023.
Every year, Brooklyn's Kwanzaa Crawl event brings a special celebration to the borough. This year's event was no exception, with over 5,000 attendees in attendance! Participants divided into teams and took part in a bar-hopping adventure, raising over $1 million for Black entrepreneurs in the process.
Stephanie Cancel, one of the attendees, was excited to be part of the Kwanzaa Crawl. She shared her thoughts with PIX11, saying, “It’s all Black-led, Black-owned businesses. It’s a bunch of amazing entrepreneurs, Black professionals. Everybody from everywhere that is Black in Brooklyn, coming out and celebrating and turning up.”
The Kwanzaa Crawl was founded in 2016 by Kerry Coddett and her sister Kristal Payne. The sisters created the event to bring hope to the community during a time of police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement. Coddett told PIX11, “After so many consecutive killings of unarmed Black men, we were just in a state of hopelessness and frustration. Things felt really dark, and we thought, ‘What can we do to celebrate ourselves? What can we do to bring our community together?’”
Kwanzaa, which is celebrated from December 26th to January 1st, focuses on the theme of unity in family, community, nation, and race. This year's theme is Umoja. The Kwanzaa Crawl event emcee, Rice, spoke to this, saying, “Kwanzaa is all about family and community. This Kwanzaa crawl represents cooperative economics, Ujima, cooperative economics that we are better together than we are separate.”
The Kwanzaa Crawl is a wonderful way to celebrate Black entrepreneurship and unity in Brooklyn. The event is a reminder of the importance of community, and of coming together to support Black-owned businesses.
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