The Young Lords 40th Anniversary Holds Lessons For Us All Today

by: Paul Rosenberg

Sat Aug 22, 2009 at 19:00

As explained on the program, there is celebration taking place tomorrow in NYC:

AMY GOODMAN: Well, this Sunday, members of the Young Lords are planning to come together to mark the fortieth anniversary of the group's founding. The event will take place at the First Spanish Methodist Church in East Harlem, the same church on East 111th Street that the group took over in late 1969 to house free breakfast and clothing programs, health services, a daycare center, a liberation school and community dinners. The occupation ended in January 1970, when police raided the church, arresting 105 members of the Young Lords.

Attendees on Sunday will include Democracy Now! co-host Juan Gonzalez, who served as the first Minister of Education for the Young Lords.

Co-host Juan Gonzales was the first Minister of Education, and he described the group thus in the introduction to the Democracy Now! segment:

The group called for self-determination for all Puerto Ricans; for independence for the island of Puerto Rico; community control of institutions and land; freedom for all political prisoners; and the withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam, Puerto Rico and other areas. The Young Lords would also play a pivotal role in spreading awareness of Puerto Rican culture and history. While the group disintegrated in the mid-1970s, its impact is still felt today.

What's remarkable about the Young Lords was the degree to which they combined radical, confrontational actions with a respectful and dignified manner, and practical demands for things that should have already been done years before.  (Remind you of anything recently?)

LUIS GARDEN ACOSTA:... a sort of a myth grew about us being the polite revolutionaries, because we would actually, "Excuse me, we're about to hijack your truck. Everyone, be safe now." So, but almost in every instance, whenever we did anything, people would actually come out and say, "You know, they're absolutely right. Someone should take a stand." So I think that differentiated the Young Lords from a lot of different groups.

Not coincidentally, a lot of the work they did was all about securing medical care for a community that utterly neglected as a matter of course.  (Remind you of anything recently?  We're all Puerto Rican now, eh?)

What happened in the mid-to-late 60s was that demands for full equality as individuals within the existing framework of liberal individualism ran smack into a brick wall.  Oh, there were some legislative and judicial victories, to be sure, building on the long-term legal strategy of the NAACP Legal and Educational Fund as one of the main foundations.  The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1065 weren't chopped liver, either.

But every victory gained in law still had to be fought for all over again in fact, on the ground, by real live everyday people.  And because of this need for ongoing struggle-as well as the many things that hadn't yet even been won in theory-there was a vast upwelling of grassroots activism, which naturally began to organize itself around common concerns, which in turn meant organizing in communities defined by race and ethnicity, as well as organizing among women and gays and lesbians, whose less-than-first-class-citizen status was constantly underscored on a day-by-day, hour-by-hour, sometimes minute-by-minute basis.

And so it was that quite radical forms of activism developed quite spontaneously from masses of people who were simply working through the vast contradictions between the high-flown promises of liberal democracy and the actual fruits of what that purported democracy delivered.  The Young Lords exemplified this process in a truly exemplary manner:

JUAN GONZALEZ: And so, Mickey convinced me to start going to a group of meetings in East Harlem with Felipe Luciano and with Pablo Guzman and several other folks in something called the Sociedad de Albizu Campos. We then read about this group in Chicago, the Chicago Young Lords, in an SDS newspaper, and they decided to take a trip out there to meet with Cha Cha Jimenez, the leader of the Young Lords. And basically-

AMY GOODMAN: Who had met Fred Hampton, the Black Panther, in prison?

JUAN GONZALEZ: Who had been inspired initially and politicized by Fred Hampton while he was in prison, while Cha Cha was in prison. And Cha Cha was trying to turn the Young Lords gang in Chicago into a political organization. So we then-he sort of gave us the go-ahead to start the East Coast branch of the Young Lords, which we did on July 25th of 1969.

This is one of the things that conservatives most deeply hate-the fact that large numbers of Black and Latino criminals transformed themselves from destructive anti-social actors into constructive, pro-social political actors.  They came to understand themselves in a political context, and to recognize their behavior as a maladaptive response to white supremacist oppression, and they changed accordingly.

Of course every individual's actions are mixture of personal and cultural/institutional factors, and this initial wave of personal transformations did not take 100%.  There were certainly individuals who reverted to criminal activity, and there were some criminals who always treated the political organizing as a scam.  Yet, personal backsliding is never taken for granted as a refutation of the validity of religious conversion.  (See the recent C-Street follies, for example.)  And so the same nuanced appreciation is called for in this instance as well.  The real proof lay in the pudding, and what the Young Lords accomplished.

Not all of them had been criminals-not by a long shot.  But it's the nature of oppressed minority cultures that only extreme options are readily available. One brother may become a gangster, the other a priest.  And part of the power of the Young Lords, like other groups, but to a degree rarely matched by others, was the way that they managed to reweave together those extreme options into a unified force:

JUAN GONZALEZ: [cont]But then the group grew dramatically. Within a year, there were branches in Philadelphia; in Newark; in Bridgeport, Connecticut; in Boston, the one that Luis started in Boston; and Detroit; and the New York group grew into hundreds and hundreds of full-time members throughout the East Coast.

But I often say that probably the most audacious and long-lasting action that we ever took was the occupation of Lincoln Hospital in-was it August of 1970?

MICKEY MELENDEZ: That was the first one, yeah.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Yeah, and the first occupation of it, where we actually took over a whole-I think it was a fourteen-story building, including the emergency room area. And we gathered about sixty or seventy Young Lords in the middle of the night, piled them all into a truck, drove the truck about 4:00 in the morning up the ramp of the emergency exit, all piled out, and barricaded and seized the whole wing of the hospital.

This was a hospital that had been condemned for twenty-five years, that was known as a place where Puerto Ricans went to die. And the city was delaying the building of a new hospital. So we took over the hospital in protest, demanding the construction, final construction, of the new Lincoln Hospital. And the Lindsay administration, by then, was so embarrassed by all of our various occupations that they actually negotiated within a day.

Now that's almost Biblical power.  The story continues:

AMY GOODMAN: Mickey Melendez, you hijacked a TB truck?

MICKEY MELENDEZ: That was-yeah, that was before that. That was all part of our work that we used to do in the community around TB testing. At the time, there wasn't, you know, translation and, you know, people sometimes couldn't get downtown. We would do TB testing and would come back two or three days to see if it was negative or positive. The ones that were positive needed a follow-up x-ray.

AMY GOODMAN: For tuberculosis?

MICKEY MELENDEZ: For tuberculosis. The city had this grey truck that would, you know, go around the city, park and do these x-rays. And, you know, we tried to negotiate with the city, which we always did. We always tried to, you know, deal with the powers to be and, you know, again, as I said, you know, to no avail. We then started to watch the truck and see how the-where the truck parked and what was the routine. Never more than twenty, thirty people a day.

So, on one particular day, when we called, and we knew they were going to be in East Harlem, myself and two of the defense people, Jose Pai Diaz and Huey, took over the truck. And we parked it in front of the office. And that day, on the way there, the task of the two other people-I was driving the truck. I had never driven anything bigger than a Volkswagen up until point. Their task was to convince these two technicians to stay on. And, in fact, by the time we got to our office, the technicians stayed on, and over 150 people-unprecedented-had been x-rayed with positive TB tests as a result of some of the medical work that we did in our community.

LUIS GARDEN ACOSTA: What I think was very important about that was the fact that-

AMY GOODMAN: Luis Garden Acosta.

LUIS GARDEN ACOSTA: the people themselves who were hijacked, at the end of it all, when reporters asked themthis is filmed and documented, by the way-"What do you feel about being hijacked?" they said, "You know what? They were right. We were in the wrong place. We should have been here." And so, a sort of a myth grew about us being the polite revolutionaries, because we would actually, "Excuse me, we're about to hijack your truck. Everyone, be safe now." So, but almost in every instance, whenever we did anything, people would actually come out and say, "You know, they're absolutely right. Someone should take a stand." So I think that differentiated the Young Lords from a lot of different groups.

It's commonplace to portray the grassroots left activists of the 60s and 70s as mirror images of the most extreme reactionaries today.  After all, the Black Panthers carried guns, didn't they?  Well, yes.  But the police were regularly murdering black youth at the time, much the same way they are running amuck tasering just about anyone nowadays.  And, of course, the Black Panthers also initiated school lunch programs, which have since become about as American as apple pie.

The Young Lords, however, came from an historically less brutalized background, and they followed the Panthers in formation by a few years.  These factors helped them develop a politics that escaped the worst excesses of police repression-including mass assassinations-and yet still set a standard for visionary militancy that inspired generations of activists who followed in their wake.

Furthermore, it's quite telling that the early male leadership of the Young Lords was open to learning a thing or two from women who emerged from a traditionally macho culture, articulating a feminist vision that was not simply an import from white feminism, but an organic expression of their own experience:

JUAN GONZALEZ: And, Luis, talk about-because Mickey mentioned at the beginning it was a bunch of young men who got together and organized the group, but women played a very important role in the Young Lords. Can you talk about some of the battles and-

LUIS GARDEN ACOSTA: You know, I came out of a seminary, so I never went to a prom, I never went on dates, I never had any of that kind of usual social interaction. So the world of feminism, of women's liberation, was absolutely new to me.

But let me tell you, Iris Morales, particularly, and Denise, they led a movement to really challenge our thinking. I went into the Young Lords thinking that I was a very liberated male, you know, open to everything, you know? And they forced me to sort of challenge and look at my sort of attitudes. And I, in that weekly-weekly-session on women's liberation in the Young Lords, began to really understand some of the ingrained aspects of my culture that really was a barrier to that equality.

AMY GOODMAN: Sonia Sotomayor, the new Supreme Court justice, Juan, she was what? At Princeton at the time?

JUAN GONZALEZ: Yeah, she was in the early '70s, I think, a student at Princeton. And I have to think that she, like many of the major political figures in the Puerto Rican and Latino community today, were heavily influenced by what the Young Lords did. In fact, her senior thesis at Princeton was on the Puerto Rican-the Puerto Rican political movement on the island and the whole question of the island's self-determination. But I've also, you know, talk to Congressman Jose Serrano often and Fernando Ferrer, who ran for mayor of New York. All of them were deeply influenced, because they were all around the same age or even younger than some of us, and they were in high school or in college at the height of the Young Lords. And they all say that they were deeply influenced by the awareness that the Young Lords created, in general.

LUIS GARDEN ACOSTA: I think Juan said it once, I think for our twentieth anniversary or twenty-fifth. He said, "You know, we have accomplished a lot. We may have not made the kind of revolution that we were talking about totally, but one thing we did, we liberated our minds." And that was a clear manifestation of the impact of the Young Lords.

For all these reasons and more, it's incumbent on all of us who think of ourselves as progressives to join this weekend in observing the 40th Anniversary of the Young Lords.  They still have much to teach all of us today.