Young Lords

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The Young Lords, later Young Lords Organization and in New York (notably Spanish Harlem), Young Lords Party, was a Puerto Rican Hispanic nationalist group in several United States cities, notably New York City and Chicago.

The Young Lords. When they realized that urban renewal was evicting their families and saw police abuses, they also became involved in the Division Street Riots.

While incarcerated, the President and one of 7 founding gang members, Jose ("Cha-Cha") Jimenez began to read everything from Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X to Lenin and Mao. In September 1968, Jimenez reorganized the gang into a political human rights movement. Jimenez was then approached by Illinois Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton, who was still officially underground organizing and founding the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party. The meeting took place in January 1969, right after the Young Lords took over the Chicago Avenue Police Station's Workshop Meeting.

Soon after, the Young Lords were restructured into various levels and ministries in an attempt to build better organization and a Puerto Rican equivalent of the Black Panthers, which became the Young Lords Organization (YLO), and later (in New York) the Young Lords Party (YLP); the latter became independent from the Chicago group.

On June 7, 1969, the Black Panther newspaper announced an alliance called the Rainbow Coalition (no relation to the later organization of that name associated with Jesse Jackson).

Besides the Black Panthers, and what was then the Young Lords Organization, the alliance also included the Young Patriots Organization, a street gang of white youths that had turned political. The Coalition sent representatives to the annual convention of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which, however, was falling apart as a national student organization, by that time. After asking for permission from national headquarters in Chicago, the New York chapter of the Young Lords Organization was officially founded on July 26, 1969. Two of the founding members were Juan Gonzalez (now, in 2006, a New York Daily News columnist) and Felipe Luciano (now a TV news reporter, poet, and radio personality), the latter of whom served as the organization's first chair.

The Young Lords focused most of their activity around self-determination for Puerto Rico and local community issues such as gentrification, health, and Police Injustice. Gentrification became a primary focus because Mayor Daley's patronage machine was ruthless and the entire Puerto Rican community was being evicted from the downtown and lakefront areas. The Young Lords used direct action, political education, and "survival programs" to bring their concerns to mainstream public attention.

After the founding of the second chapter in New York, subsequent branches were also organized in Philadelphia, Connecticut, New Jersey, Boston, Milwaukee, Hayward, California, San Diego, Los Angeles, and Puerto Rico. The Young Lords set up many community projects identical to those of the Black Panthers, such as the free breakfast program for children, free day care center, Emeterio Betances free health clinic, community testing for tuberculosis and lead poisoning, free clothing drives, cultural events and Puerto Rican history classes. They also worked on prison solidarity for incarcerated Puerto Ricans, advocated for the rights of Vietnam War veterans, and were pushed by female leadership to fight for women's rights, including through sub-groups like Mothers And Others in Chicago.

Their newspapers, The Young Lord, Pitirre, and Palante (a contraction of "Para adelante", "Forward"), reported on their increasingly militant activities. The Young Lords carried out many direct action occupations of vacant land, hospitals, churches and other institutions to demand that they operate programs for the poor. This included a campaign to force the City of New York to increase garbage pick-up in Spanish Harlem and the McCormick Theological Seminary take-over in Chicago which won them $650,000 to be used for low income housing. In New York, much of their healthcare activism was carried out by a mass organization they formed with the Black Panthers known as the Health Revolutionary Unity Movement (HRUM).

Besides the Black Panthers, the Young Lords were also influenced by groups such as the Chicano Brown Berets, Crusade for Justice, Black Berets, Rising Up Angry, SDS, M.P.I., Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, P.I.P., the Communist Party USA, the East Asian-American Red Guards, Damas y Caballeros de San Juan, and many others. As for the island, the Young Lords began organizing conferences and marches calling for Puerto Rican independence, which they had always related back to the gentrification that they were fighting in the streets of Lincoln Park, Chicago and Manhattan.

The Young Lords grew into a national movement, through the leadership of activists like Angela Navedo who met with Vietnamese women, Omar Lopez (currently as of 2006 involved nationally with immigration issues), and Richie Perez who established the Puerto Rican Student Union (PRSU) in a number of college campuses and high schools. They also became one of the leading targets of the FBI's COINTELPRO, which had long harassed Puerto Rican groups.^[1] Chairman Jimenez was indicted 18 times in a six week period ranging from assaults and battery on police to mob actions. He was kept in the county jail, or in court rooms fighting the charges,and lived under constant death threats. While the Young Lords advocated similar armed strategies to those advocated by the Black Panthers, it was as a right of self defense that rarely arose, as it did after the shooting of Manuel Ramos and the supposed suicide of Julio Roldan in the custody of the NYPD.

By 1976, the Young Lords had been crippled and had all but been destroyed by the FBI's discreditations and divide and conquer tactics, although many Lords and community groups continued to pursue their vision. In Chicago, the Young Lords ran a 1975 aldermanic campaign for Cha-Cha Jimenez and garnered 39% of the vote against Mayor Richard J. Daley's machine candidate. The campaign followed the Bobby Seale Panther example and was viewed as an organizing vehicle to bring out displacement concerns of the community. After Cha-Cha Jimenez was incarcerated again awaiting trial, for 9 months, on a false hostage charge to support the F.A.L.N; he and the Young Lords joined the successsful mayoral campaign of Harold Washington and Jimenez introduced the victorious mayor before a crowd of 100,000 thousand Puerto Ricans in Humboldt Park. To support the Vieques campers within the U.S. and to continue the fight against displacement of Puerto Ricans in the Diaspora, the Young Lords organized Lincoln Park Camp on September 23, 2002.

Some Young Lords also showed support for the freed Puerto Rican nationalist leaders and urban guerrilla groups like the Macheteros; others moved on to more explicitly Maoist formations like the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization (PRRWO), and others went on to provide the leadership of the National Congress for Puerto Rican Rights (NCPRR). Many, however, went on to become media personalities, such as Juan Gonzalez of the New York Daily News, Pablo "Yoruba" Guzman at WCBS-TV New York, Felipe Luciano, most recently at one point news director of Air America Radio, and Miguel "Mickey" Melendez of WBAI-FM New York. The documentary PALANTE, SIEMPRE PALANTE! The Young Lords, was produced by former Young Lord Iris Morales, aired on PBS in 1996.

[edit] Further reading

Miguel "Mickey" Melendez, We Took the Streets: Fighting for Latino Right is with the Young Lords, St. Martin's Press, 2003. ISBN 0-312-26701-0.
- Donna Hernandez review online