‘TELL IT LIKE IT IS’ Black History Series: The 1969 UCLA Shootout That Shook a Movement

Rivalry, Radical Politics and COINTELPRO: How a Deadly Campus Clash Between the Black Panther Party and the US Organization Altered the Trajectory of Black Power in Los Angeles

On January 17, 1969, a meeting inside Campbell Hall at the University of California, Los Angeles turned into one of the most consequential—and tragic—episodes of the Black Power era. What began as a debate over leadership of UCLA’s newly formed African American Studies Center ended in gunfire, leaving two prominent members of the Black Panther Party dead and exposing deep fractures within the movement for Black liberation.

The victims—Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter and John Huggins—were rising leaders in Southern California’s chapter of the Panthers. Their deaths followed escalating tensions with a rival Black nationalist group, the US Organization, founded in 1965 in the aftermath of the Watts uprising by Maulana Karenga and Hakim Abdullah Jamal.

The clash at UCLA did not occur in isolation. It unfolded amid fierce ideological competition, federal surveillance, and a broader struggle for influence within Black communities across Los Angeles and beyond.