Stop 1: New York Young Lords HQ at 1678 Madison Ave, New York City

After its official formation at Tompkins Square Park, the Young Lords opened its first headquarters at 1678 Madison Avenue. Here, with the Vietnam War raging and a government deeply suspicious of leftist movements, the group began to enact social programs to help their community. From March to May 1970, the Young Lords conducted door-to-door tuberculosis testing in the Bronx and El Barrio. At the time, the Tuberculosis Association was providing testing throughout the city from noon to 6 p.m. every other day. These testing times excluded poorer communities, particularly those who often were at work. When the activists requested a truck for their neighborhoods, they were denied. The Young Lords responded by actively taking over the Tuberculosis Association’s X-ray truck and making sure their neighborhoods were given access. Over 900 people were tested, and a third of those were positive; their rates were double that of the rest of the city. These tactics, although forceful, effectively garnered attention and support for El Barrio.  

The Young Lords’ core beliefs centered around enabling all communities to provide for themselves. In Chicago, the Young Lords joined forces with the Black Panther Party and the Young Patriots Organization­ – a group of poor, white leftists from Appalachia ­– to form the Rainbow Coalition. The coalition stood for the common struggles of the poor, disenfranchised demographics of the U.S. and their fight against racism, police brutality, poverty, and corruption. The Rainbow Coalition’s work influenced the 13-point Program and Platform that the New York Young Lords created shortly after their first foray into the public sphere. The platform was drafted by the group’s deputy minister of education Juan González and its deputy minister of information Pablo “Yoruba” Guzmán. The NY Young Lords’ first demand was the liberation of Puerto Rico from U.S. colonialism. It also called for the right to self-determination for all Latinos, as well as the liberation of all “third-world” peoples.

While the liberation of Puerto Rico was at the forefront of the group’s priorities, it also worked towards a larger multi-faceted goal of freedom for all peoples. The Young Lords were one of the only activist organizations to openly welcome LGBTQ members, thanks to the tremendous efforts of trans activist and Young Lords member Sylvia Rivera. Despite accepting queer members into the organization, the Young Lords failed to appoint any queer person to positions of authority. The group, which promoted gender equality as one of its 13 points, also failed to elevate women within its organization. The 10th point of the platform asserted, “We want equality for women. Machismo must be revolutionary… not oppressive.” This was the only point ever changed in the platform. Denise Oliver-Velez, one of the few women able to secure a place within the party’s leadership hierarchy, and Iris Morales argued with the male leaders of the group that machismo was the same as racism – a form of reactionary bigotry against the oppressed – and it could not be used as a tool for revolution. Their continuous efforts led the Young Lords to alter the point in May 1970 to claim, “Down with machismo and male chauvinism.” The point was also moved up eight spots to point number five.  

The female members of the Young Lords not only changed the platform, but they also led the charge in support for reproductive rights. They critiqued pharmaceutical companies that tested experimental contraceptives on Puerto Rican women in the 1950’s, and even more horrifying, the forced sterilization of over a third of Puerto Rican women under 50. This practice continued to target Puerto Ricans and other racial groups in the States. It was thanks to the Young Lords’ campaigning that the practice ended in New York. At the same time, they protested the lack of safe abortion care, after a Puerto Rican mother named Carmen Rodriguez died due to medical malpractice. Their work led to reforms that addressed the conditions involved in Rodriguez’s death.

As you make your way to stop number two, you can learn more about the broader history of prominent members of the Young Lords in the following section.

Note: This section includes mentions of sensitive material, such as suicide, so please listen only if you feel comfortable doing so. 

Young Lords member Sylvia Rivera, as mentioned before, was an avid advocate for the LGBTQ community. Born to a Venezuelan mother and Puerto Rican father – who were both absent figures in her life – Rivera ran away from her grandmother’s home at age 11 after experimenting with feminine clothing and makeup. Just six years later, Rivera was a predominant player in the Stonewall Inn uprising. In 1981, she recalled, “The people at them bars, especially at the Stonewall, were involved in other movements and everybody just like, alright, we gotta do our thing. We’re gonna go for it.”   

Rivera and fellow activist Marsha P. Johnson founded the STAR House, or the Street Transvestite Active Revolutionary House, for young homeless trans kids. The STAR members later marched along with the Young Lords in an uprising against police brutality. While Young Lords leader Guzmán recognized that gay liberation groups had similar motivations to the Party, he felt gay liberation was “a whole other trip” and feared losing group members if the Party came out as pro-queer. Undeterred, Rivera joined the Young Lords to push the group to start the Gay and Lesbian Caucus. While the Young Lords are known primarily as a Puerto Rican activist group, Rivera serves as an example of the diversity behind the movement, being both Puerto Rican and Venezuelan. 

Julio Roldan was a more rank-and-file member of the Young Lords. The 34-year-old marched in the Garbage Offensive in 1969, but by 1970, the activist was stuck in the "Tombs" prison in Manhattan. Just a few short hours after chanting, “Power to the People!” Julio was found hung in his cell. The official investigation ruled he died by suicide, but the Young Lords accused his guards of committing murder. More than 2,000 people attended Roldan’s funeral. The Young Lords seized the People’s Church, a stop later in this tour, to protest. The weeks-long occupation called for a city investigation and a Legal Aid Center for inmates. At the same time, the Tombs erupted in prison protests that demanded action regarding overcrowding and other prison reforms, with some prisoners forming the Inmates Liberation Front as a branch of the Young Lords. The prison protests pressured the city to acquiesce to an in-depth investigation. Civil rights attorney William vanden Heuvel led the committee investigation into both Roldan’s death and subsequent riot. He accepted the official explanation but pointed to issues with overcrowding and underfunding in the prison. The judge who saw Roldan on the day of his death had less than two minutes to hear each case. The case remains suspicious, with a pathologist called in by Roldan’s family finding possible evidence of a beating and that at least four other prisoners had died under similar circumstances. The prison was closed after a judge ruled the conditions there to be unconstitutional.

1. Gilligan, Heather. “Sylvia Rivera Threw One of the First Bottles in the Stonewall Riots, but Her Activism Went Much Further.” Timeline.com. March 16, 2017. https://timeline.com/sylvia-rivera-threw-one-of-the-first-bottles-in-the-stonewall-riots-but-her-activism-went-much-4bb0d33b9a2c. 
2. Halperin, Anna Danziger. “‘We Do Everything That the Brothers Do:" Women of the Young Lords.” New-York Historical Society Museum & Library. October 14, 2020. https://www.nyhistory.org/blogs/we-do-everything-that-the-brothers-do-women-of-the-young-lords.  
3. Latino Education Network Service. “New York Young Lords History.” Accessed November 6, 2022. http://palante.org/AboutYoungLords3.htm.
4. Marcus, Eric. “Sylvia Rivera - Part 1.” Making Gay History: The Podcast. June 22, 2022. https://makinggayhistory.com/podcast/episode-1-1/.
5. Murray, John F., Dean E. Schraufnagel, & Philip C. Hopewell. “Treatment of Tuberculosis. A Historical Perspective.” Annals of the American Thoracic Society. U.S. National Library of Medicine, December 2015. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26653188/#:~:text=In%20the%201970s%2C%20rifampin%20found,treatment%20duration%20to%20six%20months.
6. Narvaez, Alfonso A. “The Young Lords Seize X‐Ray Unit.” The New York Times, June 18, 1970. https://www.nytimes.com/1970/06/18/archives/the-young-lords-seize-xray-unit-take-it-to-area-where-they-say-it.html. 
7. [Audio]: Out Magazine, https://www.out.com/out-exclusives/2016/10/13/sylvia-rivera-discusses-stonewall-riots-never-heard-interview-exclusive, photo credited Courtesy of Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery.
8. Quarles, Philip. “An Unexplained Death and an Unacceptable System.” Produced by WNYC: New York Public Radio. Annotations: The NEH Preservation Project, September 21, 2017. https://www.wnyc.org/story/unexplained-death-and-unacceptable-system/.
9. ResourceUMC. “First Spanish UMC: The People's Church of El Barrio.” United Methodist Church, September 9, 2021. https://www.resourceumc.org/en/content/fsumc-the-peoples-church. 
10. Rothberg, Emma. “Sylvia Rivera.” National Women's History Museum. March 2021. https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/sylvia-rivera.
11. The Sixties Project. “13 point program and platform of the Young Lords Party.” October 1969. Accessed November 6, 2022. http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Manifestos/Young_Lords_platform.html.
12. [Photo] Smithsonian, National Museum of African American History & Culture, https://nmaahc.si.edu/object/nmaahc_2014.109.7.3, photograph by Jesse Steve Rose.