Biography
Charles Parker was a young civil rights and antiwar activist in Charlotte during an era when Black political organizing in the South was frequently met with aggressive surveillance, infiltration, and prosecution. His activism is most closely associated with the same local milieu of organizers targeted in the early 1970s.
Parker was one of the “Charlotte Three,” arrested in late 1971 and convicted in 1972 for the 1968 arson that destroyed Lazy B Stables. He received a 10-year sentence, the shortest among the three defendants, but the case still became a widely discussed civil-rights controversy. In 1979, Governor Hunt commuted the sentences, and Parker was released.
