The Black Cultural Association (or BCA) was an African American inmate group that was founded in 1968 at the California Medical Facility at Vacaville, a California state prison, and formally recognized by prison officials in 1969.
The primary purpose of the BCA was to provide educational tutoring to inmates, which it did in conjunction with graduate college students from the nearby San Francisco Bay Area. Outsiders were allowed to attend meetings of the BCA, and tutors provided remedial and advanced courses in mathematics, reading, writing, art, history, political science, and sociology. These courses made the BCA popular with inmates as well as outsiders; in time, radical political organizations such as Venceremos infiltrated the BCA, giving rise to BCA factions such as Unisight, which eventually gave birth to the Symbionese Liberation Army.
There is evidence that the BCA was a front for CIA domestic activities. Colston Westbrook who served from 1962-1969 in the CIA run Phoenix Program of assassination and psychological warfare returned to the US and became the head of the BCA and was so at the time Donald Defreeze was at Vacaville. Another future SLA member and UC Berkeley student who may have been recruited by Westbrook [his instructor at UCB] to serve as a BCA teacher was, Willie Wolfe, an upper-middle class kid from the East Coast who had little prior connection to the black community, no educational credentials and was said by his father Dr. Wolfe to have had no political inclinations before then.