Before Black Lives Matter--Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter's mother, and the long-term neglect of Watts.

Before there was Black Lives Matter, there was Rodney King, in the first beaten of an African American man caught on new technology. When his four police assailants were acquitted  there were riots. 

And before that, in 1965 in response to earlier police brutality, there were the Watts Riots, a six-day-long civil rights riot, with rioters burning a good part of this middle and lower class African-American community of Watts. 

When we talk about how the inner city should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, I think we have to consider this, from an opinion piece in the LA Times, by Randy Holland, titled, "What About the Plan?" In the article, he interviews Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter's mother, Nola Carter, then in her seventies. Out of ten children, Nola lost Bunchy and his little brother Arthur (Glen) to violence and one child to the penitentiary, where he is, at the moment, leading a hunger strike. Here is Nola, talking about her community in that article: 

"One of the people I met in South-Central after the riots was Mrs. Nola Carter, who is the mother of Alprentice (Bunchy) Carter, who started the L.A. chapter of the Black Panthers in the 1960s. He was assassinated at UCLA by a rival black power organization, which I knew nothing about. It took me into an investigation of the role of the FBI and the LAPD in undermining the black community, which is a shocking but was very well-documented in government hearings in the 1970s by the Church Commission.

Bunchy Carter's mother said I should go look for the 25-year plan. I said, "What's the 25-year plan?" She said, "We have Rebuild LA now. After the 1965 riots they had the 25-year plan." It came out in 1967 and 25 years later we didn't have peace or social justice. Instead, we had another riot.

She took me out on a street corner, 79th and Central, and said, "I remember they showed us plans for the new community. There was supposed to be a park at 79th and Central." It was just a liquor store. She said, "They showed us a model of what the community was going to look like and there were no African American people in that model. It was all white mothers pushing their babies."

That got me started on this 25-year plan. What happened in 1965 that laid a fire bed for 1992? I went to the city archives and the plan is missing. There's a file card there but you can't find the plan. Then I went into City Council records and looked up the elements of the plan. You can still find them in notes of the City Council meetings. And sure enough, at 79th and Central there was supposed to be a park. And Gage Avenue and Main Street, and 108th Street and Main, and numerous other locations. I went to four or five of them and there was not one park or rec center.

So this became the basis of an investigation into how the city was not only neglected but sabotaged, either consciously or unconsciously, by the system. In some ways it was conscious, like the out-and-out sabotage of cultural organizations like the Watts Writers Workshop, which started in the wake of the '65 riots. It brought together creative elements of the community--writers, directors, dancers--and created this incredible performance space and beehive of cultural activity, which was infiltrated by the FBI and the LAPD. The sabotage was so thorough that the FBI, after the hearings by the Church Commission, publicly apologized.

The workshop was empowering the community, and when a community is empowered it coalesces. Diverse groups come together and they form a base of power. And that base of power can question policy decisions. Take the Century Freeway. It cuts through a wide swath of South-Central that was really the cultural nexus of the inner city. It was the center of a community, this long strip that was taken by eminent domain. If a community is strong and groups are together, they can fight those things. But if they're in disarray and fighting each other, they can't come together and question policy and authority.

The community was being undermined for economic reasons, and that's still happening. The land in South-Central is prime real estate. Nearby you have the Port of Long Beach, you have Downtown, you have the airport. It tops the Westside in investment opportunity because you can buy it so cheap. If you can get a block, and when something like the Alameda Corridor train project comes through from Long Beach to Los Angeles--whoever owns that land is going to make out very well.

When the Black Panther Party came into power--I'm not saying they were Boy Scouts--they had an empowerment aspect to them. They were providing breakfast programs and education programs and testing children for sickle-cell anemia and myriad of other programs, and that had to be stopped. So there was systematic elimination of the Panther leadership.

More about Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter--from a website

This is from another blog: http://www.jasmyneacannick.com, and an interview with Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter's big brother, Bernie Morris, 76, the oldest of ten children of Nola Carter. Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter, was a former leader of Southern California Chapter of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense who was murdered at U.C.L.A.’s Campbell Hall in 1969, recently viewed the film at a private screening for the first time.  

A retired engineer, Mr. Morris, who now lives in Carson, Calif., is the first member of the Carter family to watch the film that features first hand accounts as told by the original surviving Black Panther members of Bunchy Carter and John Huggins’ murders.

“Powerful, dynamic—the film rekindled a lot of old emotions,” explains Mr. Morris.  “I remember by brother sitting me down and explaining to me who this group called the Black Panthers were.  After our mother and our stepfather split up and with me being the oldest brother, my mother looked to me for support in guiding my younger brothers.  I was expected to lead by example.  I remember thinking that the Panthers were just another gang that he was involved in and worried about the effect it was going to have on our mother.”

From the Los Angeles Sentinel: Bernie Morris, 73, speaks with "Gregory Everett" about the 1969 murder of his brother, Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter, former leader of the Southern California Panther Party for Self Defense. 

Prior to joining the Black Panthers, Bunchy Carter, a graduate of Freemont High School was the leader of the Slauson Renegades, a local Los Angeles gang.  After graduating high school, Bunchy began working for an upscale department store in downtown Los Angeles on Wilshire.

Laughing he recalls, I remember my first introduction to the Nation of Islam was when Bunchy, and our brothers John and Glen came into the house one day and declared ‘no more pork!’  It drove my mother insane.  Here she was trying to feed a family of ten on a limited budget where there was no room to be selective about what was for dinner.  It was utter chaos.”

“Bunchy was a party goer, a ladies man—what young people now call a player,” remembers Mr. Carter.  “In 1961, Bunchy wanted a car and so one day he came to me and asked me if I would co-sign on a car for him.  We looked for a car for a couple weeks and finally settled on a 1956 red and black MGB. At the time, he was just enjoying living life.  When he got that car, you couldn’t touch Bunchy with a ten foot pole,” he chuckles.

“Sometime after that, Bunchy was sent to Soledad Prison for attempting to rob a Security Pacific Bank and was there for four years.  He came out two years after the Watts Riots ended and there were all these programs being started.  Our mother was involved with a program call N.A.P. and they had these teen posts.  She got Bunchy involved in one of the teen posts on Central and Nadeau.  That’s where Bunchy met Caffee Greene and Nate Holden because they were also involved with those programs at the time working with Supervisor Hahn.”

“From that all of a sudden all I know is he’s in this organization called the Black Panthers and traveling back and forth up north.  He had formed a kinship with Bobby [Seal], David [Hilliard], and Eldridge [Cleaver].  Initially, I thought it was just another gang.”

Mr. Carter explains that their mother, Nola Carter, now 93, was feeling anguish and worried about Bunchy’s well being and that being the older brother, it was up to Mr. Carter to find out exactly what was going on and what this group called the Panthers was all about.

“Bunchy sat me down and explained his reasons for joining the Black Panthers,” he continues.  “He said he was tired of being oppressed.”

“You have to understand that Bunchy, he didn’t have the same fear that I had.  He was a very proud strong young man, and by this time, he had been arrested and incarcerated—whereas a person like me who had not been involved in any of that kind of stuff was scared.  There were certain values that our mother instilled in me as the oldest brother.  Like Bunchy, I had a role to play in our family and he had his.  The bottom line was that I knew something bad was going to happen because I knew my brother felt strongly about the injustices that were happening to black people at the time.  But it was his destiny to fulfill and I was concerned with making sure it had as small an impact as possible on our mother.”

In March of 1968, Arthur (Glen) Morris, brother of Bernie and Bunchy Carter and Bunchy’s first bodyguard, was shot and killed on 111th between Normandie and Vermont Avenues.  He was the first member of the Black Panther Party to be killed.

“When Glen died things really started to changed,” Mr. Carter explains.  “Almost a year after Glen’s death Bunchy and John [Huggins] were murdered at U.C.L.A.”  A murder that is still unsolved today.

I gather that's where Aquarius takes over, pawing over Glen's murder. I would guess this is going to bring up a lot of pain for the Carter family. I'm sure they are a strong family. I hope they find a good way to deal with this. 

More about Bunchy Carter, singer, poet, dancer, child actor, scholar, intellectual, revolutionary. And Acquarius. . .

You know I've written a bit about Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter, a complicated young man who was assassinated in 1969 at UCLA. I stopped writing because I ran out of further information about him.

In the meantime, NBC began a TV series, "Aquarius," about a white detective in Los Angeles that stumbles into Mr. Carter and the Black Panthers in Los Angeles. I have not yet seen the series, so I don't know how Mr. Carter is handled, and I have heard that his family is not happy with his treatment. I'll have to take a look.

I'm more interested in Mr. Carter as a person, and I learned something new about him today: he was  a poet and a singer. Elaine Brown wrote that the Panthers sometimes sang together. "John (Huggins) sang bass to my contralto and Bunchy's falsetto, and that he was a great dancer. This makes sense in some ways--like Doris Day, he suffered childhood polio and his mother enrolled in "therapeutic" dance classes to try to strengthen his limbs.

Bunchy worked at a department store on Wilshire and had a job working at the Teen Post in Los Angeles, for a woman named Caffee Greene. Her son, Raymond Nat Turner (Black Agenda Report's poet-in-residence), says, "Yeah, I heard Bunchy sing Stevie" "I'm Wondering," and "I Was Made To Love Her," and I used to hear Tommy (Lewis) play piano at the Teen Post my mom directed. It was also fun to watch Bunchy dance--Philly Dog, Jerk & Twine . . . a lil' 'Bitter Dog' with the Philly Dog ever once in a while. . . "Bepop Santa From the Cool North Pole. "Black Mother" were also great to hear."

Bunchy Carter, singer, poet, dancer, child actor in the Little Rascals, felon, scholar, intellectual and revolutionary. Like I said, a complicated young man. Too bad he didn't

From Bigotry to Self-Hatred: Martin Luther King and J. Edgar Hoover

One of the saddest things I have ever read was Martin Luther King making love with a mistress, as recorded by J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover, according to Taylor Branch, in volume Two of his King, like JFK, used womanizing as an anxiety reducer. One night in January 1964, in a Washington Hotel, Hoover recorded King shouting: "I'm f***ing for God. I'm not a negro tonight."

This is sad on so many levels, and I'm not talking about King's infidelity. First, of course, that King--a great man, a great soul, even if ever there was a great soul-- had so internalized our society's contempt for people of color, that self-hatred slipped out in a moment of intense intimacy.

Second, that J. Edgar Hoover so despised Martin Luther King that Hoover gleefully recorded King's private business.

The third point goes to J. Edgar Hoover's self-loathing.

 

We all know by now that Hoover was, if not an active homosexual, he was certainly one in his heart. His most intense relationship after his mother's death when he was 43. (he lived with her until then) was Clyde Tolsen, shown here on the left. Clyde was the FBI's number two man. For forty years, Tolsen and Hoover worked together, vacationed together, ate lunch together--often dressed in identical suits. Tolsen inherited Hoover's estate, and at their deaths, they were buried side by side.

According to Millie McGhee, though Hoover had another secret. McGhee, author of Secrets Uncovered, has worked with genealogists to under evidence that Hoover's family was "passing" for white.  "Not all slave masters abused their slaves-- Some actually treated them like family and bore children by them, like the Mississippi plantation owner, William Hoover. He had eight children by my Great Grandmother, Elizabeth Allen. One of those children was my Grandfather William Allen, and one was his brother, Ivery Hoover, who later had one son, J. Edgar."

McGhee's book, subtitled, "J. Edgar Hoover, Passing For White?" represents deep research into the strong oral tradition that J. Edgar Hoover's family were of mixed race, and had crossed the color line.


Apparently there were rumors within the city going pretty far back. In the 1930's, when Gore Vidal, was growing up in D.C., "Hoover was becoming famous, and it was always said of him--in my family and around the city--that he was mulatto. People said he came from a family that had "passed." It was the word they used for people of black origin, who, after generations of interbreeding, have enough white blood to pass themselves off as white.  That's what was always said about Hoover." (Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential, The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover, 1993.)

Wesley Swearingen, a former FBI Special Agent, from 1951 to 1977) said that Hoover's lack of a documented heritage was a mystery among FBI agents. Swearingen, who was the author of FBI Secrets: An Agent's Expose, said, "Because for all the FBI agents, they'd go back and check everything about your family, your relatives, and everything else, to make sure that they're squeaky clean. And here, the Director, and nobody knows really where he came from." Swearingen goes on:
Agents would get into topics like that where they were on surveillance or something, when they finished the crossword puzzle and had nothing else to do, and they'd start talking about Hoover. . .all the agents would get onto the subject of his real tight hair, his tight, wiry hair, and speculation that maybe there was a little hanky-panky in his family. . . and then his facial characteristics were really unusual."

There is even indication that Hoover's Dickerson and  Naylor ancestors, through his paternal grandfather, were involved in a post-Civil War unground railroad of their own, used to help light-skinned blacks make the transition into white society. (Not that unusual, as some academic studies show that at least 23% of white Americans have an African-American element in their background.)

Hoover had a tough childhood, it seems. His father, (or unknowingly cuckolded stand-in for a father, according to McGhee) suffered from a mental illness that, in 1913, (when Hoover was 18) was described symptomatically as: withdrawal, long silences, erratic fears. From then until his death. Dickerson Naylor Hoover was in and out of a sanitarium, never recovering enough to hold down a job. And J. Edgar himself is described in earlier childhood as suffering from what sounds like severe separation anxiety.

One thing is certain, though. Hoover detested people of color, particularly successful ones.
Starting in 1919, he used lies and slander to arrest, attack and destroy Marcus Garvey. He was ruthless in his persecution of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. Under his rule, the FBI refused to have "niggers," as he called them. When King was murdered, the Atlanta FBI office rang with cries of, "They got the SOB." 38 of those who were targeted by Hoover died under suspicious circumstances, including Black Panthers Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter and  John Huggins, who were murdered by a member of a rival Black group in a fight that recently released Cointel Pro papers indicate was intentionally sparked by Hoover's minions.

So, here, thanks to one self-hating man, Hoover, we have a record of internalized hatred within another man, one I just hate to think of as self-hating. Yes, King gets to be human. I do not need him to be a plaster saint.

And for that matter, Hoover also winds up as human as they come, the gay man who could not think of himself as gay and the black man terrified of, and therefore furious about, anything to do with blackness.

J. Edgar Hoover and the Black Panther Party--background for the life of Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter

This is a photo of Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter, (1942-1969) who died at the age of 26 in a shoot out at UCLA. 

Yup. It was a shoot-out at Campbell Hall, in the Black Student Union, during a meeting to create a balanced faculty in the African-American studies department. 

I have looked hard for background on Alprentice. I know he was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, and at some point, moved to Los Angeles, probably as a child. In the late fifties, he became a member of a Slauson street gang, then moved up to the Slauson Renegades, the inner circle of that gang. Ultimately, he was the leader of the Slausons, which had, at that time, over 5,000 members. He was known in those days as the Mayor of the Ghetto. 

Then, he was sentenced to four years for armed robbery. Sent to Soledad, he was exposed to the teachings of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam and he converted, but after his release in 1963--he was twenty-one--he met Huey Newton, one of the founders of the Black Panthers, left Islam, and instead joined the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. 

It's important here to try to lay some groundwork for inner city Northern blacks in the early sixties. Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, (SCLC) the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, (SNCC) etc., were still focused on the Jim Crow South, where blacks had been subjugated legally since the end of slavery, it was nearly impossible for them to vote, and lynchings were status quo. 

In Northern Cities, the issues were different. People of color were kept packed in isolated neighborhoods, by landlords who refused to rent to you, realtors who refused to sell homes in white neighborhoods and communities who might literally blow your house up or burn it down if you moved in. If you managed to buy a home you usually could not take out loans, as white residents of their town did, in order to improve that house, because banks had redlines drawn on their maps around Black neighborhood and refused to give loans. As for jobs--most unions were just beginning to let you be a member, which still put you in the last hired first fired role, and other than union jobs, you were often restricted to low-paying labor. 

Add to that the police department, which was staffed by people who had been raised to be racist, like most of the rest of the white population at the time. We've all been learning about how white people in general and police officers in particular frequently mis-read African-Americans as huge and impossibly dangerous (If you're interested in teasing out some of your own biases, you can take some interesting tests online at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/research/) That was obviously true in the past as well, and in Oakland and in Los Angeles, as in many other parts of the north, people in what were then called Negro neighborhoods were used to being roughed up by the police, if not killed by them. 

When we moved to South Central Los Angeles, we heard story after story from our neighbors about police brutality they had and continue to experience. This was eye-opening to me, who had been raised in white suburbia, at a time when Jews were beginning to be considered white. I had been taught that the police officer was my friend, someone to turn to if I were lost, someone who would probably give me ice-cream while I waited for my mama to come and rescue me. 

Then, I heard our neighborhood stories, and I witnessed it myself--a police officer harassing our neighbor who was walking the dogs with us one night after having us over for dinner, and multiple officers profoundly and repeatedly harassing a beloved teenaged neighbor in a way that frightened us so deeply that it was part of why we moved. I became deeply aware that my childhood ideas were not--and still are not--the usual experience for children of color, who often see the adults around them humiliated or handled brutally by police--much like Jews in Eastern Europe even before Hitler, where men were routinely humiliated in front of their families, with no kind of practical recourse, since resistance meant death, rape for their women folk, etc. (Although not resisting might lead to the same results.) 

Martin Luther King was a great leader. And he was pushed forward by impatient young men and women of SNNC. And he was both pushed and supported by an army of mostly unmentioned women who forced, organized and publicized on the ground the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The South's non-violent protests proved highly effective, largely because of this mountain of planning, the support of LBJ, who was a passionate racial activist president and consummate bully politician, and the aforementioned great inspiration of MLK's leadership--though none of that would have made a difference if not for the fact that television brought Southern Brutality into the homes of millions of white Americans, as it was their shamed awareness that allowed change to come. 

But members of SNNC, reeling from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, were already growing impatient with the slow pace of social change and Huey Newton and Bobby Seale and the Black Panther party had already chosen a more in-your-face approach when Martin Luther King finally turned his eyes to the poverty of northern cities, just before he was assassinated. They founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and they scared the heck out of white America. Armed with Marxist rhetoric as well as bristling with guns, they told the world they were tired of being roughed up by the police, and would fight fire with fire to defend their own. The Panthers were rooted in Marxist ideology and inspired by the liberation theories of countries around the world, especially South and Central America and Africa. They studied law, started schools, free breakfasts for poor children, but they also "shadowed" police officers, carrying the California Penal code and toting shot guns. 

And that will have to be that, for today. Next time--I hope to get to Ronald Reagan throwing all his political weight--you won't believe this-- in support of gun control. 

Excavating the jumble of history--Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter, the Black Panthers in Los Angeles in the 1960's, and J. Edgar Hoover.

There are plenty of places where history has gotten the truth very wrong. Fiction can help with that or hinder it. Shakespeare's deliciously villainous hunchback may have destroyed the reputation of Richard III for all time, while Josephine Tey's marvelous murder mystery, Daughter of Time, probably converted more people to Richard III the good king, Henry VII, the sidewise crab little prince murderer than anybody else, though versions are still being written that have our Dickon III plotting against one brother, drowning another and delighting in slaying his golden-haired nephews.

I fear that it will take a lot to undo the shabby history of The Other Boleyn Girl (sorry, Ms. Gregory, I have enjoyed reading your books, but your history is whacked on this one, and frankly, I have no idea how you created a timorous, trembling virgin out of the young woman whom the French King and his courtiers previously called "The English Mare," because she had been "ridden" so often.)

When I was researching the vast canvas of The Color of Safety, I found people who I felt had been neglected by history or where we have gotten things plain wrong, or where, as I find myself often saying these days, "It's complicated." Much mores than the current historical record--and even more, our collective memories-- would have us believe.

I was talking Tuesday with a gifted writer/film producer friend, Lorie Marsh (http://forward-marsh-go.tumblr.com). Lorie, who knows how to inspire, stared straight at me, called me an academic (which I am not) and said I should blog about my research for The Color of Safety.

I have to run right now, but next time, I will write more about a young man named Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter, the head of the L.A. street gang, The Renegades, known as The Mayor of the Ghetto. Carter is complicated, woven in collective memory into the tangles of J. Edgar Hoover's misinformation and subversion campaign, "COINTELPRO." I am eager to begin to set the record straight about Bunchy Carter, a man who was murdered young, but not before trying to create positive change in South Central Los Angeles.