Oakland Tough

Abstract

The postwar Bay Area is famous for birthing a series of influential cultural movements. Yet aside from the Black Panther Party, Oakland’s contributions have not received a comprehensive appraisal. This article investigates three such undertakings in the period between 1938 and 1970. Earliest, Jack LaLanne and Ed Yarick launched bodybuilding gyms that attracted boys and men to seek salvation by bulking up their physiques. Next, Bruce Lee and James Yimm Lee built upon the Bay Area’s postwar martial arts scene to recast traditional Chinese techniques into hybrid fighting styles. Lastly, Sonny Barger’s Oakland chapter of the Hells Angels cultivated outlaw behavior on city streets, rural byways, and barrooms and festivals across California. Most of these men grew up in declining urban neighborhoods that sparked in them feelings of insecurity as well as outrage. Their experiments in states of heightened masculinity may be seen as a stab at becoming relevant (and famous) on their own terms. The musclemen, martial artists, and bikers benefited from California’s mounting limelight of glossy magazines, films, and television, a media infrastructure that they worked to broadcast the visually explosive scenes happening in Oakland to a national and even international audience.