rendered them harmless.”82 Similarly Sugrue notes, “The irony of the War on Poverty was that the federal government did not, for the most part, address the economic problems that were the root cause of poverty…. But, unexpectedly, the federal government allied itself with local activists…. The Johnson administration unleashed and legitimated an insurgent movement for ‘community control’ that dovetailed with the growing demand for black power…. The long-term consequence was to wholly recast the terrain of debate over race, rights and equality in the United States from the federal to the local.”83
In New York, Mayor John Lindsay used the money to hire black and Puerto Rican activists and neighborhood youths as peacekeepers. In the 1970s these young people employed their new organizing skills to create radical black and Puerto Rican power organizations. In the 1980s these radical activists, most of whom had cut their teeth on the 1960s riots, forged community-based organizations, some of which were dedicated to fighting police brutality. Groups such as the Black Panthers, the Nation of Islam, the Real Great Society, the Young Lords, and the Revolutionary Communist Party gave birth in the 1980s to the NYC Coalition Against Police Brutality, the Justice Committee, Make the Road New York, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, the National Hip Hop Political Convention, the Audre Lorde Project, the Immigrant Justice Solidarity Project, and Stolen Lives. Individual activists such as Charles Barron, a former Black Panther, became an anti-police-brutality activist and councilman; Richie Perez, a former Young Lord, founded the Justice Project; Vincente Alba, a former Young Lord, now leads the Coalition against Police Brutality; Armando Perez, a Real Great Society founder, was elected district leader; Margarita Lopez, formerly of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, was elected councilwoman; David Santiago, a Puerto Rican Socialist and Young Lord, play critical organizing roles in the 1980s and 1990s.
My research was conducted in predominantly Puerto Rican neighborhoods, where the Real Great Society, the Young Lords, and the Puerto Rican Socialist Party were the most important community-based organizations. The Real Great Society (RGS) operated principally on the Lower East Side. When the RGS extended organizing efforts to East Harlem, two of its leaders influenced several young people who would later form the Young Lords Party of New York.84 The Young Lords were most active in and had their most profound impact on East Harlem and Mott Haven, South Bronx. The Puerto Rican Socialist Party was strongest in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. In all these areas, over time, participation in grassroots organizing efforts increased residents’ confidence in their own collective capacity.
While the focus here is on Puerto Rican organizing efforts, there is a thread that ties the Puerto Rican experience to that of blacks. First, migration to the city occurred in similar waves. Second, both groups of migrants fled rural poverty and political repression only to encounter racial discrimination in New York. Both were confined to the lowest wage labor market, the poorest housing, and inferior schools. Police viewed them in similar ways, enforcing ghetto boundaries, targeting them for drug arrests, and using high levels of violence and brutality. Black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods exploded in the 1960s. Riots erupted in black neighborhoods in 1964 but spread to Puerto Rican neighborhoods too. The reverse was true of the Puerto Rican riots of 1967. Similarly, the evolution of radical Puerto Rican organizations paralleled that of black organizations in the city. The following section is based on ethnographic field research conducted in three predominantly Puerto Rican neighborhoods. A parallel process, I argue, was taking place in black neighborhoods in the city.
The Real Great Society and Puerto Rican Organizing on the Lower East Side
The Lower East Side had long been a cauldron of movement activity. Puerto Ricans in cigar factories and Jews in the textile industry were early and active participants in labor, immigrant, communist, and socialist organizing efforts. In 1966 a local street gang called the Assassin Lords formed a political organization they called the University of the Streets (as mentioned earlier). Armando explained (in the first of many conversations we had between 1992 and 1999, the year Armando was murdered85):
I was in the “Assassin Lords,” another was in the “Dragons.” … The gangs were mostly about having something to do. We would get into a gang and fight each other…. We came to the realization that it didn’t make any sense for Puerto Ricans to be fighting each other. We decided to give something back to the community…. In the Lower East Side there was a huge need for day care centers. So, we applied for different grants and foundations and got funding for a day care center called “visiting mothers.” It was run out of a storefront. Then we got funding for other projects, and somewhere between 1966 and 1967 we received a fairly large grant. From there we started an organization called “University of the Streets.” It is still located on East 7th and has a karate program, drama, theater, art, and reading[s].
After the 1967 riots, Armando and Chino Garcia formed the Real Great Society (RGS), named after President Johnson’s Great Society initiative. Armando credited Johnson with providing an alternative for ghetto youths. “We have never seen anything like that since, not in [the] past 30 years,” Armando insisted. “To me Johnson was the greatest president we ever had for social problems.”
In 1966 Life magazine reviewed The Gang and the Political Establishment, written by a Columbia University professor about the Real Great Society. Afterward gang leaders from around the country began to contact them. “This gave us the opportunity to travel all over the country,” Armando said. “We discovered we all had similar problems, especially regarding education and housing. We noted a pattern. We realized it was not just a problem on the Lower East Side. We had a very big struggle on our hands…. We got serious. We began to educate ourselves.”
The 1968 Teachers Strike and the Network of Organizations in Williamsburg, Brooklyn
Unlike the South Bronx or Harlem, Williamsburg was still a large working-class neighborhood during the 1960s. In 1969 one-quarter of all industrial jobs in New York were in Brooklyn and over 50 percent of those were in Greenpoint-Williamsburg and Newton Creek. The largest employers were the American Sugar Company, E. M. Schaefer Brewing Company, Lumber Exchange terminal, and, until its closure in 1966, the Brooklyn Navy Yards. In 1968 the first major political mobilization in Williamsburg emerged in response to the 1968 United Federation of Teachers citywide strike (which was launched in opposition to community control of school boards). At Eastern District High School the teacher strike prompted a student uprising. Puerto Rican high school students, radical clergy, and VISTA volunteers all participated. They forced the school principal to resign. Manny Maldonado, president of the ASPIRA club (an organization designed to help and encourage Puerto Rican high school students to succeed), emerged as one of five or six student movement leaders. Martin Needleman, who worked with ASPIRA and VISTA at the time and directed Brooklyn Legal Services during the 1990s, recalled, in 1992, “A lot of what’s happening in current efforts goes back to these school struggles…. Community activists’ contacts were made then. It turned out to be an investment in our future—this community networking.” Eusebio Cuso shared similar remembrances (1996):
Little by little we got to do a lot of things together…. Manny [Maldonado] used to come up to David’s [Santiago] house and I used to live with David…. They started calling us the Socialist building—they said we were all Socialists…. Everybody who lived in that building was into some struggle or another. So they called us the revolutionaries, the politicos, the politicians, and all that good shit…. The whole building was into whatever it took to better the neighborhood. Habitantes Unidos.
Out of their organizing efforts the Los Sures community housing organization was born, named for the area of Williamsburg (the South Side) where most Puerto Ricans lived. “We held meetings in buildings to form tenants associations and then began going out to the buildings trying to organize the tenants association to become a citywide community management program. As more landlords abandoned the apartments we began doing rehabilitation. We also began working with the tenant interim lease (TIL) program,86 helping the tenants make contracts with the city to run their own buildings,” noted Barbara
