Thousands of people fanned out across Brooklyn in celebration of Kwanzaa and in support of Black businesses Tuesday, the first day of the holiday.

“It’s fun,” said Howie Borden, a Kwanzaa Crawl team leader. “I get to do this scavenger hunt-like crawl with all Black and brown communities and I give the money back to the community.”

This year’s Kwanzaa Crawl is the first to patronize only Black-owned businesses in Brooklyn.

More than 3,000 Kwanzaa Crawl ticket holders visited 25 different Black-owned bars in seven different neighborhoods: Bedford–Stuyvesant, Fort Green, Clinton Hill, Bushwick, Flatbush, Prospect Heights and Crown Heights, which is where Savvy Bistro and Bar is located.

“They come in and then they come back again, so it brings business and awareness of Black unity and it’s a good time,” said Channel Barker, the restaurant’s co-owner.

The annual event is the largest day-long celebration of Kwanzaa, which venerates the African diaspora, using harvest festival traditions from parts of Africa.

“Celebrating sort of all of the different values that Kwanzaa brings, in terms of thinking about purpose, community, collective effort,” said Stephanie Akunvabey, who participated in this year’s Kwanzaa Crawl.

Kerry Coddett, the co-founder of Kwanzaa Crawl, says the event embodies the seven principles of Kwanzaa, each identified by a Swahili name, particularly umoja, kujichagulia and ujamaa, which mean unity, self-determination and cooperative economics, respectively.

“It embodies cooperative economics, because part of this crawl is tracking the power of the Black dollar,” Coddett said. “It embodies kuumba, which is creativity”

Tajene Bifield is participating in his fourth Kwanzaa Crawl.

“It’s the only crawl of its kind. We don’t have other types, like people have SantaCon,” Bifield said.

The event is not just about having fun. It is also for a good cause.

“We always donate a portion of the proceeds to two charities that I love the most, Barbershop Books and Seeds of Fortune. Both deal with Black children and helping them,” Coddett said.

While the Kwanzaa crawl is upbeat, it was born out of a time of deep trauma and reflection in Black communities across the U.S.

“In 2016, we were sort of reacting to this moment of extrajudicial killings and all of the things that had started to become clear to us, in all of the ways Black communities had been disempowered,” organizer Niama Sandy said.

Going for seven years strong now, the Kwanzaa Crawl has attracted participants from near and far.

“I’m rooting for everybody Black,” Borden said.