Bunchy Carter

Alprentice Carter — known from his teens as Bunchy — was born on the twelfth of October 1942 at Los Angeles, California, the youngest of three sons of Eddie Carter and Nola Carter, both formerly tenant farmers from Holmes County, Mississippi, who had migrated to Watts in the late 1930s. He was raised in the South Central Los Angeles housing projects, was a member of the Slauson Renegades gang from his early teens, and was sentenced at twenty-one in 1963 to a four-year term at the California Men's Colony at San Luis Obispo and at Soledad State Prison for armed robbery.

He encountered George Jackson (placed in this archive) and the Black Guerrilla Family at Soledad in 1964 and across the following three years of his incarceration completed the self-education by which he transitioned from the gang life of the Slauson Renegades to the political organising he would across the remainder of his life conduct. He completed the bachelor's degree by correspondence at UCLA during his Soledad term — Soledad's correspondence-degree-by-mail programme having been one of the very few significant educational pathways then open inside California prisons.

He was paroled in November 1967 and met Huey Newton (placed in this archive) and Bobby Seale at the December 1967 founding meeting of the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panther Party. He was appointed Deputy Minister of Defense of the Southern California Black Panther Party — the founding officer of the Los Angeles chapter — and within twelve months had recruited from his Slauson Renegades network the founding cadre of the largest Black Panther chapter outside Oakland.

He enrolled at UCLA in September 1968 on a state-paid affirmative-action scholarship and was elected the first chair of the new African American studies programme student committee. The committee's first formal meeting at Campbell Hall on the eighteenth of January 1969 — at which Bunchy Carter, John Huggins and the United Slaves Organization founder Maulana Karenga were assembled to discuss the directorship of the new programme — produced the dispute that ended in the shootings of Carter and Huggins. The killers were named in the immediate aftermath as Larry Stiner, George Stiner and Claude Hubert of the United Slaves Organization. The FBI's Counterintelligence Program documents subsequently disclosed under Freedom of Information demonstrate that the Los Angeles Field Office of the FBI had during the autumn of 1968 conducted a counterintelligence operation specifically designed to provoke armed conflict between the BPP and the US Organization in Los Angeles.

He was twenty-six.

He is honored here as the founder of the Los Angeles Panthers.