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Journal of African American Studies

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30-10-2019

Occupy Lincoln Park: the Militant Drama of the Young Lords Organization

Author: Karen A. Secrist

Published in: Journal of African American Studies | Issue 4/2019

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Abstract

This essay examines the late 1960s politicization of the gang-turned-militant Young Lords Organization (YLO) by highlighting moments in the group’s history that are characterized by dramatic struggles to claim space in order to mobilize activism against urban renewal in Chicago’s Lincoln Park. The YLO’s protests reveal the intensity of its members’ allegiance to their neighborhood, challenging assumptions that Puerto Rico was the definitive spatial frame of reference in the development of US Puerto Rican radicalism.

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The groups that seized the campus called themselves the “Poor People’s Coalition,” or the PPC. In addition to representatives of the YLO, the Coalition included members of the Young Patriots (an Uptown street gang), the Concerned Citizens of the Survival Front, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Latin American Defense Organization (LADO) (“Leave today” 1969).

The Young Lords also demanded that the Seminary fund a children’s center and a Latino cultural center (Koziol 1969).

According to Jiménez:

“McKay talked to the Board and dropped the charge, and we got a call from Texas saying we had got $600,000 for low-income housing in Lincoln Park. The Board agreed to meet our demands for housing, that their financial records be open, that McCormick join to help community groups, that it publicly oppose the racist policies of Urban Renewal, and that it open its facilities to the use of the community.” (as cited in Browning 1970, 20)

Here, I focus upon a branch of social movements that are often referred to as the direct-action tradition. These movements have relied upon such direct-action forms as civil disobedience, sit-ins, strikes, boycotts, building or land takeovers, and other dramatic confrontations (Reed 2005).

Alexander J. Reichl (1999) defines urban renewal in Reconstructing Times Square as “a massive effort to restructure land-use patterns in American cities around an emerging postindustrial economy” (11).

The $47,170 bid sought to build 70 units on 2.5 acres of slum-cleared land on North Larrabee Street between Eugenie Street and Armitage Avenue (“O.K Hartford” 1970).

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Title: Occupy Lincoln Park: the Militant Drama of the Young Lords Organization
Author: Karen A. Secrist
Publication date: 30-10-2019
Publisher: Springer US
Published in: Journal of African American Studies / Issue 4/2019
Print ISSN: 1559-1646
Electronic ISSN: 1936-4741
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12111-019-09449-3

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