The Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History
The Young Lords
 
Jose "Cha Cha" Jimenez, photographed during a television interview.

Downloads

Crafting the People’s Revolution in El Barrio: The Young Lords’ People’s Church, by Darrel Enck-Wanzer (103 KB PDF)

The Young Lords: Its Origins and Convergences with the Black Panther Party, Johanna Fernandez (97 KB PDF)

The Young Lords Organization was a Puerto Rican revolutionary nationalist group, born in 1960’s Chicago.  Originally started as a politicized inner-city gang, the group would later fashion itself after the Black Panther Party (BPP) and ardently championed the independence of Puerto Rico.  Jose “Cha Cha” Jimenez, group leader, redirected the energies and focus of the gang in the late 1960’s.  

After its transformation, the YLO went on to lead militant, community-based campaigns in both New York and Chicago to alleviate the most visible manifestations of the new poverty in American cities: chronic unemployment, the intractable crisis of public health care, childhood lead poisoning, poor sanitation, drug addiction, hunger, racism, and police brutality. 

Legendary in movement circles, the history of this little known organization challenges dominant interpretations of the civil rights and black power movements, the U.S. urban crisis, and the character and complexity of the black Diaspora.

Bibliography

Download the Young Lords bibliography (88 KB PDF file)

Return to Radicals in Black & Brown

Stone Center logo
Home
Development
Programs
Event Calendar
Staff
About the Center
Resources
Stone Center Building
Stone Center Library
Make a Gift