Bunchy Carter
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Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter (October 12, 1942 – January 17, 1969) was an American
activist Activism consists of efforts to promote, impede, direct or intervene in social, political, economic or environmental reform with the desire to make changes in society toward a perceived common good. Forms of activism range from mandate build ...
. Carter is credited as a founding member of the
Southern California Southern California (commonly shortened to SoCal) is a geographic and Cultural area, cultural List of regions of California, region that generally comprises the southern portion of the U.S. state of California. Its densely populated coastal reg ...
chapter of the
Black Panther Party The Black Panther Party (originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense) was a Marxism–Leninism, Marxist–Leninist and Black Power movement, black power political organization founded by college students Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newto ...
. Carter was shot and killed by a rival group, Ron Karenga's "Us", and is celebrated by his supporters as a
martyr A martyr (, ''mártys'', 'witness' Word stem, stem , ''martyr-'') is someone who suffers persecution and death for advocating, renouncing, or refusing to renounce or advocate, a religious belief or other cause as demanded by an external party. In ...
in the
Black Power Black power is a list of political slogans, political slogan and a name which is given to various associated ideologies which aim to achieve self-determination for black people. It is primarily, but not exclusively, used in the United States b ...
movement in the United States. Carter is portrayed by Gaius Charles in the 2015 TV series '' Aquarius''.


Early life

In the early 1960s Carter was a member of the Slauson street gang in
Los Angeles Los Angeles, often referred to by its initials L.A., is the List of municipalities in California, most populous city in the U.S. state of California, and the commercial, Financial District, Los Angeles, financial, and Culture of 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 Robbery is the crime of taking or attempting to take anything of value by force, threat of force, or use of fear. According to common law, robbery is defined as taking the property of another, with the intent to permanently deprive the person o ...
and was imprisoned in Soledad prison for four years. While incarcerated Carter became influenced by the
Nation of Islam The Nation of Islam (NOI) is a religious organization founded in the United States by Wallace Fard Muhammad in 1930. A centralized and hierarchical organization, the NOI is committed to black nationalism and focuses its attention on the Afr ...
and the teachings of
Malcolm X Malcolm X (born Malcolm Little, later el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz; May 19, 1925 – February 21, 1965) was an African American revolutionary, Islam in the United States, Muslim minister and human rights activist who was a prominent figur ...
, and he converted to
Islam Islam is an Abrahamic religions, Abrahamic monotheistic religion based on the Quran, and the teachings of Muhammad. Adherents of Islam are called Muslims, who are estimated to number Islam by country, 2 billion worldwide and are the world ...
. He would later renounce Islam after an encounter with Eldridge Cleaver citing contradictions and focus on the black liberation struggle. After his release, Carter met Huey Newton, one of the founders of the
Black Panther Party The Black Panther Party (originally the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense) was a Marxism–Leninism, Marxist–Leninist and Black Power movement, black power political organization founded by college students Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newto ...
and was convinced to join the party in 1967.


Southern California chapter of the Black Panthers

In early 1968, Carter formed the Southern California chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP) and became a leader in the group. Like all Black Panther chapters, the Southern California chapter studied politics, read Party literature, and received training in
firearm A firearm is any type of gun that uses an explosive charge and is designed to be readily carried and operated by an individual. The term is legally defined further in different countries (see legal definitions). The first firearms originate ...
s and
first aid First aid is the first and immediate assistance given to any person with a medical emergency, with care provided to preserve life, prevent the condition from worsening, or to promote recovery until medical services arrive. First aid is gener ...
. They also began the "
Free Breakfast for Children The Free Breakfast for School Children Program, or the People’s Free Food Program, was a community service program run by the Black Panther Party that focused on providing free breakfast for children before school. The program began in January ...
" program which provided meals to the poor in the community. The chapter was very successful, gaining 50–100 new members each week by April 1968. Notable members included Elaine Brown and Geronimo Pratt. The Black Panthers were referred to as "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country" by
FBI The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the domestic Intelligence agency, intelligence and Security agency, security service of the United States and Federal law enforcement in the United States, its principal federal law enforcement ag ...
director
J. Edgar Hoover John Edgar Hoover (January 1, 1895 – May 2, 1972) was an American attorney and law enforcement administrator who served as the fifth and final director of the Bureau of Investigation (BOI) and the first director of the Federal Bureau o ...
, and the party was targeted by the secret FBI operation known as
COINTELPRO COINTELPRO (a syllabic abbreviation derived from Counter Intelligence Program) was a series of covert and illegal projects conducted between 1956 and 1971 by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at surveilling, infiltr ...
. As later revealed in Senate testimony, the FBI worked with the
Los Angeles Police Department The City of Los Angeles Police Department, commonly referred to as Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), is the primary law enforcement agency of Los Angeles, California, United States. With 8,832 officers and 3,000 civilian staff, it is the th ...
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," wrote Hoover in an internal FBI memo in May 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." The breakfast program was effectively shut down by daily arrests of members; however, those charges were usually dropped within a week. Later in 1969, Hoover sent orders to FBI field 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". In Southern California, the Black Panthers were also rivals of a
black nationalist Black nationalism is a nationalist movement which seeks representation for Black people as a distinct national identity, especially in racialized, colonial and postcolonial societies. Its earliest proponents saw it as a way to advocate for ...
group called Organization Us (usually referred to as "US"), founded by Ron Karenga. The groups had very different aims and tactics, but 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 The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Its academic roots were established in 1881 as a normal school then known as the southern branch of the C ...
.


Assassination

During a meeting of the Black Student Union at UCLA's Campbell Hall on January 17, 1969, Bunchy Carter and another BPP member named John Huggins were heard making derogatory comments about Ron Karenga, the head of Organization US. Other accounts 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 originally insisted that the event was a planned assassination, claiming that there was a prior agreement that no guns would be brought to the meeting, that BPP members were not armed, and that Organization Us members led by Ron Karenga were. Organization Us members maintained the meeting was a spontaneous event. Former BPP deputy minister of defense Geronimo Pratt, Carter's head of security at the time, later stated 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. 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 Stiner has not been recaptured. Larry Stiner survived as a fugitive for 20 years, living in
Suriname Suriname, officially the Republic of Suriname, is a country in northern South America, also considered as part of the Caribbean and the West Indies. It is a developing country with a Human Development Index, high level of human development; i ...
. He surrendered in 1994 in order to try to negotiate help for his family suffering from turmoil in Suriname. He was immediately returned to San Quentin to serve out his life sentence. The State Department reneged on the agreement to let his family come to the U.S., saying he did not qualify as a sponsor due to being incarcerated. His children remained in precarious and impoverished circumstances for eleven years, until they were able to come to the U.S. in 2005. His wife died before she could come herself. Larry Stiner was paroled in 2015.


FBI Involvement

During the
Church Committee The Church Committee (formally the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities) was a US Senate select committee in 1975 that investigated abuses by the Central Intelligence ...
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 Organization 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.


Aftermath

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 (BSU) at UCLA was shocked and devastated by the murders. The chair of communications, Webster Moore, filled the void by reopening Campbell Hall. As the acting chair, Webster organized a Central Committee that interviewed and facilitated the hiring of a former Freedom Rider in Mississippi, Dr. Robert Singleton, as the Director of the Center for African American Studies. Singleton also became the founding Director of UCLA's Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies. As BSU Chair, Webster also served on the committee that brought
Angela Davis Angela Yvonne Davis (born January 26, 1944) is an American Marxist and feminist political activist, philosopher, academic, and author. She is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Feminist Studies and History of Consciousness at the University of ...
as the 1st Black Philosopher Professor to UCLA. The BSU, while working with the EOP, provided a channel for high school students to eventually enroll into UCLA. The first Black Student Unions were established in the participating high schools. On December 9, 1969, Webster and Angela walked together down Central Avenue to bring a halt to the massive shootout between 6 Black Panthers and over 200 police. The Panthers surrendered before they reached them, but there were no casualties. Webster Moore was later beaten unconscious at UCLA by Police during a campus demonstration against the
Kent State shootings The Kent State shootings (also known as the Kent State massacre or May 4 massacre"These would be the first of many probes into what soon became known as the Kent State Massacre. Like the Boston Massacre almost exactly two hundred years before (Ma ...
.UCLA & The Angela Davis Case-Webster E Moore Richard Held was promoted to 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 was more marginalized and officially disbanded in 1982. Bunchy Carter had a son who was born in April 1969, after Carter was murdered. His son, coincidentally, attended California State University Long Beach (1987–1992), while Ron Karenga was the chairman of the Black Studies Department.


References


Further reading

* Alex A. Alonso, Territoriality Among African-American Street Gangs in Los Angeles, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, 1999. * 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.
University Archives. Subject Files (Reference Collection)


External links



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Civil Rights Movement cemented in UCLA history
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Children of the Revolutionary
LA Weekly feature on the 1969 UCLA shootout that killed John Huggins and Bunchy Carter. * {{DEFAULTSORT:Carter, Bunchy 1942 births 1969 deaths 20th century in Los Angeles African-American history in Los Angeles Assassinated American activists COINTELPRO targets Deaths by firearm in California Members of the Black Panther Party People murdered in Los Angeles American people convicted of robbery People murdered in 1969