The first board of Los Sures included most of the leaders of the 1968 school strike. Los Sures, Schliff told me, “was a voluntary organization that grew out of community needs, and then got funding. [It was an outgrowth of] the network of organizations and people that had been involved a long time; it was the hallmark of the struggle for the people’s community school board.” Luis Olmeda was the first chair of Los Sures. “Olmeda stressed Puerto Rican Pride and identity,” noted David Santiago, when I interviewed him in 1994: “He opened up the political struggle here. In the 1970s, he led the occupation of the Kraus housing projects, and put garbage in the street to protest the lack of sanitation in the neighborhood.” David Lopez, later an organizer for Musica Against Drugs (an organization founded by Manny Maldonado to help fight drug abuse and AIDS), and Carmen Calderon, from the South Side Mission, were also members of the first board of Los Sures. Williamsburg organizing efforts will be discussed later in the chapter.
The Young Lords and the Emergence of New Yorican Social Movements in East Harlem and South Bronx
East Harlem had been the setting of the largest Puerto Rican riot in the city, and Mayor Lindsay invested the most resources there. In so doing, he unintentionally spurred the creation of a network of skilled grassroots activists. These activists would play leading roles in channeling anger at police violence into organized forms of nonviolent protest in decades to come. By 1968 East Harlem was a cauldron of organizing activity. Miguel “Mickey” Melendez had participated in the riots. The city hired him as a “peacemaker.” Melendez commuted in from Mott Haven, South Bronx. Armando Perez came in from the Lower East Side. Armando introduced Melendez to University of the Streets. Luis Gonzalez, another organizer in East Harlem, introduced Melendez to his cousin Juan Gonzalez, the leader of the 1969 student strike at Columbia University.
In the summer of 1969, Mayor Lindsay tried to cut funding to some of the new community-based organizations. The activists used their newly honed organizational skills to fight back. Melendez called Juan Gonzalez, currently leading the student movement at Columbia, and Felipe Luciano, leading the black student movement at Queens, and told them that Puerto Ricans in East Harlem needed their help. They arrived “with a bunch of radical compañeros from Columbia,” Melendez told Ramon Gonzalez, my research assistant in 1993. They “blockaded the East River drive, and the city surrendered.” Melendez, Luciano, and Gonzalez then formed a Puerto Rican student group called Sociedad Albizpo Campos. Melendez transferred to Old Westbury, a radical and experimental new college interested in the concept of University of the Streets, and became a recruiter. On a recruiting trip to Chicago, he attended a meeting of the Chicago Young Lords where they discussed the recent takeover of Clemente High School. At the end of the meeting, Melendez was introduced to “this redheaded guy with a purple beret who is named Cha Cha Jimenez [founder of the Young Lords]. Cha Cha introduces me to David Perez [one of the student leaders].” They spoke at length about the problem of “police brutality in our barrios.”87 The following year David transferred to Old Westbury, and the New York branch of the Young Lords was born.
On July 26, 1969, Felipe Luciano announced the creation of the New York branch of the Young Lords before a crowd celebrating the anniversary of the Cuban revolution in the Lower East Side’s Tompkins Square Park. Soon afterward they began walking around 110th Street “with the memory of the riots that had erupted the week before on those same streets,” Melendez said. They were now asking people what it was they wanted. “They said basura (garbage),” Gonzales told me in 1993: “So every Sunday we would sweep the streets. More and more people kept joining. We put the garbage in the middle of 3rd Avenue, and we blocked traffic with it.” Gonzalez decided to call this action the first East Harlem garbage offensive. Once they had the garbage in the middle of the street, they set it aflame:
I did not count the people but in my recollection there could have been five hundred or five thousand neighborhoods taking part in the garbage protests. Every single Young Lord threw a match. Every single person in the community who helped threw matches…. Flames went up spectacularly and people started to scream with joy. In my mind the people—timid mothers, grandmothers, everyone—were showing their support of the Young Lords’ action. This new sight brought to mind the 1967 riots … but this time the protest was flawlessly executed.88 (emphasis mine)
Finally the city sent sanitation trucks to the neighborhood and agreed to keep the area clean. The Young Lords then initiated clothing drives and breakfast programs. When a conservative pastor called the police, Gonzalez said, “We kidnapped the church. We occupied the Methodist church in order to run a breakfast program for needy children. [The message was that] this will happen to any institution in a poor community that does not respond to the needs of the people. We initiated the ‘people’s church.’ That was the high point of the Young Lords.”
One-quarter of the membership of the Young Lords was African American, and many of the group’s leaders were Afro–Puerto Ricans. “We began talking about anti-black prejudice in our culture,” Gonzalez recalled. The salsa musician Eddie Palmeri wrote the hit song “Justicia” about them, and Ray Barretto spoke of them admiringly in the lyrics to his salsa songs as well.
The action with the most important long-term consequence, however, was the Young Lords’ successful fight against lead poisoning. They did their own testing and showed that over 80 percent of residents in East Harlem were suffering from high levels of lead. As a result legislation was passed banning lead-based paint and forcing landlords to remove existing paint.
Organizing in Mott Haven, South Bronx
In 1970 the Young Lords launched a major offensive in Mott Haven. They focused their effort on Lincoln Hospital, the worst hospital in the city. The hospital had an active group of workers and radical doctors who had graduated from medical school in 1969 and 1970. “The doctors supported us,” Armando Perez (from RGS, now active in planning the Lincoln takeover) told me. “We met at an apartment at midnight in the Upper West Side, for a surprise party. When everyone arrived we said, ‘surprise, we’re taking over Lincoln hospital.’” They drove a truck up the ramp to the emergency room. “We heard the guards say, you can’t do it. Willie [a member of the group] went to the back of the truck, opened it up, and we occupied the building…. It was a public relations action—we occupied it for a day to demand that they raise the minimum wage of health care workers, worker control, and a new building.”
Vincente “Panama” Alba, director of the Coalition against Police Brutality, learned his activist skills with the Young Lords. He told me in 1993, in the first of many conversations, “We adopted the most militant approach—direct confrontation. We needed health care, so we took over a hospital. We worked according to a four-year plan. In four years we’ll be free, in jail, or dead. We built the hospital. The older workers say, ‘this hospital was built by the Young Lords.’” Later they invited everyone who was into drugs to eat free in the hospital cafeteria, initiating a long-term commitment to “harm reduction” (treating drug abuse as a health issue, focusing on reducing the harm associated with it). They enlisted the help of St. Ann’s Episcopal Church, the only church receptive to their demands, in clothing drives, liberation schools, welfare rights, and tenant organizations. Some Young Lords began to do prisoner support, supporting in particular the prisoners in Attica during and following the uprising. Others moved to Puerto Rico and began to do work promoting independence there.
Police and FBI agents infiltrated the Young Lords as part of their Counter Intelligence Program, known more commonly by its acronym, COINTEL. Then terrorist cells began to emerge. “It was so depressing,” Alba noted. “When the Young Lords arose in 1969–70, a lot of other things were happening,” Armando observed. “There were sharp racial tensions, and it was the middle of the Vietnam War…. The country was in an upheaval with Americans trying to figure out ‘is this worth it?’ It was a different time. People felt you had to do something. There was a sense of life and death that you don’t have now. The methods of social control
