L.A. Black Panthers focus of film
Screening today
The UCLA Black Graduate Student Association is among the groups hosting a viewing of the movie “41st & Central,” the Untold Story of the L.A. Black Panthers” tonight at 6 p.m. in the De Neve Auditorium on campus.
The event is free, and refreshments will be served. A forum, discussion featuring director Gregory Everett will immediately follow the screening. For more information, contact misterdenman@gmail.com.
According to the film web site, “41st & Central” is the first part in a documentary series that follows the Southern California chapter of the Black Panther Party from its glorious Black power beginnings through to its tragic demise. Despite the party’s formation of free medical clinics and a successful breakfast program for children, the L.A. chapter was also known as the most violent Black political group in the United States.
The movie explores the Black Panther ethos, its conflict with the Los Angeles Police Department and the US Organization, as well as the events that shaped the complicated and often contradictory legacy of the L.A. chapter.
The film contains interviews with former Black Panther Party members along with archival footage detailing the history of racism in Los Angeles, including the Watt’s uprising from the perspective of the participants who “engaged with the L.A.P.D.” It is also the most in-depth study ever of the L.A. Chapter founder Alpretice “Bunchy Carter.” It also features first-hand accounts of the party’s formation as told by the original surviving members.
This film gives the viewer an eyewitness account of Bunchy and John Huggins murders at U.C.L.A. in 1968 and includes exclusive interviews with Black Panther Party leaders Geronimo Ji Jagga and Elaine Brown.
Also featured are former Black Panther members Ericka Huggins, Roland and Ronald Freeman, Wayne Pharr, Jeffrey Everett, Long John Washington, Muhammad Mubarak, former L.A.P.D. Chief Bernard Parks, US Organization member Wesley Kabaila, U.C.L.A. Professor Scot Brown, and many others.
Of all the provocative images that emerged from the counterculture era of the 1960s and 1970s, none was as compelling as that of a striking young philosophy professor, her hair fashioned in a perfectly coiffed Afro, with clenched fist held high in perhaps the ultimate symbol of Black militancy.
Fifty years ago, Nation of Islam Muslims Monroe X Jones and Fred X Jingles were reportedly taking a garment bag from their vehicle outside Mosque, No. 27, at 56th Street and Broadway late on the evening of April 27, 1962, when LAPD officers Frank Tomlinson and Stanley Kensic pulled up in their police cruiser and questioned the two men. The officers frisked the men and asked where the clothes came from.
“They weren’t anti-white; they were just pro-black.” —Author Pat Thomas’ paraphrase of a quote by Black Panther Bobby Seale
Wednesday of this week marked the end of a very memorable August 2011.
August is usually a tall Southern drink of sultry chilled water, the natural bridge to fall and back to school. But this year, the month was far more than that.
There were record deaths of United States troops in Afghanistan, earthquakes in New York and Washington, D.C., as well as a hurricane turned tropical storm that flooded out some states and postponed the festivities to honor America’s newest redeemed peacemaker hero—Dr. Martin Luther King.
