Against the backdrop of America’s 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. They occupied a hospital, took over a church, paralyzed traffic with uncollected garbage, tested children for lead poisoning, defended prisoners, fought the military police, and fed breakfast to poor children. Their dramatic flair, uncompromising vision for a new society, and skill in linking local problems to international crises 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 records released only after a decade-long Freedom of Information Law request and subsequent court battle, Johanna Fernández has written the definitive history of the Young Lords, from its roots as a Chicago street gang to its rise and fall as a political organization in New York. Led by working-class Puerto Rican youth and modelled after the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords confronted race and class inequality and questioned U.S. foreign policy. Their imaginative protests and media savvy tactics won reforms, popularized socialism, and exposed America’s imperial project in Puerto Rico. Fernández challenges what we think we know about the sixties. In riveting style, she demonstrates how the Young Lords redefined the character of protest, the color of politics, and the cadence of urban culture in the age of great dreams.