The more I learn about Bunchy Carter, his time and his family, the more parallels I see between then and now, Ferguson, Staten Island and our current movement to end racial bias and brutality under the law in this country.
Of course, the current movement is one of non-violent protest, and the Panthers were emphatically about self-defense. And the current movement is aimed at police brutality, while Bunchy Carter told Geronimo Pratt, "Hey, jive motherfucker, we defend against cops; we don’t offend. We don’t punch, we counterpunch.” And Bunchy quoted Eldridge Cleaver: “In their rage against the police, against police brutality; the blacks lose sight of the fundamental reality; that the police are only an instrument for the implementation.’"
All this clashes with my mental image of a Black Panther. You know, kind of like Shaft--Afro, Black leather jacket, dark shades, mustache, black beret, sullen-cool expression. I don't think of a child actor, who had polio as a kid, an intellectual college radical sucking in Harlem Renaissance literature along with Mao, Lenin and George William Frederick Hegel's theories of the development of the the slave-master dialectic and the relationship between immanence and transcendence while organizing and founding the three-tiered organization that was apparently the Los Angeles Black Panthers.
But all of that was, in fact, Alprentice "Bunchy" Carter, born in Shreveport, where he suffered a childhood bout of polio, and moved to Los Angeles, where his mother enrolled him in a "therapeutic" dance class, and where he acted as a child in at least one episode of The Little Rascals.
Bunchy was one of ten children. From here on in, I'm going to be talking about several Carter siblings. I mean no disrespect when I'm refer to them by first names, for clarity.
Bunchy's oldest sibling, Bernie Carter, shown here with film-maker Gregory Everett, (son of another Black Panther and director of the documentary Forty-first and Central, the Untold Story of the Los Angeles Black Panthers, spoke in 2010 with Jasmyne A. Cannick, a reporter for The Front Page Online, a Culver City, CA newspaper. In that interview, Bernie, a retired engineer, explains how his mother and step-dad had just broken up, and mother, Nola Carter, was worried about her children, asking Bernie to try to be there for Bunchy. Bunchy was already in the Slauson Renegades, a gang. He had just graduated from Fremont High School and was working at an upscale department store downtown on Wilshire. He had climbed the ranks of leadership at the gang, and became a leader there.
One day, Bunchy came home with his brothers, John and Glen, all excited about the Nation of Islam. The boys declared "No more pork!" His big brother, Bernie, laughed about it in 2010:
“It drove my mother insane. Here she was trying to feed a family of 10 on a limited budget where there was no room to be selective about what was for dinner. It was utter chaos.”
“Bunchy was a partygoer, a ladies man, what young people now call a player." says Bernie. Carter. “In 1961, Bunchy wanted a car. 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. Finally, we settled on a 1956 red and black MG. At the time, he was just enjoying living life. When he got that car, you couldn’t touch Bunchy with a 10-foot pole,” he chuckles.
“Sometime after that, Bunchy was sent to Soledad Prison for attempting to rob a Security Pacific Bank. He 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 teen posts. She got Bunchy involved in one of the teen posts at Central and Nadeau. That’s where Bunchy met Caffee Greene and Nate Holden because they were also involved with those programs. At the time, they were working with Supervisor Hahn."
Elaine Huggins, an early Panther member and the widow of John Huggins, murdered in the same incident as Bunchy, tells the story a little bit differently. "We had heard about Bunchy Carter, but we couldn't find him. And when we found, when we did find him, we found out that he was still in jail from some gang rap. And he declared that when he returned, he'd be totally committed to the party."
(Here is Panther Charles Bursey feeding kids in the free breakfast program.)
But back to Bernie Carter's memories of his little brother.
“From that, all of a sudden, all I know is he’s in this organization called the Black Panthers. He begins traveling back and forth up north. He had formed a kinship with Bobby [Seale], David [Hilliard], and Eldridge [Cleaver]. Initially, I thought it was just another gang.”
Nola Carter was terrified. She told Bernie that as the older brother, he was responsible for setting an example for his brothers. Bernie thought the Black Panthers were just another gang. Bernie was worried about what Panther membership would do to his mother.
“Bunchy sat me
down. He explained his reasons for joining the Black Panthers,” Bernie said.
“He said he was tired of being oppressed.
“You have to understand that
Bunchy, he didn’t have the same fear I had. He was a very proud, strong
young man.
“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. 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, 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 UCLA.” (in a Rivalry between an African-American nationalist group called US--United Slaves and the Black Panthers, that was encouraged and exacerbated by J.Edgar Hoover's disinformation campaign, COINTEL-Pro.
More to come. . .
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.
