Sports is America’s most “popular” culture, with an enormous commercial investment. The hopelessly capitalist sports culture, accompanied by the objectification, regulation, surveillance, and valuation of the body witnessed in no other field, shapes the discourse and experience of the racialized, gendered, sexualized bodies for all involved. Sports is and has been a powerful instrument of nation building, colonialism, occupation, and empire as well as of assertion of sovereignty, autonomy, and pleasure.
And yet, as the editors of this special issue, Joseph Darda and Amira Rose Davis incisively point out in their introduction, there is an “absence of sports from the study of American empire.” The editors’ framing of the issue and the contributors’ inquiries move beyond existing scholarship, not only in terms of the specific sports studied, but also in methodological tools and approaches at the forefront of American studies, e.g., Black studies, critical refugee studies, digital media studies, disability studies, queer and trans studies, and surveillance studies. The essays illustrate that, “Sports are fundamental to how we know our bodies and, therefore, ourselves and the world through which we move.”
Black Power, Martial Arts, and Sports Liberation: Beyond the Page
By M. Aziz
Black martial artistry has dazzled us for decades. Our understanding of it in the context of American Studies and American history has remained static. This story extends far beyond the cinematic catharsis and hetero-masculinist fantasy of the Kung Fu Film Boom of the 1970s. Black Power organizers used martial arts to blend embodied practice and community organizing. Organizations like the Black Panther Party provided local, accessible avenues to rethink the role of sport in American Society. After the Olympic Committee for Human Rights’ protests during the 1968 Olympics, a small but vocal Sports Liberation Movement started to form, with thinkers and Jack and Micki Scott voicing concerns about the collision of liberalism, capitalism, and athletics.
Figure 1: A photograph of the Oakland Community Learning Center’s teenager martial arts champions. From the November 5, 1977 issue of The Black Panther. Courtesy of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
The article, “Vanguard of the Athletic Revolution: The Black Panther Party, Micki and Jack Scott, and the Sports Liberation Movement,” examines a lost history of interracial “socialist sport.” Moreover, it takes the “Revolt of the Black Athlete” out of the largest stadiums and podiums and locates its importance for communities like East Oakland. Using the archives of newspapers such as The Black Panther and Sports Illustrated, I contend that the Panthers, representative of the larger Black Power Movement, politicized sport as a necessary site to change the everyday person’s quality of life. As demonstrated by dozens of action photographs in the Party newspaper from 1975 to 1978, improving the well-being of youth through martial arts became one of the most important iterations of Black martial artistry. Boys and girls eagerly took to the Party’s afterschool program. Taught by Tae Kwon Do practitioner and math teacher Steve McCutchen, it provided an exciting recreational outlet as well as an introduction to the Party’s Third World vision of the future.
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Martial arts became the cornerstone of physical education for a larger Black independent education movement, regardless of Black Power ideology. Instructors at the Oakland Community School were concerned with nourishing people’s bodies and souls simultaneously. Their opposition to U.S. nationalism and their desire to teach self-empowerment and joy connected them to other Black martial artists, even those who aligned more with the cultural nationalism of organizations like the US and the Congress of African People. Adults, teenagers, and children would all go on to compete in the early days of American martial arts tournaments. Often fighting discrimination, these competitors were visibly intertwined with expressing Black pride while sparring or demonstrating their memorized forms or katas. Readily identifiable uniforms were a signature of this. In the video above, you can see martial arts master Tayari Casel, a practitioner of Kupigana Ngumi, competing in the 1970s in an outfit that denoted his Pan-Africanist politics. As he flew through the air, his competitors knew that his views on how to achieve freedom didn’t stop when he stepped onto the mat.
Micki Scott said in an interview that sports reflected the dominant values of the system and society. She and Jack Scott wrote about how you could reinvert the values around you based on how you taught sport. Not only did these activists de-emphasize the growing sports industrial complex, they also argued that society could dismantle its own racial and gender discrimination through collective participation. Their viewpoints were shared by some who came of age during Black Power. And in both “Vanguard of the Athletic Revolution” and my first monograph, I draw attention to the ways that the politics of the 1960s and 1960s spread to martial artistry. As a holistic practice beyond physical protection, it embodying the era’s commitment to social welfare as self-defense