They had simply been looking for a space to feed breakfast to poor children before school. The First Spanish United Methodist Church (FSUMC) seemed an ideal place. Conveniently situated in the center of East Harlem, the spacious building was closed except for a couple of hours on Sunday. But its priest, an exile of Castro’s revolutionary Cuba, denied the use of the church. In late December 1969, two months after their initial request was denied, the militant activists known as the Young Lords nailed the doors of the FSUMC shut after Sunday service and barricaded themselves inside.
Although this Puerto Rican counterpart of the Black Panther Party is today largely unknown, those seeking to build a more just world have much to learn from their tenacity and intrepid organizing skills. Beginning in 1969, this unexpected cohort of New York radicals unleashed a series of riveting urban guerrilla campaigns against the city’s racist policies and contempt for the poor.
As Barry Gottehrer, advisor to then NYC Mayor John Lindsay, told me in an interview, the Young Lords “couldn’t be placated with anti-poverty money, and you couldn’t mess with them either. They took over a church and a hospital and made out like bandits on the evening news.” In Chicago, they occupied a police precinct. In so doing, the Young Lords identified and targeted the embodiments of power at the local level—institutions of influence and authority in the everyday lives of urban dwellers. They weren’t simply fly-by-night activists; they were grassroots organizers who launched strategy-driven campaigns. They built a highly disciplined revolutionary organization with an analysis of the root causes of structural problems, a theory of change, and a vision for a new society, one organized around human need rather than profit.
As Pablo Guzmán, one of the founders of the Young Lords, summarized the political divisions between the Young Lords and the board of the church: “Their idea is that Puerto Rican people dig being poor, and that they made it [through hard work], so why can’t everybody else. . . . They think that Puerto Rican women on welfare spend their money on beer, play the numbers, and dig the gutter.” The board presumed that the poor brought poverty onto themselves through their irresponsible behavior and lack of values, personal drive, and work ethic. The reasoning implied that the poor did not deserve sympathy; help would only enable shiftlessness and deepen dependence—all of which justified the board’s refusal to allow use of the church to feed poor children.
In the 1960s, amid a new wave of displacement occasioned by postwar economic and demographic changes, these deep-seated ideas about poverty gained widespread political currency when social scientists developed a theory of culture to explain poverty. Drawing on anthropologist Oscar Lewis’s 1959 study of Mexicans, they posited that low-income people were trapped in a self-perpetuating “culture of poverty,” a web of pathological behaviors that, when passed down to their children, reproduced intergenerational cycles of poverty and hindered economic advancement.
For their part, the Young Lords argued that displacement, post war deindustrialization, automation, and colonization drove want among Puerto Ricans. Their battle with the FSUMC is one of many examples of how people of color used protest and direct action to force their way into public debate and challenge the logic of such arguments.
CHURCH OCCUPATION
In the wake of increasing state violence against activists, the decision to turn the Lord’s house into a protest site was a brilliant tactical move. It created a sanctuary protected from violent reprisals. A year earlier, in April 1968, after hundreds of Columbia University students occupied major campus buildings protesting the Vietnam War and the university’s gentrification of Harlem, students were dragged from occupied buildings by police wielding billy clubs.
At the East Harlem church, such violence was politically untenable.
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