Bunchy Carter

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Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter founded the Southern California chapter of the Black Panther Party.

Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter was an African American activist and former gang member who was killed on January 17, 1969. He is celebrated by many supporters as a martyr in the Black Power movement in the United States.

[edit] Early history

In the early 1960s Carter was a member of the Slauson street gang in Los Angeles. He became a member of the Slauson "Renegades", a hard-core inner circle of the gang, and earned the nickname "Mayor of the Ghetto". Carter was eventually convicted of armed robbery and was imprisoned in Soledad prison for four years. While incarcerated Carter became influenced by the Nation of Islam and the teachings of Malcolm X, and he converted to Islam. After his release, Carter met Huey Newton, one of the founders of the Black Panther Party, and was convinced to join the party in 1967. In early 1968 Carter formed the Southern California chapter of the Black Panthers and became a leader in the group. Like all Black Panther chapters, the Southern California chapter studied politics, read and memorized BPP literature, and received training in firearms and first aid. They also began the "Free Breakfast for Children" program which provided meals to the poor in the community. The chapter was very successful, gaining 50-100 new members each week by April of 1968. Notable members included Elaine Brown, and [[Geronimo Pratt].

[edit] The Southern California chapter of the Black Panthers

The Black Panthers were opposed by the secret FBI operation COINTELPRO, and the party was referred to as "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country" by J. Edgar Hoover. As revealed later in Senate testimony, the FBI worked with the Los Angeles Police Department to harass and intimidate party members. In 1968 and 1969, numerous false arrests and warrantless searches were documented, and several members were killed in altercations with the police. The "Breakfast for Children" program was effectively shut down by daily arrests of members, with all charges most often dropped within a week. "The Breakfast for Children Program" wrote J. Edgar Hoover in an internal FBI memo in May of 1969, "represents the best and most influential activity going for the BPP and, as such, is potentially the greatest threat to efforts by authorities to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for." Later that year, Hoover submitted orders to FBI offices: "exploit all avenues of creating dissension within the ranks of the BPP," and "submit imaginative and hard-hitting counterintelligence measures aimed at crippling the BPP."

The Black Panthers were also rivals of a black nationalist group named Us, founded by Ron Karenga. The groups had very different aims and tactics, but the groups often found themselves competing for potential recruits. This rivalry came to a head in 1969, when the two groups supported different candidates to head the Afro-American Studies Center at UCLA. Bunchy has a son who was born in April of 1969 after Bunchy was murdered. His son, coincidentally, attended Cal State Long Beach (1987-1992), while Karenga was the chairman of the Black Studies Department.

[edit] The killings

John Huggins and Bunchy Carter, members of the Black Panther Party, were shot and killed on January 17, 1969.

At a Black Student Union meeting at UCLA's Campbell Hall on January 17, 1969, Bunchy Carter and John Huggins, another BPP member, were heard making derogatory comments about Karenga, the founder of Us. Other versions mention a heated argument between Us members and Panther Elaine Brown. An altercation ensued during which Carter and Huggins were shot to death.
BPP members insisted that the event was a planned assassination, whereas Us members maintained it was a spontaneous event. Former BPP deputy minister of defense Geronimo Pratt, Carter’s head of security at the time, has stated in recent years that rather than a conspiracy, the UCLA incident was a spontaneous shootout. The person who allegedly shot Carter and Huggins, Claude Hubert, was never found. Later, during the Church Committee hearings in 1975, evidence came to light that under the FBI's COINTELPRO actions, FBI agents had deliberately fanned flames of division and enmity between the BPP and Us. Death threats and humiliating cartoons created by the FBI were sent to each group, made to look as if they originated with the other group, with the explicit intention of inciting deadly violence and division.
Following the UCLA incident, brothers George and Larry Stiner and Donald Hawkins turned themselves in to the police, who had issued warrants for their arrests. They were convicted for conspiracy to commit murder and two counts of second-degree murder, based on testimony given by BPP members. The Stiner brothers both received life sentences and Hawkins served time in California’s Youth Authority Detention. The Stiners escaped from San Quentin in 1974. George is at large to this day. Larry lived as a fugitive for 20 years and then surrendered in 1994 in order to try and negotiate help for his destitute children in Suriname. He was immediately returned to San Quentin where he continues to serve out his life sentence. His children remained in precarious and impoverished circumstances for eleven years, until they finally were able to come to the U.S. in 2005.

[edit] Repercussions

The LAPD responded to the attack by raiding an apartment used by the Black Panthers and arresting 75 members, including all remaining leadership of the chapter, on charges of conspiring to murder Us members in retaliation. (These charges were later dropped.) This reaction fueled claims that Us was being used by the FBI to target the Black Panthers. Later in 1969, two other Black Panther members were killed and one other was wounded by Us members.

The Black Student Union at UCLA was shocked and devastated by the murders, and ceased to operate effectively on campus for several years. Richard Held was promoted to the special agent in charge of the San Francisco office.

In the years following the deaths of Carter and Huggins, the Black Panther party became more suspicious of outsiders and became more focused on defense rather than community improvement. The group eventually became marginalized, and officially disbanded in 1980.

[edit] External links

• The FBI's War on the Black Panther Party's Southern California Chapter by the Maoist Internationalist Movement
• Los Angeles Gangs from streetgangs.com
• Civil Rights Movement cemented in UCLA history by the Daily Bruin, UCLA
• Children of the Revolutionary LA Weekly feature on the 1969 UCLA shootout that killed John Huggins and Bunchy Carter.

[edit] References

• Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power: A Black Woman's Story, Doubleday, New York, 1992.
• Scot Brown, Fighting for US: Maulana Karenga, the US Organization, and Black Cultural Nationalism, NYU Press, New York, 2003.
• The Black Panther: Black Community News Service newspaper, Berkeley, Spring 1991.
• Kit Kim Holder, The History of the Black Panther Party 1966-1972: A Curriculum Tool for Afrikan Amerikan Studies, 1990, Amherst College Library, Amherst, Mass.
• Huey Newton, War Against the Panthers: A Study of Repression in America, University of California Santa Cruz, June 1980.
• Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement, South End Press: Boston, 1990.