Black and Brown Fighters

“Why does Judo or Karate suddenly get so ominous because black men study it?”

1964, The New York Times published a bogus story about a gang of Blood Brothers walking around smacking white people. Depending on the author’s speculative mood, its membership ranged 25 to 400 people. They had, in the author’s premonition of danger, “intensified their training in Karate and Judo fighting methods.”

Of course, the Blood Brothers never existed, and the original story was penned by Junius Griffin in reaction to an enraging police response to a couple of school kids who “swiped a few pieces of fruit” from a stand in Harlem. The day came to be known as the Fruit Stand Riot. 

In colored hands, martial arts were vilified as a outrageous cults of violence entrusted to certain ‘people’ with ill-tempered natures. Inspite of the martial path’s lessons on self-discipline, humility and the strength of kindness, Black and Brown martial artists were viewed through the memory of anti-imperialist violent revolution. Whether “Kenya’s bloody Mau Mau Uprising, the Angolan and Mozambican Wars of Independence”, the Algerian Revolution or Palestinian Uprisings, the Black and Brown man was archetyped by their seemingly ‘irrational’ anger, hatred and violence aimed at the ravage of colonial conquest on the naturally free human spirit. 

100 years after the American Civil War was fought over slavery, the government was still crowding “Black people into ghettoes through redlining…kept them in place with segregation and, when that didn’t work, lynching.” As you can imagine “for alot of Black Americans, kung fu, karate, jiu-jutsu, what-have-you, looked like paths to empowerment” (Hendrix and Poggali, 24).

I hear this story a lot when I sparr with the people I care about, the loss of power and the quest for empowerment. Whether we lost power to a bully, a sexual assaulter an abusive parent, a slave-master, colonizer, boss, or even just to life! Martial arts was a good and structured way to reclaim our power, channel and manage our feelings of anger or grief in a controlled and healthy way, working through things while reconnecting with our body’s natural rhythm in the world.

Hendrix, G., Poggiali, C., & RZA. (2021). These fists break bricks: How kung fu movies swept america and changed the world. Mondo Books.