The Young Lords: A Radical History

The Young Lords: A Radical History

by Johanna Fernández
The Young Lords: A Radical History

The Young Lords: A Radical History

by Johanna Fernández

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Overview

Against the backdrop of America's escalating urban rebellions in the 1960s, an unexpected cohort of New York radicals unleashed a series of urban guerrilla actions against the city's racist policies and contempt for the poor. Their dramatic flair, uncompromising socialist vision for a new society, skillful ability to link local problems to international crises, and uncompromising vision for a new society riveted the media, alarmed New York's political class, and challenged nationwide perceptions of civil rights and black power protest. The group called itself the Young Lords.

Utilizing oral histories, archival records, and an enormous cache of police surveillance files released only after a decade-long Freedom of Information Law request and subsequent court battle, Johanna Fernandez has written the definitive account of the Young Lords, from their roots as a Chicago street gang to their rise and fall as a political organization in New York. Led by poor and working-class Puerto Rican youth, and consciously fashioned after the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords occupied a hospital, blocked traffic with uncollected garbage, took over a church, tested children for lead poisoning, defended prisoners, fought the military police, and fed breakfast to poor children. Their imaginative, irreverent protests and media conscious tactics won reforms, popularized socialism in the United States and exposed U.S. mainland audiences to the country's quiet imperial project in Puerto Rico. Fernandez challenges what we think we know about the sixties. She shows that movement organizers were concerned with finding solutions to problems as pedestrian as garbage collection and the removal of lead paint from tenement walls; gentrification; lack of access to medical care; childcare for working mothers; and the warehousing of people who could not be employed in deindustrialized cities. The Young Lords' politics and preoccupations, especially those concerning the rise of permanent unemployment foretold the end of the American Dream. In riveting style, Fernandez demonstrates how the Young Lords redefined the character of protest, the color of politics, and the cadence of popular urban culture in the age of great dreams.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781469669328
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date: 02/01/2022
Pages: 480
Sales rank: 311,898
Product dimensions: 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Johanna Fernandez is associate professor of history at Baruch College of the City University of New York and editor of Writing on the Wall: Selected Prison Writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Johanna Fernandez has not only produced the definitive history of the Young Lords; she also has single-handedly shifted our understanding of the post-1968 political landscape. Richly documented, beautifully written, and brutally honest, this book moves the Young Lords from the margins of the New Left and Puerto Rican nationalism to the very epicenter of global struggles against racism, imperialism, and patriarchy and for national self-determination, medical justice, reproductive rights, and socialism. A work as monumental and expansive as the Young Lords' vision of revolution." —Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression



In this remarkable book, historian Johanna Fernandez tells us that the children of Puerto Rican migration to the U.S. colonizer's continent developed a 'second sight,' experiencing poverty and discrimination while possessing knowledge of Puerto Rico as a U.S. colony and U.S. imperialism, making their organization, the Young Lords, a powerful force. Challenging Latino antiblack racism and machismo and the church, and using intense community organizing, they not only brought liberation and class consciousness to Puerto Ricans but also infused the social movements of the 1960s with solidarity, launching the famed Rainbow Coalition. This is history writing at its best, rigorously researched yet powerful and moving, often poetic. And it is not 'just history,' but rather profoundly a cautionary tale of the present and the future given the limitation of social revolution within the powerful settler-colonial state that is the United States."—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States



A groundbreaking and meticulous account of one of the most influential radical groups in 1960s America. After decades of painstaking research and countless interviews with actual participants, Johanna Fernandez has produced a vivid chronicle of the unheralded achievements, the painful failures, and the continuing legacy of the New York Young Lords during those few brief years that we sought to change the world and captured the imagination of a city."—Juan Gonzalez, Richard D. Heffner Professor of Communications and Public Policy, Rutgers University, and former Young Lords Minister of Education

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