BLACK & WHITE
Hidden amid the glorious combat pyrotechnics that make Bruce Lee’s 1973 classic Enter the Dragon such a memorable movie is one scene in which African-American co-star Jim Kelly, on his way to the big martial arts tournament, is stopped and harassed by white policemen. Viewed against the current backdrop of civil unrest gripping American society over police brutality and social injustice, Enter the Dragon’s brief foray into issues of race may well be the film’s most lasting symbolic image.
“That scene is very, very timely, even so many years after the movie came out,” said Warrington Hudlin, a longtime martial artist and successful movie producer. “The message wasn’t just explicit but implicit. But to be honest, when I originally saw it, it didn’t stand out to me. I was already very familiar with that kind of racism.”
While Kelly’s confrontation with the racist policemen now stands out as a graphic reminder that America has wrestled with these issues for a long time, nearly forgotten is the scene immediately preceding it: Jim Kelly enters a dojo and says goodbye to another African-American man in a karate gi. Displayed on the wall behind them is a large logo of a fist with a cobra. The logo is highlighted in black, red and green, the colors of Pan-Africanism.
Although the film is a work of fiction, the logo is the symbol of a very real group, the Black Karate Federation, and the who sends Kelly off to Han’s tournament is one of the organization’s
