Our Strength Is In Being Right.....We Shall Never Compromise that......

Ona sunny January day in 1969, a gun battle broke out during a meeting of the Black Student Union in Campbell Hall on the campus of UCLA. There was disagreement among student union members — some affiliated with the Black Panthers and others with US Organization, a rival group — about the leadership of the nascent Afro American Studies Department. Two Black Panthers members, 23-year-old John Huggins, and 26-year-old Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter were allegedly making snide remarks about the head of US, Ron Karenga when both were shot dead.

What none of them knew at the time was the FBI had all but orchestrated the event, which kicked off a year of retaliatory shootings that would claim the lives of two more Panthers.

In a 1968 memorandum to 14 field offices, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had instructed recipients to “submit imaginative and hard-hitting counter-intelligence measures aimed at crippling the BPP” within a context of “gang warfare” and “attendant threats of murder and reprisal.” In the subsequent year, the agency sent forged letters, including insulting cartoons and death threats, to leaders of both movements, instigating the dispute that erupted on UCLA’s campus.

The Black Panthers, founded in 1966, had grown to national prominence quickly. Their mission stood in stark distinction to the peaceful civil rights movement commandeered by Martin Luther King, Jr., and both their comportment and their tactics made for salacious press coverage: “Panthers emerged through the press in those days as a group of armed blacks with militant attitudes and loaded guns — something only slightly more sophisticated than a street gang,” wrote Tim Findley in Rolling Stone in 1972.