Steve Muhammad is a decorated martial artist who developed his own form—Ken Wing Tai Ba—by watching the creative movements of his predominantly Black students over his 60-year career. While his talents and military career took him all over, his legacy begins in the Mississippi Delta, with his paw-paw and a peckerwood.
Four-year-old Steve Sander's cinnamon-colored legs dangled over the edge of the porch swing. He sat next to his paternal grandfather JC, whom he affectionately called paw-paw. JC was an imposing figure, over six feet tall, medium build, and skin that resembled sun-kissed mahogany. Etched on his face was the wisdom of his years; formerly enslaved, now a sharecropper.
It was 1944 Winterville, Mississippi, and the humid heat enveloped them. JC used his legs to push the swing back and forth, offering his grandson a reprieve from the delta sun. Fixated on the red clay dirt road that ran in front of their two-room house, they sat in silence, trying to catch a breeze.
JC pierced the silence, "You ever seen a peckerwood?"
Steve looked up, confused.
He racked his four-year-old brain and responded with a serious face, "Isn't it something that pecks on a tree?"
JC let out a deep-throated, "Nah," shook his head, then leaned forward to stand up from the swing, motioning to Steve. " Come on, I want to show you what a real peckerwood is."
1944 marked close to seven decades after the end of the Reconstruction Era, a period that never lived up to its promises of a better quality of life and opportunities for formerly enslaved Black people. The U.S. was also several years into fighting World War II. A war in which more than a million Black men and thousands of Black women would eventually serve. Steve's family were sharecroppers, a vocation that, even after the end of chattel slavery, still ensured their servitude to the landowner through a cycle of indebtedness. For example, Steve's family was never paid money for the crops they gave to the landowner, only given a register book whose function was to denote theoretical receipts for their toil, but mostly to record debts for basic living needs received from the landowner. Actual money was so scarce in the family that Steve never knew what money was until he was nine years old.
I first learned about Steve Muhammad—formerly Steve Sanders— while researching a story on Black men in South Central L.A. who fly acrobatic pigeons. From August 2021 to February 2025, I interviewed Steve six times, and I always called him Mr. Muhammad. His memory was sharp, his mannerisms warm and his beliefs resolute. Over the course of our interviews I slowly understood the origins of his beliefs, beginning with his time growing up in the Mississippi Delta.
One of Steve's earliest memories, shared during our first interview in 2021, was being out in the cotton field with his mother, Blanche, a short-statured woman at just under five feet tall. She'd just given birth to his baby sister Berniece and was already back in the fields. Berniece was strapped to the front of her and Steve sat perched on a croker (burlap) sack nearby within arm's reach. Blanche moved methodically up and down the rows, grabbing handfuls of fluffy white cotton fibers, twisting at the base and loading her bag. When one area's fruit was exhausted, she pulled Steve on the croker sack, moving in unison with baby Berniece to the next.
On this particular day, Steve noticed a horse in the field pulling a plow adjacent to his mother. He looked at the horse, then looked at his mother. He looked back at the horse again, this time a feeling of deep sadness came over him and he began to cry—he realized that they were using his mother, the woman who cared for him and who he loved, the same as a horse.
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Even in those early years of his life, Steve knew his mother to be resilient, smart, and brave, but sharecropping attempted to reduce her value to that of an animal, less than a human. Unbeknownst to Steve, in that moment, the contradiction he felt between what he knew about his mother and how she was being treated taught him his first lesson about fighting: We are not inferior.
Steve and his grandfather JC got up from the swing. They put on their hats and headed to town—which consisted of a sparse collection of buildings, including a store, dancehall, and multipurpose building.
Once there, Steve recalls JC signaling him to sit on a bench where they could get a good view of things. Steve was bursting with anticipation to finally lay eyes on these peckerwoods his paw-paw spoke of, swiveling his head left and right hoping to steal a glimpse. Just as Steve was giving up hope of ever seeing one, a white man walked by. As the man passed them, JC nudged Steve with his elbow. "That's a peckerwood."
Steve, still confused, looked up at his grandfather and said, "But I thought a peckerwood was something on a tree?" JC replied, "No! That's a peckerwood," pointing his finger for emphasis. "And I want you to listen to me, don't ever be afraid of a peckerwood or any man that wanna fight you, but in particular, this type of man. Don't ever be afraid."
Steve's first inclination about the term peckerwood wasn't completely wrong. The term was first used in the mid-1800s in the South to refer to the woodpecker bird, but by the 1900s the term was adopted by African Americans as a racial epithet, especially in the South, to refer to white people. This was the definition that JC referred to.
JC lived by the advice he gave his grandson. Steve recalled one day when they were in town, his grandfather instructed him to clear the sidewalk to let the white pedestrians pass, as Jim Crow required. But when they wanted to jeer and gloat about their status by mocking them, JC said in a firm voice, "We did what you wanted, now go on now." And they did. He wanted to cultivate that same courage and self-esteem in Steve.
The very next day, JC took Steve to the smokehouse.
The smokehouse resembled a windowless shack on the outside. Inside, the walls of the shack were lined with shelves of canned goods Steve's grandmother, Lucretia, put away for the family. There were peaches, pole beans, okra, and tomatoes. Sacks of shelled and dried corn sat in the corner and a smoked hog hung from the rafters.
JC opened the door and lit a kerosene lamp so they could see. Inside, there was a croker sack hanging from the rafters, not far from the hog. The sack was filled with dirt at the bottom and cotton on the top, so the dirt wouldn't move. Pointing to the sack, JC instructed Steve, "You can punch it, kick it, or hit it with a stick, but you can't poke holes in it". Steve looked at his grandfather, then approached the sack and gave it a few jabs. The material of the sack was coarse and scratched his little hands.
His grandfather set the kerosene lamp down and left the smokehouse. On that day, at the age of four, Steve began his combat training.
He punched the rough sack so many times that it began to cut his hands. Steve's grandmother, Lucretia, came out to the smokehouse to grab some canned goods.
During our interview Steve's eyes lit up when he described his grandmother to me. She had a rich ebony complexion and long straight black hair. Hearing him talk about her reminded me of the Queen of Sheba in the Bible—"Black and comely." Lucretia was formerly enslaved like JC and devoted to her husband.
She saw Steve wincing from the cuts on his hands and cooed, "Awe, Steve, come with me."
Steve was relieved to be rescued.
She bandaged Steve's hands with the love and care only a grandmother can render. Steve assumed that after the bandaging, she would pull him in close and give him a hug and a kiss as she sometimes did, but to his surprise, she gave him a love tap on his backside and told him to go back out to the smokehouse and continue punching the bag. Steve looked at her in disbelief.
"Your grandfather wants you to hit and kick that bag. You do what your grandfather say do."
This would be Steve's daily routine for the next four years, punching and kicking the bag, even on Sundays after church.
Steve learned his second lesson in fighting from his paw-paw: Sometimes we have to fight.
When Steve was about eight years old, his mother and father decided they could no longer raise their family—Steve and his four siblings—in Mississippi if they had any hope of a better life. Sharecropping kept them eternally indebted, and Mississippi kept them permanently subjugated.
Leaving would be no easy feat, as the family received no wages for their labor, only a register book, which was not a transferrable currency they could use to leave town. Also, in Winterville, Black people were forbidden to receive money, even through a wire transfer.
Steve's mother had a brother in Topeka, Kansas, with a close and trusted relationship with a white family near Winterville. To get around this obstacle, the brother wired money to the white family who purchased bus tickets for Steve's family to travel to Topeka. The day of their departure, the family got up in the dark hours of the morning, arranged the few things they could carry in their hands, and walked to the bus station to board the bus to Topeka.
Steve's father, IC, got a job on the assembly line at the local canning factory in Topeka, and Steve's mother did domestic work when the children were in school. Life started to look up for them.
When Steve was 11 years old, around 1951, he and his father visited his grandparents in Winterville. While visiting, Steve's grandmother gave him a list and sent him to the store.
Steve studied the list his grandmother gave him, careful to put each item in his basket, and then he got in line to pay. But every time a white person came into the store, they were served before Steve, who waited patiently.
Finally, Steve had enough, so he politely said to the umpteenth white man who cut in front of him, "Excuse me sir, but I'm next." The white man looked back at young Steve in disdain and snapped, "Wait your turn nigger." Then turned back around to pay for his goods.
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At that moment, Steve heard his grandfather's voice in his head, who for most of his life, taught his grandson about racism, dignity, and courage. Almost instinctively, Steve reached down into the basket, wrapped his 11-year-old hand around a small can of tomato paste and aimed it at the back of the white man's head with as much force as he could muster. The man tumbled to the floor.
Steve dropped the basket and took off running as the white man yelled at him from the floor, "You come back here, boy!"
Breathless from running, Steve told his grandparents and father what happened. JC immediately instructed Steve's father to grab his truck, drive Steve to the airport, and put him on a plane at once to send him back to Topeka. The white people of the community would soon be looking for him.
After Steve's father took him to the airport and ensured his safe passage to Topeka, he came back to his father's house to find about 15 white men at the front door, "We come to get that nigger boy," they spat.
JC opened the front door, cradling a shotgun, surveyed the men on his porch, and said in a long southern drawl, "He ain't here."
One of the white men lunged forward as though he was going to barge past JC into the house when another white man grabbed his shoulder. "That's JC there, and if he say he ain't here, he ain't here."
The mob relented, lingering only a few minutes more, attempting to extract information on the whereabouts of Steve. Realizing JC wasn't going to give up his grandson, they finally left.
After the last white man left, JC stood on his front porch and turned towards the corn field next to his house, let out an audible coded signal, lifted his shotgun in the air, and twisted it from left to right three times. On the third and final twist, about 25 Black men with shotguns stood up in the cornfield.
The Black community of Winterville developed a distress alert system using wooden drums that, through distinct rhythms, alerted each other of the nature and location of the distress. JC used the drums to summon the men of the community. They were prepared for whatever war the white men of Winterville were going to wage that day.
When his father recounted what happened, Steve learned a third lesson about fighting: Courage isn't the absence of fear, but the necessity of purpose.
That was the last time Steve ever set foot in Mississippi.
Things continued to improve for Steve's family in Topeka. His father found a better job and Steve got an afterschool job at a local Chinese restaurant when he was 13 years old. One day, he arrived early to work. Peering behind the fence that surrounded the restaurant, he saw the owners doing some strange form of movement in the backyard. He tried to mimic them from outside the fence but failed miserably. The next day, he arrived even earlier and asked the father of the family if he could join them. The father agreed, under one condition, "This is something you should tell no one about, this is our Chinese exercise. But if we teach you, this is between you and our family." Steve agreed. Now he had a fighting science to support the lessons he learned in Mississippi: Tai chi.
Steve would go on to study martial arts in the U.S. Marines from 1960-1967, stationed in Okinawa, Camp Pendleton, Vietnam, and El Torro. Finding martial arts instructors willing to teach him when he was in the U.S. proved challenging, because despite martial arts being popularized in the 1960s, martial arts, like society, was a largely racist and segregated sport. He competed in his first martial arts tournament in 1963. He lost, but he continued practicing, building a name for himself in the sport. He would go on to win several state and national titles, eventually garnering the title of "The Fastest Hands in Martial Arts." His final post at El Torro would become pivotal due to its proximity to South Central, L.A., where there was a burgeoning community of Black martial artists forming, determined to diversify the competitive martial arts space.
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In 1968, three men—Cliff Stewart, Ron Chapel, and "Crazy Eddie"—approached Steve. They had a wild idea to form a Black Karate Federation, a coalition of Black martial artists focused on education and diversification. They saw martial arts as a tool for Black liberation, empowerment, and protection. In 1969, the Black Karate Federation was formed. The founding members were Cliff Stewart, Ron Chapel, Donnie Williams, Jerry Smith, Curtis Pulliam, Karl Armelin, and Steve Sanders, who was also chosen as their leader. In 1984, Steve joined the Nation of Islam and adopted the last name Muhammad.
Throughout his martial arts career, spanning more than 60 years, Steve built his fighting science combining the teachings of Kenpo, Wing Chun, Tai chi, and boxing. He named it Ken Wing Tai Ba (pronounced Kim Wing Ta-ee Bok), and developed it by watching the creative movements of his predominantly Black students over the years. He said Ken Wing Tai Ba was "built for us to get a fair deal in fighting tournaments and something that we can be proud of, carry on, and teach our children forever." At the age of 85, Steve is still teaching martial arts instruction in Georgia. Instructing students on the techniques of Ken Wing Tai Ba and the psychological foundation that they are not inferior, sometimes they must fight, and courage isn't the absence of fear, but the necessity of purpose.