Young Lords Party

YOUNG LORDS PARTY. Founded in 1969 on the model of the Black Panther Party and composed mainly of second-generation Puerto Rican youth, the Young Lords Party (YLP) played a major role in awakening a spirit of nationalism, unity, and political struggle within the Puerto Rican community. The YLP’s thirteen-point program and platform called for equality between men and women, community control of police, schools, and other community institutions, and the establishment of a socialist society. Skilled at using the media, the YLP published a weekly newspaper, Palante, produced the first radio program by New York-born Latinos, and gained extensive television coverage for its activities.

The first YLP headquarters was located in El Barrio—the largest and most important community of the Puerto Rican diaspora—at 1678 Madison Avenue, between 111th and 112th Streets in New York City. Its first political offensive consisted of burning garbage in the streets of El Barrio to force the Department of Sanitation to provide adequate trash removal. Perhaps its most famous action was the takeover of the First United Spanish Methodist Church on Lexington Avenue and 112th Street on 28 December 1969. There, it operated community programs for eleven days that included classes on Afro-Caribbean history and culture, health testing, as well as a free breakfast and clothing program. Many thousands of people participated in activities at the church, and when the police evicted the YLP 105 people were arrested.

At its peak, almost a thousand people were YLP members. Storefront offices opened in the South Bronx and on the Lower East Side, and branches were established in Newark-Hoboken, Bridgeport, Philadelphia, and Puerto Rico. In addition, there were active supporters in Detroit, Boston, and Hawaii, in the military, and in prisons. Support in El Barrio was particularly widespread, as exemplified by a YLP-led October 1970 march of 10,000 people demanding independence for Puerto Rico that wound its way from East Harlem to the United Nations. The YLP contributed to increasing citywide lead and tuberculosis detection tests, creating the mood that led to bilingual education and the teaching of Puerto Rican history, and giving impetus to the struggle for drug treatment services and a new Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx.

In 1972, the YLP shifted its focus away from community organizing toward theoretical study and organizing at work sites, in the process changing its name to the Puerto Rican Workers Organization. A number of former Young Lords made their way into mainstream institutions. Most prominent of these were Felipe Luciano, once deputy chairman, who became a newscaster on major New York television stations, and Juan Gonzalez, the once deputy minister of information, who became a reporter for the Daily News and other mass media. In one of his columns, Gonzalez wrote, “Before the Lords, Puerto Ricans and other Hispanics were an invisible minority. After our founding, a whole generation experienced a cultural awakening.”

Abramson, Michael. Palante: Young Lords Party. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971.

Erik-Wanzer, Derrel, ed. The Young Lords: a Reader. New York: New York University Press, 2010.

Fernandez, Johanna. The Young Lords: a Radical History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019.

Lee, Jennifer. “The Young Lords: A New Generation of Puerto Ricans; An Oral History.” Culturefront (fall 1994).

Young Lords Newspaper Collection. DePaul University Library. Chicago. https://digicol.lib.depaul.edu/digital/collection/younglords