Hassan Kwame Jeffries

Fitness has always been political.

And so I think it's not whether or not fitness in the 21st century is political.

It's just how does it manifest its political nature?

So the most iconic Black Power organization, of course, is the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, which comes out of Oakland, California, founded 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale.

Especially with Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, they were heavily influenced by sort of Asian activism and Asian radicals.

Huey and Bobby, very early on, they're passing out Mao's Red Book, right?

I mean, so...

They're looking to sort of Asia and to China in particular as sort of a model for how you lead a revolution.

That Eastern influence, if you will, of sort of martial arts is very heavy.

And we saw the same thing with the Nation of Islam.

I mean, it's martial arts training, the fruit of Islam that is connected to this idea of discipline.

You have to be disciplined in order to be an effective fighter, but you also have to have discipline in order to be an effective community member.

during this period, within sort of African-American activist circles, it is very collective.

I mean, the one thing that we don't see a lot of is sort of individual workouts, right?

So it's not like, hey, all right, you know, we got a meeting at 10, y'all go work out in your basement, right?

And come meet us at 10.

It's like, no, no, no.

You know, we're going to have a meeting at 10, but at 8, we're going to be here, right?

And we're going to do the physical aspect first.

You have the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hexeth, talking about the warrior culture, lethality.