How Wrong We Were

It happened just inside the cafeteria doorway: a heated argument, some profane words, a tussle between four angry young men. The first shot silenced the revolutionary chatter. More shots rang out as frightened students scrambled for cover, leaving me wounded in the shoulder and two Black Panthers dead on the floor of UCLA’s Campbell Hall, room 1201.

It’s been 40 years since the January 17, 1969, shootout that took the lives of Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter and John Jerome Huggins. I’ve spent the majority of my adult life in San Quentin prison because of the events of that day.

I was 20 years old at the time, a student awaiting placement in UCLA’s High Potential program as a political science major. But perhaps more importantly I was a member of Kwanzaa-founder Maulana Karenga’s black revolutionary organization “Us.” Formed in the wake of the Watts riots in 1966, Us had been, for years, the rising vanguard organization of the black revolutionary struggle in Los Angeles. Karenga, a cum laude graduate from UCLA with Ph.D.s in political science and social ethics, had earned the attention of The New York Times as the “leading black nationalist” in Los Angeles.

My initial involvement with Us was purely accidental. In 1966, as an angry 18-year-old man, I inadvertently stumbled on Karenga and the first ever Kwanzaa celebration at the Aquarian Bookstore in South Central.

It was the crowd that first caught my attention – multicolored African attire, shiny bald heads and clusters of beautifully defiant afros. I stopped to investigate and was immediately greeted and invited inside. Only several years removed from living in segregated Houston, Texas, forced to drink from the “colored” water fountain, I’d never had such an exhilarating experience among so many African-Americans.

Back in Houston my father was a college professor – a Ph.D. in mathematics and a World War II veteran. But he was driven to alcoholism by the accumulated weight of years of racial prejudice, and his depression and abuse tore our family apart. My mother eventually left him, taking her five children to Watts. I was 10 years old at the time.

Though I didn’t face the same kind of racial discrimination in Watts as I did in Houston, life wasn’t easy. I was considered an outsider and was often followed home and beaten up by the street-hardened neighborhood kids. But that night at the Aquarian, after years of struggling to fit in, I finally felt like I belonged somewhere. I left the celebration with rich feelings of racial pride and joined the Us organization shortly after, along with my wife and my brother, Sikia.

On Sunday evenings I began attending “soul sessions,” in which Karenga expounded on various aspects of Kawaida, his theory of black cultural and social change. We studied black history and Swahili and practiced martial arts. Many of the men shaved their heads and grew Fu Manchu mustaches. We were taught self-determination, self-respect, self-defense and to prepare for the urban guerilla war that was to be waged in America. Karenga was able to articulate our deepest rage. He envisioned Us as the leading edge of a black revolutionary movement.

Another group, however, had a differ-ent idea.

By 1968, the Black Panther Party, led by Deputy Minister of Defense for Southern California Bunchy Carter, had made their way south from Oakland and established themselves as a force in Los Angeles’s black revolutionary struggle.

At first the Panthers and Us coexisted relatively peacefully. In early 1968, Karenga hosted a “free Huey” rally in support of Black Panther Huey Newton, who was in prison on charges of murdering an Oakland police officer. Karenga shared the platform with Panthers H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichael and Carter, among others. Soon after, however, ideological conflicts between the two groups emerged that threatened our cooperation. Panthers taunted Us members about our African-style clothes, use of Swahili and the emphasis we placed on culture. Us members responded by referring to Panthers as domesticated “pussy cats.” Many in Us, myself included, felt the Panthers were undisciplined, too reliant on wealthy, white supporters and borrowed too heavily from Karl Marx and Mao’s Little Red Book.

Later that year, these intellectual tensions gave way to more menacing behavior.

UCLA became a hotbed of conflict between the two organizations, both of whom were vying for student allegiance and directorship of a newly minted Black Studies department. Intimidation was a common ploy of both groups. Anonymous phone calls and rumors of targeted assassination plots began to circulate as the feud intensified.

Several of these calls were directed toward my mother. Most were from a strange man who warned her about the violent end my brother and I were about to meet. Only a few weeks before the UCLA shooting, a woman called and told my mother, “You’re going to have to bury your sons soon.”

Unbeknownst to both Us and the Panthers, the FBI was taking a keen interest in this dispute. On November 25, 1968, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover issued a memo concerning Us/Panther hostility, speculating on how the bureau could “capitalize” and “exploit” these differences in order to cripple the black power movement. How much of the hostility between Us and the Panthers was externally induced by the FBI’s COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) is still unknown.

Initially, the black students of UCLA weren’t overly concerned with the partisanship over who would head the Black Studies department. Their chief concern and expectation was that the person was black, culturally conscious and committed to developing a curriculum that reflected the history and community interest of black people.

But as relations between Us and the Panthers deteriorated further, the conflict became impossible to ignore. A core of nonpartisan black students initially tried to mediate between the groups, but grew frustrated as outside events, like the sinister phone calls, prevented any kind of reconciliation.

Uncommitted students who wanted to be a part of the black studies program eventually found themselves forced to pick sides. An appearance at UCLA by Us founder Karenga on January 15, 1969, failed to resolve matters. In fact, Karenga’s presence on campus only served to exacerbate the tension. Many students, and especially the Black Panthers, felt like he was using his stature to take control of the program, and resented him for it.

That meeting proved to be the tipping point, the final stone in an accumulating pile of perceived slights.

Another gathering was scheduled for January 17, for all black students to consider a resolution to the Us/Panther conflict, and to agree upon a criteria for the Black Studies program. Approximately 200 people attended the meeting, held in the cafeteria area of Campbell Hall, home of UCLA’s ethnic organizations.

Both the Panthers and Us came well armed for the occasion.

No surprise, the meeting was heated. As a member of the Sim-ba Wachanga, Us’s paramilitary unit, I was assigned to work security for the event. After two hours of debate without reaching consensus, we adjourned around 2:30 p.m. Just as people began to leave, Us member Harold Jones, a fellow Simba Wachanga whom we called Tawala, abandoned his security post to confront Black Panther (and future Green Party presidential candidate) Elaine Brown in the hallway outside the cafeteria. Though I wasn’t able to see what transpired between them, Brown says in her autobiography that Tawala told her, “You need to watch what you say, sister.” Brown asserts that she tried to brush it off as insignificant, but Bunchy Carter, who had observed the exchange, became enraged.

After his confrontation with Brown, Tawala reentered the room and returned to the security post he should never have left. Directly behind him, just outside the doorway, a group of Panthers gathered in the hallway. Several tam-wearing Panthers, including Albert Armour and a few others, carried suspicious-looking briefcases.

I was standing about 15 feet away when a loud, bitter argument suddenly erupted over by the doorway. Several students moved away from the verbal confrontation, clearing the way for me to see Bunchy pulling feverishly on Tawala’s coat as John Huggins and Armour unleashed a flurry of downward blows to his head. Immediately, I abandoned a conversation I was having with (future Ebonics pioneer) Toni Cook and hurried over to assist Tawala. But before I could reach them, a loud “Fuck you!” broke through the air, followed almost simultaneously by an even louder blast of a gun. Either by accident or to scare Tawala, Huggins’s gun had gone off.

I quickly dropped behind a table that had been knocked over during the scramble for cover. Eerie screams of terror and the sound of shattering glass sent chills throughout my body. Although some of the students managed to get through the door and out of the cafeteria, most remained frozen with fear, trapped inside. Several females, including Cook and Muminia Azizi, managed to make their way to a small room at the back of the cafeteria and disappeared behind a closed door. My brother Sikia, who was also working security for Us, was nowhere to be seen and I feared he’d been shot.

It was only after Huggins discharged his weapon, sending the crowd of about 75 remaining students into a frantic state of panic, that I saw Us member Claude Hubert (Chochezi) step inside the doorway, directly behind the three Black Panthers scuffling with Tawala, and fire his gun.

Five consecutive shots rang out before a brief lull in the chaos. Easing my head from behind the upturned table, I saw Tawala lying silently on the floor. I assumed he had been shot.

More bullets flew and Bunchy leapt over some chairs with his gun drawn in a desperate attempt to evade Chochezi’s aim and to avoid the volley of random shots being fired by Huggins. Armour fled the room as Bunchy finally fell to the floor.

Still behind the table, I was trapped as shots continued to fly all around me. In my attempt to move to a safer spot, I suddenly felt a burning sensation in my shoulder that cut through my courage. I had been hit. Pain and fear became indistinguishable in my mind. Though I was prepared to die a revolutionary’s death, this was not a revolutionary cause. This was gang warfare.

By the time I’d reached Tawala, who was frozen with fear on the floor, the shooting had subsided. I commanded him to “angulia” (attention), then screamed at him to “get the fuck up!” Chochezi stood nearby, covering the room with his gun, until Tawala finally snapped out of his trance and got up. The three of us ran from the cafeteria and down the hallway. My brother was left behind.

Later that evening, we learned that police had arrived at Campbell Hall about 10 minutes after the shots were fired. They found only Bunchy and John, both dead on the floor.

Bunchy Carter and I had a history that went back long before we were drawn to opposing revolutionary organizations. We were in rival street gangs in South Central.

I was a “Gladiator” from the west side, Bunchy a “Slauson” from the east side. Most Slausons had initially joined the Black Panther Party (whose headquarters were located in Slauson territory) while a majority of Gladiators became Us “advocates” or joined the Simba Wachanga.

It is perhaps important to note that the so-called “gangs” of the late ’50s and early ’60s cannot be compared to today’s gangs with their random and careless disregard for human life. Crack cocaine and automatic weapons had not yet been dumped into the marginalized black cities of America, destroying whole families and communities. Although there were occasional shootings and some stabbings, the primary mode of violence in South Central at that time was free-for-all gang fights, one-on-one fisticuffs, and a gang whipping if you got caught in the wrong neighborhood at the wrong time. Those encounters usually resulted in a “lesson” – rarely deaths. Still, the formation of gangs created a competitive rivalry amongst groups who really had much in common – a factor which would play out tragically on that fateful day at UCLA.

Following the shootings, Elaine Brown, Geronimo Pratt, and several other Panthers returned to their homes and began hauling their weapons away. Before they could finish, the police arrived, arrested 17 Panthers and confiscated armaments that included a homemade bomb, shotguns and pistols. Police claimed their search was about preventing retaliation for the shooting. On the face of it, this seems like a logical justification. But when you take into account an FBI memo from two months earlier (made public since the shooting), urging police to “capitalize upon BPP and Us differences,” one must wonder.

Five men were indicted for the killings of Bunchy Carter and John Huggins – myself, Sikia, Chochezi, Tawala, and Donald Hawkins. While Chochezi and Tawala went underground and made their way out of the country, Hawkins, my brother and I surrendered shortly after the warrants for our arrest were issued. The indictment alleged not only murder, but conspiracy to commit murder. Sikia and I felt confident there was no direct evidence that we had conspired to do anything, much less commit murder. It was a spontaneous shootout, and we assumed that since we hadn’t had a direct role in the violence that no Black Panther would testify against us.

How wrong we were.

Nine Black Panthers, including Brown and Armour, testified that my brother and I carried weapons to the meeting that day. And, because I arrived with and left the scene in a car with Chochezi and Tawala, Deputy District Attorney Stephen Trott was able to include us in his conspiracy theory. At the end of the dramatic trial, three of us were convicted of two counts of second-degree murder, one count of conspiracy to commit murder, and possession of firearms on campus. While Hawkins was sent to Youth Authority, my brother and I were sentenced to life in prison.

Sikia and I survived numerous attempts on our lives in prison. Fearing our luck might eventually run out, we both escaped from San Quentin in 1974 and fled to South America. I wound up in Suriname, leaving my two young sons Larry and Lionel behind with their mother in South Central.

I had always been a father on the run, never settling down long enough to be there for, or enjoy, the company of my children. For me it was always the bigger picture: the organization, the ideology and the revolution, which took precedence over everything else. But in the heart of Suriname, things changed. I started a new life. I found love with a woman named Nisha, and fathered six children. I became more concerned with saving my children than I was with saving the world. Perhaps it was my advancing age or the veiled cynicism I had acquired for leaders and governments – with their lofty promises and repression – that compelled me to narrow the perimeters of my revolution to that of my family. For years, we scratched out a meager existence in the Surinamese bush – poor but together. But in 1994, with crushing poverty, disease, and violent political turmoil all around us, I decided to turn myself in to the American embassy so that my children could emigrate to America and have a chance at a better life.

I am still being held captive in San Quentin on a 40-year-old conspiracy conviction. Sikia’s whereabouts are unknown. Although there is ample documented evidence that the FBI and the LAPD conspired to fan the flames of internecine violence between Us and the Panthers, no government agency or official has ever been charged, tried or convicted. LAPD chief William Bratton’s office recently sent a letter to my parole board, falsely accusing me of “murdering two victims by shooting them with a firearm for unknown reasons.” Of course I’d never shot anyone, yet Bratton claims that I would pose an “unreasonable risk to society” were I to be released from prison.

By no means is this an attempt to make light of what happened at UCLA on January 17, 1969. There is no justification for this senseless act of the past. What began as an Us/Panther ideological difference turned into a competitive dispute over which organization had the “right” to be the vanguard of the revolution. This conflict quickly escalated, creating the internal basis for COINTELPRO’s penetration and disruption of both organizations.

The violence between Us and the Panthers didn’t stop after UCLA. Two more Panthers were killed by Us members in 1969, while several other shootings and bombings were carried out by both organizations. In San Diego, Black Panther John Savage was shot and killed by Us’s Jerry “Tambuzi” Horne. Meanwhile, the home of Us vice-chairman James “Tayari” Doss was riddled with bullets on the night of March 17.

In all critical honesty, I can cry foul on the role of the U.S. government in the conflict and be fully justified in doing so. But history demands that we must also be willing to criticize ourselves, apologize to the victims and their families, and accept a portion of the blame. It is my belief that the violent example set forth by the Us/Panther conflict in Los Angeles helped create a vacuum in the black community that ushered into existence the era of Bloods and Crips.

Now living in South Los Angeles, with their father in prison and gang warfare all around them, my Surinamese children are faced with this brutal, unintended consequence of the Us/Black Panther revolutionary feud. The seeds of death and destruction always linger beneath the surface of all acts of violence, destined to re-emerge under new conditions and under new circumstances.

In San Quentin, I’m now looked up to by the younger generation as an “OG” – original gangster. Every day I see the lost souls of our troubled youth – the holes in their spirits and the yearnings for the broken fathers who have abandoned them. I pray they aren’t mirrors of what my own children will become.