by Joshua Bloom
The Young Lords wore purple berets, asserted their right to armed self-defense, and developed a thirteen-point platform and program modeled after the Black Panthers’ program. The Young Lords were different from other domestic “Third World” organizations in that Puerto Rico was (and is still) a territory of the United States, subject to U.S. rule without full political representation. Led mostly by Puerto Rican youth born in the mainland United States, the Young Lords sought to link the liberation struggle in Puerto Rico to the social conditions they experienced in their urban neighborhoods in the United States. Like the Black Panthers, they saw problems in their communities as the result of imperialism, capitalism, and racism.8
On April 4, 1969, Chicago police killed the Young Lords’ minister of defense, Manuel Ramos, and critically wounded the organization’s minister of education, Ralph Rivera, shooting him in the head. Less than twenty hours later, the Young Lords turned out more than three thousand people for a protest at the police station. Allegedly, the police had tried to turn the black gangs in the area against the Young Lords. But on May 14, the Young Lords took over the McCormick Theological Seminary and invited the black gangs to talk. The Black Panthers announced their support for the Young Lords and formally declared solidarity with the group: “Regarding you, the Young Lords as our true revolutionary brothers, as our comrades, as our allies, the Black Panther Party is working jointly with you to see that aggression is thwarted and suppression is ended.” Jimenez talked about the class character of the struggle at the meeting and said, “We see the United States is our enemy. And we look out for allies, you know, we look at Cuba, we look at Mao, we look at all these other countries that have liberated themselves from the monsters.”9
Recalling their earlier food and clothing giveaways and inspired by the Black Panther model, the Young Lords organized community service programs to address the basic needs of community members and to draw them to their organization. They organized joint free clothes distributions with the Black Panthers, handing out free new and used clothes to hundreds of families. The Young Lords also initiated a free breakfast program for children that served Chicago’s Puerto Rican neighborhoods.10
In June 1969, the Chicago Black Panther Party announced the creation of a “Rainbow Coalition” with the Young Lords and the Young Patriots, a group of poor revolutionary white youths led by William “Preacherman” Fesperman, a white seminary student who had moved to Chicago from Appalachia, wore Black Panther buttons, and displayed the Confederate flag. Chicago’s Black Panther deputy chairman, Fred Hampton, announced, “We got blacks, browns, and whites . . . we’ve got a Rainbow Coalition!” The national Black Panther Party promoted Chicago’s revolutionary coalition as a national model, and speakers from the three groups were featured at events from Oakland to New York, such as a march on Fort Dix in New Jersey to protest alleged brutality against soldiers in the stockade there. Explaining the coalition, New York Black Panther leader Carlton Yearwood said that the groups shared a revolutionary commitment to class struggle across race. “We believe that racism comes out of a class struggle, it’s just part of the divide-and-conquer tactics of the Establishment and a product of capitalism. When we provide free breakfasts for poor kids, we provide them for poor whites and poor blacks.”11
As the Young Lords in Chicago emulated the Panthers, other Puerto Rican activists began to follow suit. On June 7, 1969, the Black Panther ran a story on the Young Lords in Chicago and the Rainbow Coalition. The article caught the eye of a group of Puerto Rican student activists in New York City who were looking for a way to address police violence, expand educational access for Puerto Ricans, transform educational curricula, and advance Puerto Rican independence. Pablo “Yoruba” Guzmán, as a student at Columbia University, and David Perez and Miguel “Mickey” Melendez, as students at Old Westbury College, had been involved in educational politics and social service programs. Guzmán had participated in the Columbia protests. By 1969, all three were moving toward revolutionary anti-imperialist politics. The students already looked to the Black Panthers for inspiration. When they heard about the Young Lords in Chicago, they decided to follow their example. In the words of Guzmán, “At first the only model we had to go on in this country was the Black Panther Party . . . [Then], in 1969 in the June 7 issue of the Black Panther newspaper there was an article about the Young Lords Organization in Chicago with Cha Cha Jimenez as their chairman. Cha Cha was talking about revolution and socialism and the liberation of Puerto Rico and the right to self-determination and all this stuff that I ain’t never heard a spic say. I mean, I hadn’t never heard no Puerto Rican talk like this—just Black people were talking this way, you know. And I said, ‘Damn! Check this out.’ That’s what really got us started.”12
After reading the Panther article on the Young Lords in June, Guzmán, Melendez, and Perez traveled to Chicago to ask Jimenez if their organization could become a formal chapter of the Young Lords. Jimenez told them they should merge with Juan “Fi” Ortiz and a group of New York high school students that was trying to get a chapter going. They recruited Fi to the Central Committee, and the New York Young Lords was formed. They decorated their office with posters of the Black Panthers, Pedro Albizu Campos (leader of the Puerto Rican independence movement in the mid-twentieth century), Ho Chi Minh, and Che Guevara.13
In October 1969, the Young Lords changed their name to the Young Lords Party and began publishing a mimeographed packet called Palante, which grew to a full-fledged newspaper by May of 1970.14 Like the Panthers, they saw a need to create a revolutionary culture that would allow Puerto Ricans to liberate themselves from mental slavery and stand up to oppression. “The chains that have been taken off slaves’ bodies are put back on their minds,” explained Young Lord David Perez. “To support its economic exploitation of Puerto Rico, the United States instituted a new educational system whose purpose was to Americanize us. Specifically, that means that the school’s principal job is to exalt the cultural values of the United States. . . . What all this does is to create severe problems for our people. First it creates a colonized mentality—that means that the people have a strong feeling of inferiority, they have a strong feeling of not being as worthy as the Americans because the structure tells them that to become American is always a goal they have to attain.”15
The New York Young Lords used direct action tactics akin to those of organizer Saul Alinsky with an anti-imperialist edge to force confrontation with the city government of New York, seeking to gain concessions for their community. Many people complained about the mountains of piled-up garbage in the neighborhood because of the city’s failure to clean the streets. In August 1969, the Young Lords went to the Department of Sanitation and requested the use of brooms to clean the streets. When the department staff refused their request, they took the brooms by force. They organized a community work day and swept the streets with the brooms they had “liberated.” Hundreds of neighbors joined them, piling up a five-foot-high mountain of trash blocking off the six lanes of Third Avenue. As Juan González directed people away from the pile, Yoruba screamed “Burn the garbage!” and, to the cheers of the neighbors, the Young Lords doused the trash with gasoline and ignited the pile. As Yoruba explained to the New York Times, the Young Lords had organized the garbage-dumping demonstration to show people in “El Barrio,” the Puerto Rican slums in East Harlem, that direct action was needed to force the city to meet community needs. Mayor John V. Lindsay, attempting to de-escalate the conflict and win support in his upcoming re-election campaign, reassigned Sanitation Department personnel to clean up the pervasive garbage problems in the neighborhood and keep it clean. The victory brought a tremendous outpouring of community support for the Young Lords.16
In the fall of 1969, the Young Lords in New York approached the Reverend Humberto Carranza of the local First Spanish Methodist Church on 111th Street in East Harlem. The church was not used during the week, and the Young Lords asked if they could use the basement of the church to
run their free breakfast program for neighborhood children. Carranza refused, so about twenty Young Lords went to Sunday service to ask the parishioners directly. During the testimonial period, Young Lord chairman Felipe Luciano made a plea to the thirty parishioners who were present for the Young Lords to be able to use the space. But Reverend Carranza had warned the police, who proceeded to storm the front of the church and beat Luciano—breaking his arm and sending him to the hospital—and arrest all the Young Lords present. Melendez called the left-leaning National Lawyers Guild for help, and a brilliant young Latino lawyer, Jerry Rivers, was sent to help secure the Young Lords’ release from jail. Rivers came to represent the Young Lords in most of their cases. He soon changed his name to Geraldo Rivera and eventually became a popular talk show host.17
The repression of the Young Lords brought them increased support from the community and for the following three months, Young Lords members regularly gave testimonials in Sunday services at the First Spanish Methodist Church, which were often attended by 80 parishioners and 150 Young Lords supporters. The Young Lords continued to ask permission to use the church space to conduct a “liberation school” and a day care center and to run a free breakfast program for children. But the Reverend Carranza continued to refuse their requests, and on December 28, after the Sunday service, the Young Lords and their Black Panther allies locked the doors of the church with chains and sealed them with six-inch railroad spikes. Yoruba told the press that the immediate plan was to feed hot breakfasts to fifty to seventy children at the church each morning and that the Young Lords would end the occupation if they were allowed to run the breakfast program. The Young Lords put up a sign proclaiming “La Iglesia de le Gente—People’s Church.” They served breakfasts of fruit juice, milk, and cookies in the mornings to seventy-five children and conducted classes on Latin American history for the community. The church takeover became a national story, and thousands visited the Young Lords to offer their support, including celebrities like Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland. In the end, the National Council of Churches agreed to provide space in other churches in the neighborhood for the Young Lords’ programs.18
In early October 1970, Young Lord Julio Roldán was sitting on a stoop and drinking a beer with friends when police pulled up. Roldán was arrested for drinking in public, and the next morning, he was found hung in his cell. Believing that Roldán had been killed by authorities, five thousand demonstrators carried his casket from the González funeral home on Madison Avenue and marched to the First Spanish Methodist Church on 111th Street. Again, the Young Lords took over the church, but this time, they were armed, and they refused to move. Fearing a disaster, the mayor negotiated with the Young Lords and granted a seat on the Board of Corrections to Young Lord ally and former light heavyweight boxing champion of the world José Torres. The mayor also granted amnesty for the church occupiers, given that no guns were found when they came out. The Young Lords agreed to the terms and then followed the example of the Algerian revolutionaries, sneaking their guns out in the bras of old women.19
On the strength of these successes, the Young Lords Party continued to grow. A Philadelphia office opened in August 1970. Others opened in Puerto Rico; Newark, New Jersey; and Hayward, California. Most of the members of the Philadelphia chapter were young Puerto Ricans involved with a Catholic service agency that had turned toward revolutionary politics through engagement with the Socialist Workers Party and then turned toward the model of the Young Lords, adopting their platform and achieved formal recognition as a chapter. The Philadelphia chapter focused on free breakfast for children and service programs for the community. When they began organizing for community control of the police, their offices were firebombed.20
Often working directly with the Black Panthers, the New York-based Young Lords created innovative campaigns, such as one to take over Lincoln Hospital, which had been housed in a condemned building for twenty-five years. In that campaign, they forced the City of New York to build a new hospital in the South Bronx. They took over a mobile X-ray truck to force the city administration to attend to a spreading tuberculosis epidemic in East Harlem and seized unused equipment to test for lead poisoning in children, whose exposure to peeling lead paint in substandard housing placed them at risk for brain damage. They challenged the Board of Corrections on prison conditions, conducted ongoing breakfast programs for children in four cities, and initiated bilingual education programs. They also turned out ten thousand people to demonstrate at the United Nations for an independent Puerto Rico and maintained direct alliances with independence movement organizations in Puerto Rico.21
THE WHITE NEW LEFT
Like the Panthers, the Young Lords, the Red Guards, and Los Siete de la Raza viewed their movements as struggles against racial oppression as well as against class exploitation. In emulating the Black Panther Party, they sought to devise policies and programs that addressed the distinctive forms of oppression they faced. Young white activists did not face racial oppression. And the Appalachian Young Patriots notwithstanding, many white New Left activists came from the middle class and did not personally suffer class exploitation either. Nonetheless, many looked to the Black Panther Party as a primary reference point for their own political activism.
In an interview with the Movement newspaper while he was in prison, Huey Newton explained the Black Panther position on the role of white allies in building a global revolution and emphasized the Panthers’ commitment to socialism. In contrast with Stokely Carmichael and other separatist black nationalists, he reinforced the Panthers’ openness to working with whites and advanced a sympathetic assessment of the white New Left:
I personally think that there are many young white revolutionaries who are sincere in attempting to realign themselves with mankind, and to make a reality out of the high moral standards that their fathers and forefathers only expressed. In pressing for new heroes the young white revolutionaries found their heroes in the black colony at home and in the colonies throughout the world. The young white revolutionaries raised the cry for the troops to withdraw from Vietnam, hands off Latin America, withdraw from the Dominican Republic and also to withdraw from the black community or the black colony. So you have a situation in which the young white revolutionaries are attempting to identify with the oppressed people of the colonies and against the exploiter.22
Newton argued that because middle-class white revolutionaries had not experienced class exploitation or racial injustice, their oppression was “somewhat abstract.” Nonetheless, he insisted that they had an important role to play in the global revolutionary struggle. White leftists, he said, needed to dedicate themselves to revolution and to align themselves with the anti-imperialist liberation struggles around the world and with the Black Panther Party: “[White revolutionaries] can aid the black revolutionaries first by simply turning away from the establishment, and secondly choosing their friends. For instance, they have a choice between whether they will be a friend of Lyndon Baines Johnson or a friend of Fidel Castro. A friend of Robert Kennedy or a friend of Ho Chi Minh. And these are direct Opposites. A friend of mine or a friend of Johnson’s. After they make this choice then the white revolutionaries have a duty and a responsibility to act.”23
Newton suggested that the abstract quality of white revolutionary struggle could be made real—that whites could prove their allegiance and become truly revolutionary—through support of the black struggle against oppression: “Black people are being oppressed in the colony by white police men, by white racists. We are saying they must withdraw. . . . When something happens in the black colony—when we’re attacked and ambushed in the black colony—then the white revolutionary students and intellectuals and all the other whites who support the colony should respond by defending us.” SDS published Newton’s ideas about the white New Left as a pamphlet and distributed it nationwide that fall, in coordination with “Free Huey!” actions.24
Heeding the call to defense, in early 1969, the Students for a D
emocratic Society committed to work with the Panthers to organize a February 16–17 birthday celebration for Huey Newton in twenty cities nationwide to mobilize support for the “Free Huey!” campaign. Calling for SDS members across the country to participate, SDS interorganizational secretary Bernardine Dohrn explained the importance of doing whatever it took to defend the Panthers: “When an organization is rooted in the needs of the people, attacks on that organization or its leaders (frame-ups, jailing, assassination) are understood and resisted as a more visible form of the daily oppression of the entire people. The reaction is not just shock or indignation at the hypocrisy of the system, but more determined and conscious willingness to fight. The tactics of the fight are any means necessary.” Dohrn ended her appeal by quoting Newton: “The racist dog oppressors have no rights which oppressed Black people are bound to respect. . . . The oppressor must be harassed until his doom. He must have no peace by day or night.”25
By April 1969, SDS had embraced the Black Panther Party as central to its own struggle. On April 4, the one-year anniversary of Martin Luther King’s assassination, SDS published a resolution passed by twelve hundred national representatives titled, “The Black Panther Party: Toward the Liberation of the Colony.” The resolution linked the revolutionary core identity of SDS to the act of resisting the state’s repression of the Panthers: “When the leading black revolutionary group is continually harassed, its leaders jailed, hounded out of the country and brutally assassinated, when Panther members daily face the provocations of the ruling class and its racist pigs, when their blood has been spilled and their list of revolutionary martyrs . . . increases daily, then the time has come for SDS to give total and complete support to their defense efforts. To do less would be a mockery of the word ‘revolutionary.’”26
