Rainey Cheeks, 1952-2026: World Bronze Medallist, Then Something Harder
He took bronze at the first World Taekwondo Championships in 1973 and won the All American Open at Madison Square Garden. Then he spent forty years doing the thing that actually took courage, in a city that was losing a generation.
- Born
- 20 March 1952
- Died
- 11 August 2026, Georgetown University Hospital, Washington D.C., age 74
- Cause
- Complications from a kidney transplant, while also being treated for cancer
- Full name
- Kwabena Albert “Rainey” Cheeks
- Instructor
- Grandmaster Ki Whang Kim
- Rank
- 9th degree black belt, grandmaster
He started at fourteen, at the 12th Street YMCA in Washington, under Grandmaster Ki Whang Kim — one of the most consequential instructors in American taekwondo. By twenty-one he was on the floor at the Kukkiwon in Seoul for the first World Taekwondo Championships, held 25–27 May 1973, and came home with a bronze in the heavyweight division. He also won S. Henry Cho’s All American Open at Madison Square Garden.
He was inducted into the Taekwondo Hall of Fame in 2007, and in 2010 founded the Ki Whang Kim Traditional Martial Arts Association to keep his teacher’s lineage intact.
The rest of his life
In 1993 he founded Inner Light Ministries UCC, and served as its bishop. He became one of Washington’s most prominent figures in HIV/AIDS support and in Black LGBTQ+ community leadership, through the years when that work was neither safe nor popular. The Washington Post and WTOP both led their obituaries with it.
That is not a departure from the martial arts story. It is the same story. A man who could fight at world level spent the back half of his life running rooms where frightened people were told they were welcome.
What a school owner should take from Rainey Cheeks
Every school in this industry claims to build community. Most mean a birthday party and a Facebook group.
Cheeks built the real version, and the test of it is that people came to him at the worst moments of their lives — not to learn to kick. If you want to know whether your school is actually a community or just a business with a mat, that is the question: has anyone ever walked in to tell you something that had nothing to do with training?
A note on the day he died
Grandmaster Carol Middleton — who founded the D.C. Self-Defense Karate Association and ran it for fifty years — died on the same day, 11 August 2026, in the same metropolitan area. We treated that as a likely error when we first saw it and checked it hard. It is not an error. Washington lost two of the people who built its martial arts community within hours of each other.
Sources, and what we could not confirm
- The 1973 World Championships bronze is confirmed in the published results of that event.
- The Madison Square Garden win is confirmed by the Taekwondo Hall of Fame, but the Hall gives no year. The year 1973 comes from a single obituary. We have printed the win and left the year attributed rather than asserted.
- Principal sources: the Washington Post and WTOP obituaries, the published results of the 1973 World Taekwondo Championships, the Taekwondo Hall of Fame, and the MoCo Show.
Corrections and first-hand recollections are welcome and will be added with attribution.