Cool Zone Media.
Hello and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and this week I'm traveling and instead of doing the thing, I'm doing a different thing where I play a rerun, and in this case, I'm playing a rerun that I thought would tie in really well with last week's episode. Last week we talked about the first Paramedics, so this week we're going to revisit the Young Lord's.
We're going to talk about the group of radicals who completely changed the way that healthcare works in this country by taking direct action and doing all kinds of cool stuff.
I hope you enjoy it. Hello and welcome to Inside Podcasting, the podcast where we give you all the tips and tricks you need to run a successful podcast. Our first tip I'm going to give it to you for free, is don't try and come up with a clever podcast introduction for every single episode, because it gets old and boring and then you find yourself doing introductions like this instead of saying, this is cool, well did cool stuff. I'm your host Mariya Kiljoy, which is much nicer and
easier to say. You see. That's that's the first tip on this okay, so with me today is a Linda Segata.
Allow.
I'm good, I'm happy to be here.
Yay. Usually I'm like, on this day, that's totally a different day than last time. But this time it is a different day than last It is.
We're older, wiser, yeah, and last week.
And I'm on more antibiotics than I was last week. But I have less tooth pain, so that is an advantage. Yeah. I think I did the last recording with like wisdom tooth infection.
Oh wowsy Alec.
Yeah, our producer is back. We're no longer running rudderless. We have Sophie Lichtman with us. Sophie, how are you doing? Is that what happens when I'm not here?
We were lost? It was my first time, but I was lost about you.
Oh thank you, Linda.
That was not your first rodeo.
Oh I'm glad to be back and I excited excited to hear parts three and four.
Yeah okay. Also our audio engineers Ian, thanks Ian for doing the thankless work. Our theme music was written for us by un Woman. This week we are picking up where we left off last week for our second ever four parter. Go back and listen to parts one and two. What's wrong with you? Why do you start on episode three of a four part You're probably the kind of person who can read comic books. I can't read comic books because I don't know where to start.
Wow, really, you start wherever?
I know?
That's just the word for me to be fair bagpie.
We just made a We just made an off mic argument for why you would start at the end of something instead of at the beginning, because you might find out somebody that you think is a hero is actually a really, really bad person in their personal life.
Oh that's true. I actually, for research purposes, should probably start all biographies about three quarters of the way through the book and read through the episode. Yeah yeah, all right, fair enough. Well that's not what's happening in this particular episode. They you know, no one's perfect, no group is perfect. But we're focusing on the stuff that the Young Lords did, and there was way too much good shit to just
do in two episodes. So here we are. We are talking about the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican street gang turned activist organization who where we left off, is just rocking shit in New York City. They're setting trash on fire, but in a good way. I feel like there's like good and bad ways to set trash on fire, and they're all set to come into their own so let's
watch them do it. So they've just burned a whole bunch of garbage and gotten the city to be like, maybe we need to do something about this garbage because these radicals keep setting it all on fire and blocking the roads. So they open up a storefront because now they're way more popular than they were, and they turned to organization. They started operating more like having autonomous working
groups that work on different issues. And one of the autonomous working groups they set up is really interesting to me. They set up police watch organizations to go watch the police, right hu. And these were community led rather than just led by the young lords, which one else. Yeah, like, I haven't because I haven't done a Panthers episode yet. I'm not trying to contrast to the Panthers ideas of
police watch and stuff. But if you're going to have a membership organization with a hierarchy, please do shit like this. It was an autonomous affiliate network of neighbor neighbors circles, and most of the volunteers were men and women. In their forties, not directly affiliated with the Lords. I think this was to basically have like cooler heads, like like people were a bit calmer and more trustworthy in this way or whatever, you know, and they focused on conflict
de escalation. They also helped resist unlawful arrests WHOA. And their goal was to eventually make the police obsolete. I really like this.
Yeah, I also really like this.
I know, I'm like, why doesn't this just happen? Why don't people just make the police absolute? I mean, probably a lot of people who try to make the police obsolete by either going to jail or becoming worse than the cops. But like the partnersher tried to make camps obsolete. But he sucks anyway. They were unarmed, or at least they were not armed with firearms, which wasn't a moral decision but instead a strategic one within the context they
were in. Actually, most of what the Young Lords are doing is unarmed compared to a lot of other organizations. We're going to talk about what weapons they did use. Have you have you heard what weapon they're like signature weapon was. No, I'm not going to tell you yet. It's gonna come up later in the script. Okay, so good. I want you to think about what would be the coolest like non gun and that they could have.
I know, right now I'm picturing like chain with the ball with the spikes on it.
That's pretty good.
Is it a battle axe?
Nope, it's not a flail. It's not a battle axe.
Okay.
When I do my spinoff episode Great Medieval Weapons of History to explain the difference in morning stars and flails, and they like argument about whether or not the flail was actually historically used medieval. Okay, anyway, so they waited until they had buy in from the community before they even started this organization. They didn't just be like, oh, we're the new cops in town. We're going to start
roaming the streets. They ended up with two hundred volunteers that patrolled a five block area around their storefront.
Holy shit. Yeah, yeah, one hundred people is a lot of people.
I know, and like, I want to know more about its organizational models. I mean, it's like my nerd shit as I want to figure out where they were hierarchical, where they weren't hierarchical, where they moved into different realms. But you know, they also launched a children's breakfast program
working together with the Black Panthers. I think that and this is an inference from several sources, but I think that this is because the Panthers they're on the downswing because the Panther twenty one trial, right, So the Young Lords are stepping up and the Panthers are helping them do it. And the cops work really hard to discourage parents from letting their kids participate, saying basically like, oh, they're a gang. Don't let your kids fall into that gang.
Keep your kids away from you know, the evil Young Lords or whatever. Yeah, it didn't work. Lots of people went working out of the storefront. The community just pours in support from all corners. There's local thieves who are like, hey, do you want some chairs? We still out of this VW. And that's where all the chairs in the office came from.
Healthcare professionals donated medicine and volunteered, and there was an informal clinic run out of there on probably hanging out on the VW chairs that were stolen out of I mean, whoever's VW was was maybe mad, but you know, maybe they wanted to know a richer neighborhood to do it.
Who knows bread sourcing?
Yeah, from each, according to ability to steal, to each, according to need of stolen goods. They kept the whole block clean because that was like kind of their initial thing anyway, right that there's they'd like physically clean the streets, not metaphorically clean the streets, although we'll talk about some of their how they handled drug dealers in a little bit later. Because people loved them. Yeah, they set them ount of trash on fire. Everyone liked them. Fire makes friends, apparently.
I know I would I would think there'd be more of a backlash. I'm pretty excited that people were like, way to go, guys, someone had to do it.
Yeah, Like I struggle to imagine that right now, in most places you could go burn a bunch of trash in the street and make do more than polarize people.
Yeah, but I guess. I mean the need was so great that they, you know, that the community was just like something had to happen. We needed our trash to get picked up.
Yeah, yeah, totally. And I bet you it's like I bet you the first half was like half the people were like fuck yeah burning trash, this rules. Fuck the man, and the other half was like, I don't know about that. But then when it like worked and people started picking up the trash regularly, they were like, oh, all right, and so there are this much larger organization. Now some
of them are still in high school. So the Young Lords managed to continue their name, but a lot of them dropped out of college and high school to work on this. There's a lot of ex college kids. This is a pattern we see across the late sixties early seventies movements, is that people go full time to work on this stuff. And the people who can go full time are people who are like, why would I want a degree when instead I can change the world.
Yeah.
As someone who made that decision myself, I have a particular affinity for this.
Yeah.
No, No, everyone who finished their degrees, that's great. Fuck. Yeah. Anyway, they start working alongside the welfare rights movement. They're just involved in everything. Because a fourteen year old young Lord got arrested at a welfare rights demonstration. As far as I I didn't put this in the script, but basically I think he was like walking home from somewhere and he saw a bunch of women like doing a sit
in and were like. He was like, oh, I'm with them, and then sat down and got arrested or something like that, and he ends up in friend of the Pod the Tombs, which has been which is locked up basically everyone in the show who's lived in New York over the course of one hundred and fifty years, Like we do episodes about the nineteenth century, and all of the anarchists are getting sent to the tombs. Oh wow, and here we are in the nineteen sixties. People are getting sent to
the Tombs. Have you ever been to the Tombs? I have no idea if you got arrested in New York I have not. Actually, okay, I never got it, but.
The name since a chill down my spine. Yeah, definitely.
I feel like most guests, I'd be very nervous to be like, hey, you ever got arrest anyway, So the welfare movement of the late of the nineteen sixties deserves its own episode. At some point they shut down New York City a bunch of times. They were fierce as fuck. They were women of color lead and the New York Young Lords weren't exclusively men, and some of the founders were women. But this alliance stillp helps bring gender equity equality into the movement, Like more and more women are
joining because they're focusing also on this particular thing. And this is something that they keep doing over and over again, is that they keep moving and working on issues that bring more and more women into the movement. And I think that's really cool. By October nineteen sixty nine, they put together a thirteen point program modeled on the Black Panthers,
but growing from it as well. They use the word Latino in this, which is one of the first public uses of the word in this con text, and as far as I can tell, yeah, as a white person who just read this stuff, Basically later in the nineteen seventies, Hispanic was added to the census, and so Latino became more of a word to be like fuck Spain, Like what the fuck we're not from Spain?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Oka, But this is before that.
Yeah, yeah, exactly, So I think that they're still already on the like fuck Spain, we're not from Spain totally.
Yes, they were very much on that tip.
Yeah. And it also it talks about this this thirteen point program, it talks about cross racial solidarity between all oppressed people. It talks about internationalism, it talks about women's liberation. It doesn't always succeed at doing more than talking about these things, but we'll get to that.
Yeah, And I believe that at first it was like a ten point demand, right, and then I think I from what I remember reading, like the parts about battling muchismo and women's liberation were added because of pressure from women within the Young Lords.
I believe you're right. I wrote a bunch of the script a little bit ago. Yeah, it got at the very least, it got rewritten to further emphasize these things. I think the women's liberation thing was I could be wrong. I think it was in there in the beginning, but it wasn't as strongly worded, and it was like near the end it was like the last point or the second less time totally, And so it got like bumped up to number three or four or something after after this.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right, because I do remember it being something about like much cheesebo needs to be used in a revolutionary way, and the women were like, Yo, that's not what we're talking about. Actually, that's not possible.
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, they did so much yeah, no, I mean I'm really excited about that part of it that they they did so much discussion about what is and isn't useful in terms of like they're basically having the conversation about masculinity versus toxic masculinity totally.
And there are definite like conversations about gender and about how gender is a social construct like that was happening within the Young Lords and a lot of conversation learning from gay liberation movements. Like when I read about that, that's what really blew my mind and maybe be like, oh my god, I'm so proud that these people are Puerto Rican.
Yeah, you know, yeah, because we get presented this like because of the image of like well, actually, I mean mainstream society literally doesn't have an image of the Young Lords. Mainstream society ignores them, right or doesn't know about them.
And but when we see like the mainstream image of radicals in the nineteen sixties, you might see a black man with a rifle, right and it and there's nothing wrong with that image, but it's like, yeah, it's like I didn't know that the Black Panthers cifically teamed up
with a queer Liberation Front until I did. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, they they've made explicit statements around this time, being like we're with the queers, you know, wow, And it's this like yeah, I mean there's still all kinds of like sexism in the Chismo, but people are so interested in like looking back and pretending like everything are these divorced movements. Yeah, I remember this. No, I'm just completely outscripted. I remember this conversation I had with this old union miner in
West Virginia years ago who was like working against mountaintop removal. Oh, and I was talking to him and he was like, you know, a coal mining hippie in the sixties, and he's white, and he's like, yeah, in the sixties, we were out there protesting the war, and then on the other corners people protesting for gay rights, and then the other corners people protesting for black power. And we were like, why are we all on different corners? This is dumb.
Let's stand on the same corner and then we're stronger. And I'm like, oh wow, yeah, yeah, makes me happy. It can be that simple, you know. And like, as you talked about and we're going to talk about more about it, and I'm be curious because I think you know more about this part of it than me. The women within this movement had to fight for this inclusion, you know. But yeah, so they put together a thirteen point program and it ends with we want a socialist society.
So there's no like, you can't really pretend like they're reformists, right. They were really good at getting reforms, but that wasn't their goal.
Yeah.
They set up a bilingual newspaper, which they mimiographed themselves before eventually getting it produced all properly. It was one of the country's first bilingual newspapers. Oh wow. At its peak it had print runs of twenty four thousand copies. We fit every week, I believe. And it was called Polente, which I'll read. I'll read what is in a script really quick. Polente is slang that means onward, basically from PoTA Olente. There's a sick hooray for the riff rap
song called Polente. Maybe you've heard of it, Alinda.
I have.
It took me two years to write.
Oh really it did.
Yeah. Yeah, Like, I don't know if anyone out there is hard on themselves, but you can probably relate to tasking yourself with I need to write a song that honors this movement and this, like you know of my ancestors, So I better write a really good song within like four to five minutes that encapsulates this, like how much it means to me. So it took me about two years to do that.
That makes a lot of sense. The like like there's episodes I haven't done of cool people who did cool stuff yet because I'm like, I'm not ready. Yeah, I'm not ready to like cover. I mean I've done some that I kind of felt that way about Stonewall in the Spanish CVIL and some other things, right, but there's some that I'm just like, oh, how the hell am I gonna tell this? So that makes a lot of sense to me. It's a great song. Anyone who's listening should go and listen to this song.
And great video. Also yeah, ye my friend Chris Mark.
Yeah, I actually originally wrote the script for someone else, and then I use this part of the script to talk about how cool the song is, how people should check it out, and then I dragged you on as a guest. Nice, so they start putting out uh polente, Actually do you want to do? You have more of a I'm like it's slang that means onward. Yeah, is there more that you could say about what it means?
It is true, it's just slang, you know, and it's funny within like, at least the experience of my family, you know, my dad, who was like a total like veteran turned hippie, would be like, oh, yeah, why aren't they like the Young Lords, you know, And then other people in my family would be like, that just means to literally go forward. There's like dance songs about that. Why are you I'll wrap up in this word, you know.
So it's it's like a thing that I feel like for me, I was specifically drawn into that word because of the Young Lords. And maybe if you don't come from like a super like a nerdy background of researching them, you might just be like that means like keep a pushing, you know. But because of my mind being like totally blown by learning about them, I was like, this is the word. This is what I need to do.
Yeah, yeah, no, fuck yah. Speaking of what we need to do, we need to be sponsored the things that we hate in order to eat food and feed it, feed the food to the people that we like and ourselves. So it's been a particular week of like learning about a bunch of ads that have managed to slip in past our filters. Oh really, So if you're listening to this in Ireland and you get an ad for because I mean, a cop in Ireland, I'm just gonna go ahead and say I do not support this particular sponsor.
Wow, that is just trolling. I know, that really trolling, you.
Know, especially if it was like I don't know if it's Northern Ireland or whatever. Especially feels like a brit become a British cop in Ireland.
I love to know what category they've slipped in under because we have like government blocked and like all those categories blocked.
Yeah, it's like all social club.
A few years back, we had the Washington State Patrol running ads on one of our shows, or a couple of our shows, and we're like, what the fuck, Like we have all these categories blocked.
They were under business.
Oh wows more honest?
You like, yes, yeah, yep, So don't enjoy these ads.
Yeah, welcome to our life. Here you go, and we're back. And it'll be particularly funny because these ads change over time, right, they're not set when we record the episode they're set, I think when you listen to the episode. So what if in the future I start doing host red ads and I've gone on this long rant and then I come in and I'm like, do you like sandwich cookies? Well, do I have a sandwich cookie for you? The following brand of sandwich cookie is all natural and it is
exactly what I need when I need sugar. I don't know, I'm not really doing a good job.
I'm sorrying.
Really happening. I didn't want to.
Famous vegan snack the Oreo.
No, it's vegan.
Oh yeah, that's why the newman O's thing is like not actually a rip off, because having the more organic version is fine. But it's like people are like New Minos. They are the vegan Oreos, and you're like, as are Oreos.
I haven't thought of at New Mino in a long time.
When I got some, you taught me all about the gloriousness that is the Oreo Magpie. You literally could do a sponsorship for Oreo if they were by an evil corporation.
I know this is the problem, Like anyway, the incredible tension of everyone needing jobs in order to continue to live, and I like this I have the best job of anyone I know. I feel like Olinda, you might also identify with having a pretty decent job.
It's true.
But yeah, but what most jobs. I'm going to turn this into a proper segue. Wow, what most jobs? But my job actually doesn't offer me not because is healthcare. Okay, we're gonna talk about healthcare. Now that's my segue. I'm really good at my job. The medical situation for people of color in the nineteen sixties New York was not good.
Yeah, devastating that that's a better word. Yeah, for sure.
White medical students used black and Puerto Rican hospitals for training before they moved to work on You know people that society actually cared about. Lincoln Hospital, the only hospital at the time in the South Bronx, was called the butcher Shop. People would go in there to get a leg amputated and come out with the wrong leg amputated.
Holy shit.
Yeah, there was no triage in the waiting room of the er. The paint in the children's ward was lead. We'll talk more about lead pain. Here's a nice euphemism. People got enrolled into medical studies without their consent. That is the nicest way of phrasing that I can possibly imagine seriously is a it's bad. It's like a really
bad thing. So the Young Lords single handedly, No wait, they show up as one player and a larger coalition of groups fighting for health rights, the East Harlem Health Council, the e h HC. This is actually before they moved to the South Bronx. We're going to come back and talk about Lincoln Hospital a little bit later, okay, But so this is the when they're still more in East Harlem. They're protesting inside and outside of hospitals about the abuses
happening there. And a ton of the medical providers at these hospitals were involved in organizing with the EHHC, just usually not the administration, but the actual doctors and the ha other you know, nursing staff and administrative staff and stuff. Administrative staff, I don't know what you call the people who aren't the bosses but are still administering things.
Yeah, I've got nothing, yeah, administrative staff, yeah, middle management yeah.
Yeah.
And I think it's like again, like you have these like people who are like we're crazy socialists, who we're crazy yaw in uniforms and patrol like to keep the cops off of our block. And the doctors are like, wait, but are you trying to help people? And they're like yeah, and they're like all right, great, we're trying to help people too. How do we help people? You know?
Yeah? Yeah?
The Young Lords they sat down with some doctors at Metropolitan Hospital in Harlem and they drafted a ten point health program because of course it had to be a ten point health program because they only have two naming conventions in the Young Lord which is one is the ten point or whatever number point program and the other one is the something offensive like the garbage offensive. Okay, that's now. I love a good naming convention and there have been great ones throughout history. I just so I'm
not trying to drag them. They just they have two of them in it. In the ten point program, they advocate for direct democratic control of the hospital by a combination of its medical staff, it's workers, and the residents of the neighborhood. No fucking notes, Like.
Seriously, that sounds great, let's do it.
Yeah, how do we do it? Also in the ten point program was like healthcare should be free? What the fuck? Then they formed yet another organization, the Health Revolutionary Unity movement or Hrum Hrum. I think hrum and it might seem sort of odd that they may and join a million organizations, but it's actually kind of an effective decentralization technique that I think this is my own bias coming into it. When they are more effectively decentralized is when
they are accomplishing more. From my point of view, that's my reading of this history. They're avoiding putting themselves directly into power. They're keeping power with the people, which is their stated goal. And I'm under the impression that they were also learning a lot about what wasn't working with the Black Panthers, who also were looking at their own weaknesses and trying to them up. Don't get me wrong.
It's also important because while this is a story about how the Young Lord's won sanitation, detox facilities, a patient's bill of rights, it's also a story about how the young Lords, in conjunction with a huge, intersecting swath of revolutionaries and like medical professionals and stuff, do so. An awful lot of this health care activism was inspired by the Cuban Revolution. A bunch of doctors and young lords has secreted themselves to Cuba at one point or another
to see how to create a functioning health care system. Wow. Yeah, I'm not a I'm not like a big state socialism girl, but I'm also not a big capitalism girl, and socialist Cuba produced a better healthcare system than the United States has ever managed to do.
Yeah.
So on December fifth, nineteen sixty nine, they joined to sit in at the hospital they're protesting the construction of an emergency room. That I could not figure out what was wrong in the emergency room was being done in a bad way.
Okay, I don't know.
There's so many different times they all take over churches and hospitals and shit that it was like hard. Wow. Yeah, it's a good problem for your movement to have be like and keep track of everything they did, because they did everything constantly.
Yeah.
I believe them that the er was being done in a bad way and that it was worth protesting. I have no everything else they've been right on about. So they didn't win a dramatic change in the construction of the er, but they want a sort of a side demand okay, and that the hospital would now pay for one of their doctors to come volunteer at their storefront clinic offer immunizations. Yeah, and then there was something else that they wanted to work on. They just like literally
worked on everything. They were focused on lead poisoning. I don't know if you knew this, but lead is really bad.
For you, yes, especially for children.
Yeah, yeah, which is why you shouldn't paint the children's wing of the hospital in lead. Apparently it's like sweet if you eat it, and that's why kids eat it. Sophie is looking distressed by this.
It's trajac.
So lead poisoning.
It's poisoning the original like fruit flavored vape things I don't. I don't.
Maybe there's lead in the current vape. Well, we get sued if I make this claim allegedly.
Yeah, you're saying you don't know, but you might know. But it might be, but it might not be, and that's fine.
Yeah, we're not in the UK. We can't get sued for libel. There's probably not.
Like this podcaster is in the UK bagpot, but.
I'm not in the ego. Oh, I see, interesting, the delicate balance we all walk, Okay, I genuinely have no All I know is that vapes are unregular, right are they still unregulated? I don't know about this.
I don't get pretty unregulated. But lead paint tastes sweet, and that's why kids.
That is all right, I'm looking it up.
It really sped with my day. It's Monday and I'm already like what the fuck?
Yeah, lead paint has a sweet taste, which encourages children to put paint chips in their mouths and chew on surfaces like window sills, says University of Rochester, the top Google result when I google lead paint.
I bet animals are drawn to it as well.
M that's why animals attack.
I thanks you violent, thanks thanks for bombing me out.
Magpie, You're welcome. That's the point of this ship. Wait this well, let me talk about how they've stopped it. Oh that's a great thing. They stopped this shit. Tell me all right, So lead fucks you up. It fucks up your brain, It fucks up your kidneys, It can kill you. Children in poor urban areas were chok full of lead. The paint had been discontinued in the nineteen forties, but no one was checking poor houses housing areas to make sure that, like landlords were getting rid of the
lead paint and shit. New York City late nineteen sixties, twenty five to thirty five thousand kids were getting fucked up by lead poisoning every year. Wow, and that's just the ones who were like it was bad enough or got noticed in that way. Right. Of course, one kid, he was two years old, his name was Gregory Franklin. He was killed by lead paint and basically since he had been born, his parents had been fighting with their landlord to deal with the lead paint in their house
to no success, and then they lost their child. So the Young Lords spring into action. They what they needed was a lead offensive. Yeah, I love it.
I know.
It's so good, especially lead offensive because it sounds like it's going to be about machine guns. But they're still unarmed except for with that particular tool that we're going to get to you later.
OHCT.
The city had access to a ton of free lead poisoning kits, but they weren't distributing them, or at least they weren't distributed him in these areas. So during the nineteen sixty nine mayor all election, the Young Lords announced they were going to do free door to door testing with these kits, which the city hadn't promised them. They didn't call up the city and be like, hey, can we get some kids, and then say hey, we're going
to do testing. They just announced the city is going to give us kits call and we are going to do testing. And the government was like no. So then medical personnel and the Young Lords did a sit in at the Department of Health and they walked out that particular day with two hundred kids and I believe started just getting kids from the city.
Wow.
Yeah, direct action gets the fucking goods. And they went door to door doing testing for lead. And it was two groups. It was the Young Lords and then h Rum the Health Movement and they the larger coalition that they're part of. And so they tracked who they who needed treatment, and the doctors with them made referrals. So they go around and be like Young Lords and doctors working together. Over thirty percent of the kids that they
tested tested positive for let exposure. And so then they would sit down and talk with people about their rights and about how to go about and try and get justice and try and get health health needs taken care of. And they did this once a week. One source says they did every Saturday. One source they says they did it every Tuesday, because why would history agree with itself. I mean the answer is because it was a bunch of humans, and humans don't remember shit from forty years ago,
very clearly. Yeah yeah yeah at the time.
Way, yeah, they were doing it once a week and.
Yeah, yeah, get I mean to cut you off. I'm sorry saying oh yeah, that's all.
That's all I was saying. It's a great It's like an incredible thing to do with your time.
Yeah, totally.
Yeah.
It's like even it's like it's like volunteerism or whatever, right, but it's like fucking direct action. You're going around and helping people and like you're getting to know your neighbors and like they's just like not a downside, yeah, you know. And so they publicized what they found and it became a scandal for the city who had refused to take had refused to give them the tests, you know. So within within months, the city changed its housing codes, stepped
up testing, founded the Bureau of Lead Poisoning Control. I think basically because they were like, if you tell the city, like, if you don't take care of people, the socialists will the cities Like, maybe we should take care of the people. Yeah, much like you will be taken care of by Uh, let's go with a positive sponsor again, old stand by turtles. Turtles are really cute. You want to be sponsored by the cute little turtles that.
Live free, that live free like in the wild.
Yeah, why not, Like we're just we're thinking about good sponsors to do little ads for.
I'm a fan of turtles. I love how they live for a very long time. Yeah, you should probably listen to them more.
Yeah, respect your elder turtles. Yeah that is this is an ad for respecting your elder turtlesh you should listen to the Methuselah turtles in your life and then whatever else these other ads are. We didn't approve of their an accident. I hope it's all turtle ads. Okay, we're back. My favorite turtle fact I learned is that box turtles stay within a mile or so of where they were born their whole life. Oh wow, that was wanted from that ad. Just now about turtles that we are heard?
Oh yeah I didn't. I didn't hear that. Just local little guys.
Yeah, keep it local like a yeah, all right, so let's talk about and they take over church, I mean around that time they keep working on survival programs too, which is what they call the like you know, breakfast program and stuff like that. Right, but they wanted to do more and they needed another base of operations. And also their friend and the Black panther Fred Hampton, had just been murdered in Chicago by the police. So wow, they were looking for a place that they could operate
that the police probably wouldn't storm in a hail of gunfire. Okay, So they wanted a.
Church reliant by the way, I know, and I feel like I always wondered why the church And that's like a very great point. Yeah, practical point.
Yeah, it also is that Like, Okay, so their Marxist Leninist organization right ostensibly and practically, but they're clearly doing their own thing. They're things their own way and in their own context. So they're not an atheist organization like Marxist Lenism is like supposed to be. Right, some of
them are atheists, some of them or not. The Christian Church was criticized regularly by the Young Lords for being an instrument of colonization, completely accurate, but at the same time, they used Christ as a man of the people a lot in their propaganda.
Oh I like it, I like it.
Yeah, they had posters. I really want one. They had posters of Jesus with an AK forty seven slung around his shoulder.
Wait, what do we get that? I'm like immediately on the ubay.
I know, anybody who's listening, if you have access to these posters, please send them to me and Alinda seriously. And I think that some of the radical Catholics are rolling with them at this point. You can hear more about the passifist radical Catholics in our episode the passifist Radical The ones who are rolling with the Young Lords probably aren't pacist, but I'm not sure. You can hear more about them in our episode about the Burglars versus
the FBI that came out recently. So the Young Lords they're looking for this new base and they go to a Spanish church in Harlem and they're like, hey, can me use your space? But the priest at East Harlem's first Spanish United Methodist church didn't want to let them feed kids there. He was a refugee from Castor's Cuba and he was not super lefty. It's a way that
one could say that. So they went four more times to Sunday Mass, and they would participate in mass, I believe, respectfully, but then they would also like speak up and be like, let us feed kids here. Each time the priest was like, no, you can't do that. So then they go, I think it's time number five, but I'm not entirely sure, And a young lord tries to speak at the service, and an undercover cop pops up to arrest him because the priest had set up a sting to arrest the young
lord's during mass. So yick, I know, so a brawl broke out. Because a brawl broke out between cops and lords in the house of the lord, Thirteen young lords, eight men and five women were arrested and five more hospitalized. Oh wow. Religious civil rights leaders came out against the church for having set up a sting to arrest the lord the lords at mass. So the young Lords gave up,
went home, disbanded their organism. No, it stiffened the resolve to use the church, and it also turned more of the congregation into supporters of the young lord's request to use the space. The congregation of the church was fairly split, and more of the younger congregants were like fuck yeah, the Young Lord's rule, and more of the older congregants were like, the Young Lord's drool totally how they phrased it. And so the next Sunday, five hundred supporters for the
Young Lords waited outside. The Young Lords met with the church board, who started off the conversation by saying racist shit against Puerto Ricans. That's the other like background context to a lot of this, right, It's not just like people being like I have slightly more conservative economic values than you, and I don't think it's a good way to help people grow up. No, they're like you, I'm
not gonna say it how they would say it. You lazy Puerto Ricans have no work ethic and that's why you're all poor and you blow all your welfare money on beer. These are some of the my paraphrasing of what they've said, you know.
Yeah yeah.
Also that it was disrespectful for the Afro Puerto Ricans to have to wear their hair and Afros was another thing. The priests were like, we don't like your haircut.
Wow, way did go out of your Like you're laying by the way, literally, no one's asking you about people's hair. But cool, you're supposed to be talking about Jesus and stuff.
Yeah, Famous, if no one asked you. Famous hates people for their haircut. Jesus maybe he doesn't like frosted tips. I'm not sure. I've never asked him about tins. But so for two more weeks they keep going to Sunday
mass So this is like two months now, right. Then the third week after they've been beaten by cops, it's December twenty eighth, nineteen sixty nine, they go to a Sunday service and then they nail the doors shut, lock themselves inside, and they basically take the university takeover strategy
to the community. And if you remember, this isn't the first time the Young Lads, the Young Lords in Chicago took over a church as well, right, but it certainly gets presented that they're drawing more from their experiences during the Columbia University takeover, which is when Columbia University students led by led by black students took over much of the university, which if you want to hear more about, listen to our episode about Up against the Wall Motherfuckers,
the which I think we just called up against the Wall in the title because we're not allowed to cuss on the title.
Oh.
I like that this entire podcast has turned into an ad for other episodes of our podcast.
I like to see it as weaving the web of history, but it's also yeah, it's also just yeah, you know, if you want more context. They didn't take hostages. They let anyone out who wanted to leave. They held a press conference and they said that their demand was the ability to run a food program out of the church. And they couched it all in religious language, but without lying. They were like, they weren't like, oh, Christianity's perfect in
every way and they're doing it wrong. They're like, look, Christianity became a religion of colonization, but Jesus himself was a man of the people. Because that's their line, right, and they echo liberation theology stuff which you can hear more about in our episodes about Chico Mendez in the Fight for the Rainforest. Now, I'm just gonna do it to make Sophie shake her head. The mayor, this is like one of my favorite details of this whole thing. So the mayor has a Puerto Rican aid, like a
guy who's his point of contact with the Puerto Rican community. Okay, his name is Arnie Segata.
Okay, yeah, wait, like my I utilizing that's my uncle.
Wait is it your uncle?
No? I have no idea who Ernie is. But Arnie related Arnie, Arnie, we're related though.
Yeah, Arnie Segata, it's spelled the same way. I had to just double check. I had to look up your own I had to look up your last name. I remember I was spelling it right in my head because I'm like not very good at the double rold ours thing, and so I was like, oh, maybe anyway, so your uncle Arnie.
Oh god does he suck? I'm worried about.
No, he's great.
Oh good, good, good, you come from Arnie. Let's go, let's go.
Uh.
So he started off not great because he's the mayor's guy. He gets sent he's the token guy. You guess he used to quell unrest in Puerto Rican neighborhoods. He was probably on the ground during the trash burning being like everyone cal him down. So the Mayor's like, here, go in, and he has this like backpack telephone, this like radio like military fucking telephone, you know.
Wow.
Forty minutes later, the Mayor's office is like radios and it's like, what the fuck, where are you? What's happening? And Arnie is like, I think they're right, and I'm staying with them. Oh God, and he gets fired and he stays Arnie, Yeah.
My man, I gotta kind of like look this guy up on the internet right now.
So they renamed the place the People's Church, and the community pours in to discuss what to do about all kinds of shit like evictions to lack of interpretation services at school meetings, and it was called the Church Offensive.
Wow.
I really hope that at some point a young lord became a youth pastor, sat down backwards on a folding chair and said, you know who else had a ten point program and then talked about the ten Commandments. That's
what I hope. So they ran a medical clinic there because of course they did, staffed by all their doctor comrades, and they ran their breakfast program plus free community meals every evening for everyone, and so it's like all of these different people from the community coming and bringing in food and sharing it with everyone. It's fucking utopian, like just frankly, yeah, yeah. They taught classes on Puerto Rican
and black history. They set up a loud speaker facing the street that played speeches for Malcolm X and shit alongside Puerto Rican music.
Wow.
The Young Lords generally didn't carry weapons, and when they needed security they Okay, I want you you both get a guess again. So if you can't look at the script, I'm not guess what their weapon was. The flail wasn't correct, the battle axe was incorrect. I'll give you a hint. Turtles, what do.
You a shell? Like? Wait, how there's there's like they're out throwing shells.
No, they have nun chucks.
Ah, oh my, I'm so sorry.
Yeah.
Sorry, So they carry nunchucks as theirs their weapons of choice, which is I mean, like frankly like, it's a scary weapon to carry, but it's like not a you know, it's not a like kill you weapon.
Yeah.
But if someone walks up to me and they're like kind of scary anyway and they have a breton and they're carrying nunchucks, like I don't want to fuck with them.
Absolutely not. This is like also the most New York thing ever, by the way, Oh yeah, because you know it's just like I mean, it just is in the way that it's this like.
Cross cultural like oh my god, you're right.
Moment, you know. I mean, I'm sure this was coming out of like at the time Kung Fu movies were huge. Yeah, you know, like this is just oh really yeah, it's just the most New York image in my mind.
Yeah.
Totally also very warriors energy.
Yeah, totally totally. Which is I mean, that's their roots, right, It's like they're a crazy gang that wants to realize that there's more of them than there are cops in this town. So white supporters use their whiteness to pass through police lines and deliver supplies.
Oh wow.
And the young lords made sure that no one did any desecrating of the church, and they kept the altar and everything intact. They actually even kept Sunday services and like the regular congregation was able to come in and use the church on Sunday even during their occupation, although only the younger congregants came. Right, the people don't like them aren't going to show up, and they held festivals of the oppressed with Puerto Rican music, with poets and
musicians and writers and artists. I read something that claimed this is the kind of thing that I feel like a lot of places might claim origin to that the spoken word poetry jam, like the whole concept of the spoken word poetry jam, yeah, was developed here. I believe it, and if so, this is one of the foundations of hip hop.
Yeah.
It's also where the poet Pedro Pietry gave his first public reading of his poem Puerto Rican Obituary.
Which is featured in my song Ballante. Yeah, and there's incredible footage of him reading it, I think for the first time on YouTube that you guys should check out because it's very moving.
Yeah, it is a even if you're like not a poetry girl, you should go and listen to this.
Yeah.
Yeah, very much street poetry. You're not going to cringe. It's not like Predicatre Louie Slam yet, you know, it's very I remember reading that that poem for the first time when I was in high school in an anthology of called like the Outlaws Anthology of Poetry or something, and reading that poem really was the first time I ever saw pernercan NICs be like so talked about in such a real way, in a way that was like a Mickey Mouse way.
You know, I believe you, but tell me more, what's the Mickey Mouse way?
Like the way that we were portrayed in media when I was growing up, which was very like docile and fun and like it was very j lo very Ricky Martin. That was like what I grew up with. And also like literally West Side Story being something that's like, oh, well, you can see us featured in such recent movie as this West Side Story, and it's like nineteen ninety eight,
why is this the last reference that I have? Yeah, So it was just very much you know, I was hanging out in the Lower east Side and Tomkins Square Park and stuff and for the first time being like, oh my god, the problems that I'm seeing in society now were happening then, and people like me, we're talking about it and we're experiencing it, and this is like a poem that's expressing that angst, you know. Yeah, so it was a very powerful moment for me.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The first time I heard it was in your song. And then when I like I was reading about this, I was like oh, because I was just all yeah, and all the connections. So I want to quote about this takeover just to keep telling met how fucking cool it is. From the best book on this history that I found was called The Young Lord is called The
Young Lords by Johanna Fernandez. Cool quote. Immediately, local grandmothers began delivering pots of food to the Puerto Rican radicals through church windows, while a feelanx of National Lawyer's Guild attorneys on site and then the church's periphery filed court injunctions and reminded judges and police of the barricaded radicals constitutionally protected right to protest teetering between sacrilege and righteousness.
The Young Lord's unfolding drama was captured by TV cameras parked in the out parked in and outside of the House of Warship. And yeah, because of the National Lawyer's Guild. Shout out to the National Lawyer's Guild who were also still around and doing amazing things, the fight to evict them was held in the courts rather than just like
storming the place. Because you hear about this and you're kind of like, well, why didn't they just like storm it, right, And the answer is, oh, yeah, they took it to court. And their strategy, which is probably never gonna win or whatever. Yeah, their strategy was basically a Methodist church is mandated to help people, and that's what we're doing. And this stalled their eviction, but not for all that long. I think
it's thirteen days. Maybe in the end. On January seventh, nineteen seventy, the occupants gave themselves up into police custody walking out of the church. Some of them were singing, some of them had their fists raised in silence. When presented before a judge, each one corrected the judge the judge's pronunciation of their name, saying their own names in Spanish instead of English, which is such a good fuck you don't They didn't win the use of the church.
The church promised to run a daycare center and a drug detoc center, but it never did. But they they won yet again. The government's shamed into action. Just as importantly, their power is growing, and we're going to talk about what they did with their growing power on Wednesday in the final part of this four part epic.
I want it to end.
Well, when we come back, we're going to see them overthrow capitalism and no, I'm just kidding it cointel repression and internal conflict fuel by authoritarian structure and going to fuck them up. But their legacy will live on and when we come back, they're going to take over a fucking hospital.
Yeah yeah, was gonn say Linded? Do you know what else is based? You're pluggables? My what you're pluggables? Anything that you.
Well, you can find me on all of the social media's, uh some of them terrify me more than others. But I'm on Instagram as hooray for the riff raff that spelled with a U h u r r a y for the riff raff on Twitter and all the other ones, and I'll be on tour this summer on the West Coast and also through the Midwest in July.
Oh yeah, magpie, anything you want to plug.
My other podcasts, Live Like the World Is Dying has gone weekly, So if you're like, how am I going to make it till Monday? You can listen to me or one of my other co hosts on Friday by
listening to Live Like the World Is Dying. And I'm on social media even though I hate it are so if you want to participate in either everyone feeling bad about themselves been trying to perform coolness, you can see me on Instagram at Margaret Kiljoy or if you want to have bad faith arguments with people making bad faith arguments about you and watch the Left of Hour itself. You can find me on Twitter at Magpie Killjoy. Sophie, what do you got? What do you want to plug?
Ah? My beautiful friend Jimmy Loftus has a book coming out and it is available for pre order right now. It is called Raw Dog. If you go to any of Jamie's social media's you can find a link to pre order or request it at your local library.
It's probably worth pointing out that it's about hot dogs. Oh yep, we'll see you Wednesday. They Hello, I'm out of jokes to start episodes with. This is cool People did cool stuff, which kind of sounds like a joke name for a podcast anyway, but I rather like it. I'm your host, Margaret Kilday with me today on this Journey is a Linda Segata.
How are you doing good? I just said a snack?
Hell yeah, and you're an hour wiser than last time?
Yeah, totally.
Our producer is Sophie. Sophie, how are you?
How are you? Yeah?
Compared to like toothpain recording, antibiotics antibiotics recording is a breeze.
Yeah. I feel that as somebody who also is on anbiotics. Yeah.
This podcast brought to you by a Max of Sillan. Yeah, fish antibiotics legal but not for human This.
Week I couldn't hear out of my right ear.
This week I mostly can.
It's great.
Yeah.
To be clear, I don't believe either of us are in fish antibiotics, and I do not recommend them anyway. That's not even for legal reasons. I just feel guilty when I accidentally make a joke about bad advice. Our audio engineers Ian Hi Ian. Everyone say hi Ian, that being including you listening to your headphones in a public place. I want you to say hi Ian. God hates a coward. Say it all right. Ian. You're exempt from having to
say hi Ian unless you want to. Our music was written for us by young woman, and today we're talking about the Young Lords, the Puerto Rican socialist organization that is kicking ass and taking names in New York City. In nineteen sixty nine, nineteen seventy, they've just taken over a Methodist church and turned it into the People's Church for eleven days, which I said thirteen last time because I wasn't looking at the script and I was coming up with numbers and I came up with the wrong one.
They got a lot done for eleven days.
I know, there's like multiple festivals of the oppressed that they managed to throw on eleven days.
Totally.
Could you imagine, like I would take more than eleven days to organize a festival the oppressed right now?
Uh?
Yeah, yeah, totally, Like all right, we're getting ready for twenty twenty fives festivally oppressed.
Totally.
Everyone got to check their schedules. So this action got them national attention and support, and their membership soared especially and it brought in again more women. More than six hundred new members came on. And this is an official membership organization as compared to some other things. Right, Okay, they would take Puerto Rican people, and they would take both non Puerto Rican black people and non Puerto Rican
LATINX folks from their neighborhoods. Overall, they skewed demographically Afro Puerto Rican and English speaking at this point, so value judgment and that that's just what their demographics were. Yeah, I think it. Whatever. They'd already opened a Newark, New Jersey chapter by this point, and soon they opened some in the South Bronx Bridgeport, Connecticut, Boston, the Lower East Side, and Philly. They lived communally. They ate free meal at
dining halls. They had a whole building. Now oh wow, Yeah, women and men live together and organized together and threw down together. And the women worked hard to fight chauvinism in the movement. They would specifically, this is the thing I didn't know to I researched this. They would call people out as male Chauvenes's pigs. And it's one of the first uses of that phrase, male Chauvenes's pig. And something I hadn't realized is that the men men are pigs.
Rhetoric within feminism doesn't come out of calling men animals. Like it's not directly calling them the pig, the animal. It's that since the Black Panthers has started calling cops pigs, they're calling men cops, right wow.
Yeah, yeah, they're saying you're being a cop right now? Yeah, Like that makes a lot more. It's just like it rings it rings well with me.
Yeah, be like, you are the oppressor right now, you are passing, and it probably fucking stung more. Than being like because when you call men pigs, you're like, oh, you're a pig, You're you're gross and being overly sexual or whatever. Men are often like, yeah, I am, that's just the way we are.
Baby, totally right, broachew.
As compared to being like you are acting like a police officer, yeah, you know, which is not a nice thing to be called. And that helps get men get their shit together, as does a woman's caucus, as does an action that did not come up with my research, but you brought up Okay, but.
Then I couldn't. I researched it online. I couldn't find it online.
But I found a little bit claiming you did. Yeah, but only a little bit, like only a single reference, So you should say what you learned, Okay.
I land this when I went to the Bronx Museum and they had an exhibit all about the Young Lords, and it was written in the paper that the women had gotten together and they decided if their demands would not be met where they were able to carry firearms. Although you're saying that they didn't really care well.
Some people, so I know, I know, it's like it's messy. I think that they must have sometimes or something, but okay.
And be treated as comrades instead of servants, and you know, like the way that traditionally their families taught them to treat women. There would be a sex strike. And you know this is also acting as if like the majority were straight, but that men would not be able to receive sex anymore from women until they got their shit together.
Yeah, probably effective, I think is really cool.
Yeah, and I don't know if if it went down for a long time or if it was put into effect, but it was definitely printed in the paper.
It was definitely like warm, You've been warmed, is how it seemed in the paper.
So the thing I ran across when I when I did more research after you told me this is that I ran across like one line that was like, in nineteen seventy the women had a sex strike. Okay, but I I don't entirely know. And actually it's interesting. I would trust well, I would trust Polente more than I would trust a random article that I read, yeah something,
or even of history book. And so the thing about firearms is really interesting me because I there is going to be a point in the script when they kind of take up arms, right and all these other times they're like rolling around in nun trucks. But I bet you that there were times in which they were armed and that just wasn't like fitting the narrative of the way that people want to talk about things, and like, so I don't know, you know.
Or perhaps it was like education and how to use firearms. Yeah, might have been the vibe. Like, so I learned that from when I went to the museum. But a lot of what I've learned is from a book called Ballante that I encourage people to get. It's I have here, no one's going to see. It's called Voices and Photographs of the Young Lords, and it's a lot of interviews and also like little you know, essays that were written
in the newspaper. So cool. And one of the things that I read was talking about how they believed that how women members wanted to learn how to use firearms and not be treated like they weren't warriors.
Yeah, makes a lot of sense. Yeah, So so they're doing all this after the church, their numbers were up. Their numbers became about thirty five to forty percent women, and there were numerous openly gay members, and gay members
had their own Caucus as well. The Black Panthers paved their way on that one, openly stating their allegiance with the gay rights movement and specifically the Gay Liberation Front that had grown out of the Stonewall Uprising, which yes, you can hear about on our episode about the Stonewall Uprising. And in fact, the Young Lords provided a personal to Sylvia Rivera, the transit, one of the trans heroes from Stonewall, when she was facing death threats. And this is.
Also half Puerto Rican. Oh yeah, it's right, just wanted to give her a shout out.
No, yeah, fucking totally and like and so I will say that many Young Lords refused the assignment because they like were transphobic and didn't understand what the fuck was up and they were like freaked out, there's still a long way to go. But other ones accepted it and were Sylvia Rivera's personal bodyguard, were Young Lords, and that fucking rules. Yeah, people with jobs gave up more than half their salaries for the group. Because it sounds a
little bit culty at this point, No one. My theory is, no one ever gets anything done without getting a little bit close to the cult line. You shouldn't cross the cult line, you know. But if the cult line isn't even in sight, you might not be creating a community. It's real messy.
Ah, interesting, Okay.
One of the cultier things that they did is they did that maoist self criticism thing where you're supposed to like stand up and say all the stuff you did wrong to the whole crowd.
Oh, I've never heard of this before.
It's it was a big part of like like the cultural revolution in China, which I don't know as much about as I would like to this like MAOIs self criticism thing. And what's interesting actually, if you listen to the podcast Behind the Bastards, they talk about a lot of cults and one of the things that comes up a lot is not MAOIs self criticism. But is this like stand up at a circle and admit why you're like bad and fall apart from like the group's rules
or whatever. Is like a way you encourage group thinking, and it is, from my point of view bad.
Yeah.
Yeah, And anyone who failed to do this was called a liberal. This is something that like I feel like liberals don't quite always realize, is that, like the left wing also calls liberals liberals in a negative way, you know. Yeah, Like every now and then I'll say something's like liberal
and people like fuck you, right winger, and I'm like, what. Oh, it's during this period of growth that you start seeing the cracks that are later going to fuck it up, at least by the convenient narrative that I'm drawing and have read in other sources. The New York Lords were given full autonomy by the quote Central Committee of Chicago, right, because it still had started in Chicago, even it's bigger
in New York. But New York is pretty sure that they should be the central committee, and that the chapter shouldn't shouldn't have full autonomy, that the New York Chapter should be in charge of all the other chapters, and that more discipline was needed. And also the Chicago newspaper wasn't coming out regularly enough. What are you all doing?
You better get on that. H So the New York Chapter starts getting kind of controlling, and then another thing to understand about their politics, and I try to avoid, like, let's talk about Marx right, But along with the Black Panthers, the Young Lords were a break from traditional Marxism in that they identified the lump and proletariat as the revolutionary subject, which means that I have to break down really quickly Marx's ideas about classes, in which you have the proletariat,
who are industrial workers in the city. They all and Marx thinks that these are the beasneys, They're the best. Everyone else sucks according to Marx. Right, then you got the bourgeoisie, a class whom no one who is alive can spell correctly. And yeah they are I still bow ergy.
Oh my god, I thank you spell track.
Yeah. Yeah, it took me a very long time to wrap my head around hierarchy.
More importantly, thanks talk to speek, talk to text speech apps for words you kids spell. Oh that's clever, bouge wisi even think about it.
The bourgeoisie are the owning class. They don't work for a living. This is their distinguishing characteristic. Instead, they own stuff for a living. Definition of capitalism in this case being roughly the access to capital being how you make money rather than work. Right. And then you've got two other weird classes. You have the petty bourgeoisie, who are like the small business owners. They're not running the show, but their relationship to capital is different from that of
a worker. Marxists generally don't like them, and then you have the lump and proletariat, who are objectively the coolest. Marx does not agree by this. With this, these are the unemployed and the thieves and the beggars, and the people whose work is illegal, like sex workers, the criminal class, and Marx doesn't like them, right, But the Young Lords and the Black Panthers do. Personally. I like to think that Marx's classes are like he's writing a role playing game.
Instead of paladins and wizards, you have petty bourgeoisie and the lump and proletariat. And so from this point of view, we clearly need everyone. Maybe not the regular boujeoissa, I don't know, but you just clearly you can't have a party of only thieves. You are only wizards. Not as much fun. There's my class humanity statement of Oh god. Anyway, the Black Panthers like that lump and proletariat. The Young Lords like them. The New York Young Lords claim to
like them. But part of what they're mad at Chicago about because the Chicago clearly comes out of them. They are they come from the criminal class. The Young Lord comes. This was not a bunch of workers sitting around being like, man, I don't like how the boss is treating me. You like how the boss is treating me. It's a bunch of car thieves who are like, let's stand up against
racism and try and get everyone some healthcare. Yeah, and the New York lords don't quite have it quite the same background as relates to that, and so part of why they're mad at Chicago is that Chicago is still too criminal and gang like and they're not good proper revolutionaries. So by May nineteen seventy, they sever ties from the Young Lord's Organization of Chicago and they become the Young
Lord's Party. It is very likely that the split was orchestrated by co Intel Pro, the counterintelligence program of the FBI. Oh wow, it was almost certainly encouraged by them. The disagreements existed, but co Intel Pro existed to make those disagreements grow right back in Chicago. Cha Cha is taking it hard. He was close friends with Fred Hampton, who had just been murdered, and now he's getting told he's two gangster for the group. He turned from a gang
into an organization. But he keeps it civil. And no fights breakout between the cities. So it's a break but it's not a war, right, Okay. But they've got all these political things brewing, there's all of these fractures that are starting to form. It doesn't stop them from doing really cool shit. One of the cool things they do is they get into a fight with a long standing
friend of the podcast Tuberculosis. For anyone who's just learning, now, what happened when I started making this podcast is I started reading a lot more history books, and I started learning that everyone dies of tuberculosis. That's just how you die everyone. If you're in a history book, you either get killed by the state or you get killed by tuberculosis.
You forgot the third or your lover. What there's tuberculosis the government or your lover.
Oh yeah, yeah, totally.
That's the trifecta. There's no other way.
No, I can't see how healse I could die as long as it's not some combo move.
Oh, you'd be living a really weird life.
That is. The infiltrators like corossing into handkerchiefs.
And yeah, yeah, I don't know about that government thing. That seems that seems uh not not not for cause for you.
Yeah, no, I wouldn't be. You would be very far from that. My plan is to not be killed by any of these things.
Yeah.
So, tuberculosis or TB as it's called by its friend friends, or consumption when it's out of the goth night. We talked about this in our Aled Heart episode. The first ever known transmand to receive gender affirming surgery save millions of lives by revolutionizing the way that public screening was done for tuberculosis decades before today's story, specifically by using X rays to screen ahead of time. What is TB. Well,
it's a bacterial infection. It's just around latently. Sometimes it pops up with symptoms and shit, it kills about half of its victims if you actually get the symptoms those keeping track at home, that's about a five percent mortality rate overall, which is brutally high. Today we have antibiotics and no one dies of it anymore. Just kidding, it kills a lot of people still, mostly in other parts of the world. It killed one point five million people
in twenty twenty. It is the number one deadliest infectious disease after COVID nineteen. It's the number one preventable infectious disease, preventable with vaccines, treatment with antibiotics, and screening, things like that. So everyone who dies of it is murdered by capitalism from my point of view, because you don't have to die from it except for access to care. So the Young Lords they go to war against two of the
biggest enemies of the show, capitalism and fucking tuberculosis. Let's go. Yeah, the real problem in the poor areas of New York City thanks to stale air and overcrowding and lack of access to screening. So in addition to door to door lead poisoning to they start testing people for TB, which involves an X ray machine. So they send a petition around and it gets them use of one machine, but
it's a stationary machine. They want a mobile unit. They want like a van with an X ray machine in it, like the X ray van that goes around the city already, but is inaccessible to poor people of color. One book I read says it was inaccessible because it was it operated from twelve to six pm and didn't accommodate working people's schedules. But the guy who stole the van, I listened to an interview with him. Oh, spoiler alert, steal the van. We'll get to that.
Yeah.
It was like I was like, did we skip chapter?
What's happening.
We'll get to that. The guy who steals the van Later in the story, he says in an interview that it was inaccessible because it only went to white neighborhoods, and that feels a little bit more truthful.
Once again, giving a shout out to the thief the thief class.
Yeah.
Yeah, So on June seventeenth and nineteen seventy, they steal the van. They unfurl a Puerto Rican flag on it, and they drive it off. They tipped off the press ahead of time to make sure everyone saw them steal this van. People don't do like crime like they used to for better and worse. Yeah, they parked it. They were really subtle. They parked it across the street from
their office and then announced free testing for everyone. And I think the techs who worked in the van were like entirely fine with it.
They're just like, whow cool, this is the coolest thing that's happened to me.
Ever, I know, like I'm so bored and now I'm part of some like crazy shit on the news and I still just get to help people for a living here.
Yeah, totally.
Within hours of stealing the van they won, the director of health of the area agreed to let them keep the van and run it on the city's dime twelve hours a day every day. Wow. The first day they tested hundreds of people. Yeah, and around that time, well, before we move them to the South Bronx, we should move everyone to these killer deals about stuff, job opportunities. You could go become an Irish cup. So many options here.
Listen to these options. Don't press the forward fifteen seconds button. That has no influence on anything from my point of view. Here's some ads, and we're back from those enlightening ads. I try to come up with something clever, but I got nothing. So I'll just tell you about when they moved to the South Bronx because there's yet another health epidemic for them to deal with, because they really just fucking did it all. Like I can't say.
Also, like the number of issues that this community was facing, like as it just like really boggles my mind, being like, wow, I grew up in that city. Yeah, and like these are all people like my parents' age, you know.
Yeah, your parents' age, Like people like talk about lead poisoning and tuberculosis and.
Streets and for sure, Yeah, and a lot of like how the Bronx was burning, you know, a lot of like faulty electricity and just you know, like a lot of issues like that.
For sure, is that what that was? The Bronx burning because of faulty electricity.
There was like a lot of safety hazards, but also a lot of like some lords that were setting you know, just like letting, yeah, their buildings burner being the reason why their buildings were burning.
Yeah.
Yeah, So there was a lot of My family definitely talked a lot about these issues.
Okay, I don't know whether you want to say this in error. Is your family from East Harlem or is it from South Bronx or is.
It somewhere They're actually from Chelsea? Ok Yeah, they grew up in the Chelsea projects. Okay, you know they were born My dad was born and my aunt was born in Puerto Rico, but came over when they were very young. My grandfather came over and was like working at first and then was able to pay for everybody to come cool.
Yeah, yeah, I hadn't as a white outsider in New
York City. I hadn't realized the degree to which Puerto Rican identity shaped the city in all different parts of the city, you know, and like the Lower east Side like doesn't even really necessarily come out much in the story, even though they had a Young Lord's had a chapter in Lower Eastie, even though that was a Puerto Rican neighborhood, you know, yeah at this point, which heavily influences all of the like hippie culture stuff that was happening in that area.
Oh totally. Yeah. Like talking to my dad when I would mention like hanging out on the Lower Eastside or Tompkins Group Park or squatting or anything, you know, to him, it was just like, oh, yeah, me and my friends like did all that shit, but we were cooler.
Thanks, probably he was right, like just like yeah, but.
You know, you think about the New Yereekan, the new Arekan Poets Cafe, like that's in the Lower east Side still. I don't know how, but I'm so glad that it's still with us, and that was born out of this movement, you know.
Yeah, is New York in a name of an identity for New York Puerto Ricans.
Is that the yes, So a lot of the people that you're talking about, who are you know, joining the young lords at this point, who don't speak Spanish for example, Like that would be a really great I representation of like a New Eurekan, although of course there are New Eurekans that do, but it's like a very specific like doesn't have extremely strong ties to the island. Like even my dad, who was born in Puerto Rico, felt like he wasn't Puerto Rican enough. And then also he was
an outsider in his own city. Okay, so it's like they you know, this idea that you don't quite fit into anything because you're always a little bit of an outsider. So New Eurekan was born.
Yeah, I mean that makes a lot of sense to me. I feel like the diasporic identity is like this thing that often grows in New York or at least I know that, like the diasporic identity of like Jews or Jewish people like grew in New York City in a lot of ways as an identity that was separate from anything else. It was like, this is the diasporas, like who we are. I don't know whether deasporas are ran that people use in this context or not.
Oh definitely, okay, yeah, yeah. And also there's a lot of like longing for like you know, when you talked about how the Young Words were teaching Puerto Rican history, like that was something that was I mean, to this day, it's so hidden from anybody who is Puerto Rican or New Eurekan, Like just this feeling that you come from a place that is so foreign to you and you want to learn about it, but it's been hidden or kept away.
Yeah. Yeah, it's like because America has this like public school systems has this like one monolithic educational idea of what we teach people, you know, and it's just like, rather than teach people Puerto Rican history, we teach people about like Paul Revere whatever the fuck, you know. Like yeah, and it's just interesting because like a really high percentage of people who live in the United States are not descended from the Revolutionary War fighters, you know, yeah, or
have at least other just whatever. Anyway, Yeah, I'm I guess I should start a podcast where I talk about history that hasn't talked about as much. So we want to help me do that.
This entire podcast is just propaganda, and it's you just advertising for your own show, on your own show. Incredible.
Self promotion is awesome. I haven't worked the name of my book and any of these scripts. No, I'm very proud of that. Okay, so they've just stolen a van. That makes it very like that much happened. They just changed the way.
I just love how much they like play chicken with the city. It's like, yeah, of course, we could go to jail for a really long time for a grand theft auto or something, or maybe well, Jessica, give us what we want.
I know, I know, I can't imagine any of this working. Then it keeps working.
Yeah, yeah, So they go to South Bronx, or rather a branch opens in the South Bronx, and I don't know how many individuals are specifically moving right, And there's a problem that needs to be dealt with in South Bronx.
Heroin. The state wasn't doing a very good job of helping people who are addicted. Instead, it criminalized people. The South Bronx and Spring nineteen seventy had the highest heroin addiction rate in the world. Fifteen percent of people who lived there were addicted to heroin, according to one number
I heard. Other numbers that I heard included the South Bronx had a mortality rate fifty percent higher than the rest of the country, syphilis and gonorrhea six and four times the national average, and overdose was the leading cause of death among adolescents and young adults.
Oh wow, And.
This is the kind of thing that we see reflected more later in the opioid crisis on all like wider scale. Right. So, the first thing that the young Lords did, They're like, all right, we're gonna deal with heroin addiction. That's what our community needs. That's what we're gonna do. They got an apartment, they cleaned it up nice, and they started screening drug users for commitment to sobriety. And then two young lords would keep watch over They just set up
a detox center just or a cold Turkey center. Really, this is their first first attempt. Two young lords would keep watch over the detoxing people for twenty four hours a day and help them quit cold turkey. Then each person in recovery was assigned a mentor who was available to them twenty four hours a day for the next
six months. Yeah, they also robbed drug dealers and scared them off the block, which got the mafia mad at them, but they somehow had enough power that they didn't get any No one got killed as a result of this that I'm aware of.
This is so wild to me. Yeah, you know, Yeah, I keeps waiting for, like, when is some I'm gonna ge assassinated by one of the many powerful forces who don't want change to happen.
I I am not aware of it happening. Yeah, I like and I one of the things that often underlies a lot of history that doesn't get left in, like, is people working with the mafia or like all these different radicals, like working with different power structures, right, And that's like often left out because it's not as like sexy or it's criminal or whatever. Right, So probably they're doing something that is making the mafia not attack them. But I believe the mafia is mad at them, So
I believe that that something is not working with the mafia. Okay, if I were to guess, and I expect I'm wrong, it probably is just literally like we are scary and there's a lot of us, and we are tied in with the panthers, and we are tied in with them up against the Wall motherfuckers and Leah, yeah, yeah, the city is full of angry revolutionaries. That's my best guess.
But I don't yeah, you know, I know it. Around the same time, for example, the up against wall motherfuckers are like scaring off mafia hits by having more guns
than the people trying to kill them, you know. But yeah, so they're robbing drug dealers and scaring them off the block, which is also really hard to morally understand in a situation that predates the War on drugs, right because right now, during the War on drugs, when people talk about like, oh, we're gonna like go fuck up all the drug dealers, you're like, oh, you're gonna go fuck up drug users who are like fucked by society. Congratulations, You're the same
as the fucking War on drugs. Yeah, but when we're not in that context, I don't fucking know. This is like straight up, I don't know, you know. Yeah, But the cold Turkey approach wasn't gonna work with everyone. The medical problems that people are facing were bigger than just heroin, so they needed something more. They needed something bigger, like like a hospital. The South Bronx had won hospital. Lincoln Hospital was built in eighteen ninety eight, the same year
that the US stole Puerto Rico from the Spanish. This is the place that I was saying, gets called the butcher shop. It's the wrong leg amputated whoops shop with lead paint for the children to eat. And it's the kind of place where the er doesn't do triage. There's no translators on staff, no accommodations for non English speaking patients.
But the best part, and this is not sarcasm, the actual good part was that some reformers had set up a fairly groundbreaking mental health clinic there that emphasized talk therapy and actually hearing patients out. Oh wow, so it's kind of a battleground spot already in March nineteen sixty nine, before the Lords arrived. The Lords did a lot, and
they deserve it a ton of the credit. But by tying into existing infrastructures and working with other groups, in March nineteen sixty nine, the mental health clinic had taken itself over. The workers, mostly people of color, had seized the building and kicked out the director and his upper staff. Yeah, the doctors, including white doctors, which is most of them this is the late sixties, supported the action and kept working and they held it for three days, and the
Black Panthers ran security and brought supporters. This is before the Panther twenty one trial took the wind out of the New York City Panthers.
Just would like to say that I am really loving these stories of like doctors standing with their staff and like standing up to administration and their bosses. It's really I encourage all the doctors out there who might be listening to do that. Yeah, as we really need it.
Yeah, this particular takeover was broken when the city. I don't even think the mystery is the hospital. The city was like any doctors who practice here will lose their licenses. But the action did get a bunch of workers have been fired, and it got the fired workers on fired and the director was transferred out, So it was like
successful to some degree. Right by nineteen seventy, some of the workers there were young lords themselves, and some of these workers set up a complaint table for workers and patients in the er. Twelve hours a day, they were there at this table. On weekends they were there twenty four hours a day Wow. And they kept getting kicked out and they kept coming right back in. There's like interviews you can hear about like the people like kind
of being friends with the security guards. It's like I'm kicking you out again, and they're like I'm going to be right back in and like all right, have fun, you know. So they set up this complaint table. They get two thousand complaints in a month, wow, and they just start acting on them like all the ones that they can. They just direct action, get the goods, install
privacy screens in the bathrooms. They move trash off the street outside and into the director's office because this is what you do with trash.
WHOA.
Yeah. The medical staff who were part of this organization, I think this is atrun, but I'm not. I'm not one hundred percent certain the larger organization that's doing this. The medical staff just start doing triage in the er, like when they're not at work. They're just like, were triaging. Fuck this an er needs triage, which I did not learn this word until I was an adult. Triage is when you determine which patients are the most injured and
who needs medical care most immediately. So they put pressure on administration for better care for the workers, but there was a wall. They couldn't get anything systemic fixed. They could only like band aids. People are like, oh, it's just a band aid. Like band aids are great, they stop bleeding, you can keep infection out like, but they don't address systemic issues. So they did what they had
to do with a really interesting security culture method. On July thirteenth, nineteen seventy, one hundred and fifty young lords met in an apartment and locked themselves in so that no infiltrators could get out and give anyone a heads up because they knew they were infiltrated. It's the fucking it's nineteen seventy, you know, a huh, And so not all of them knew the plan going in. They all get told the plan, but they can't call out. At three point thirty am, they pile into a U haul
and a bunch of cars. They backed up to the hospital loading dock. They opened the doors. They stormed the hospital with nun chucks.
Oh this episode brought to you by nonsense dunchucks. I know how cool they are. I know.
For some reason, most retellies leave the nunchucks out. That's a mistake Ely on nunchuck radicals. You get it, Okay, I'll tell my one nunchuck story please.
Yeah.
I'm like twenty two or something, and I'm like living in the basement of this house with some hipsters and they have this party and I'm avoiding it. I'm hanging out in the basement and at one point someone comes down. At this time, I'm like, all I'm doing is like studying martial arts and trying to stop a war and all that shit. And they come down and they're like, Magpie, this guy won't leave and he's harassing people. He's like
harassing this woman. You have to kick him out. And I'm like okay, And so I'm like in my sleeping dress and I just like walk upstairs with the pair of nunchucks and I'm like the weird kid an address from the basement who hasn't been at the party, and I just like walk up. I think I have a beard at the time, and I'm just like, hey, you better leave, and the guy's like I'm already gone, and he runs away. I don't know how to use nunchucks. I do not know how to use nunchucks. At this
point in my life. I just have them.
I mean it's definitely a power move of like who's going to assume that you don't know how to use them? You know, like if you're pulling them out just visually, you'd be like that person knows how to use those.
Yeah, Like bluffing is a very effective as we.
Learn from the young lords. Like sometimes you just try it.
Storm a hospital with nunchucks. What go wrong? Yeah, So they secure the entrances, they barricade shit. They still let workers and patients in and out of the building, just they're controlling it. They set up screening clinics for tuberculosis and lead poisoning, anemia. They set up a daycare in a classroom because one of their whole things is that they believe that kids should get childcare while they're sole
caretaker is in the hospital. It's wild, I know. They hung up a banner welcome to the People's Hospital in a Puerto Rican flag. They hadn't tipped off the hospital workers or it wouldn't have worked right, But the hospital workers were down. The physicians backed them. They hated working
for the butcher's shop because they became doctors to help people. Yeah, even the chief administrator was like, well, I mean they kind of got a point, like, wow, no one likes working at the butcher shop, you know, except like Sweeney Todd or whatever. Thank you, thank you.
We really like.
You did that one for you apparently. So they called for a press conference. It was so perfectly time. So they call for a press conference and they explain themselves to the press and they give their demands, which is like door to door health care, better pay for workers, daycare for patients and workers, hurry up and build a new hospital. I did not find a name for this action. I assume it was the Lincoln Offensive for the Hospital offensive.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
They held it for about twelve hours. The negotiations of the police were going very badly. Undercovers were trying to infiltrate into the hospital, so they left and rather than letting themselves get mass arrested, they put on white coats and slipped out with the doctors, covered by supporters from inside and outside. Yeah. Oh, and once the cops realized they'd been duped, they combed the area for the lords,
but people in the neighborhoods took them in. Only two participants out of one hundred and fifty two hundred participants got fucking caught. Wow, good fucking odds. I would take those odds seriously. Nothing changed immediately. Then three days later, a patient named Carmen Rodriguez died during an abortion at
the hospital. The resident, a student doctor, didn't look at her chart in her pre existing conditions and performed the wrong kind of abortion, and then when she responded badly, doubled down on mistreating her, and a few days later July nineteenth, nineteen seventy, she died of negligence.
Oh wow, this is something I've read about.
Yeah, yeah, it's fucking heartbreaking, Like I don't know, just especially doubling down and sit especially like I mean, there's.
Also just a really painful history of sterilization of Puerto Rican women, and just it was a part of what like the women of the Young Lords would talk about in when they would talk about the women's movement and women's liberation, as they would make a very clear distinction between upper class women's liberation and how like the Young Lord women of course, you know, stood for abortion rights, but they also were like, we have to be very
clear about our experience of you know, being forcefully sterilized like a lot of women getting sterilized in who worked in factories and just without their knowledge.
Yeah.
Yeah, so it's just a part of the history, and it's just such a recent history, you know of Puerto Rican women.
Yeah. No, It's something that I didn't really understand i first started doing some of this research about like, you know, it's doing well now I feel self conscious about it. But I did an EPISO about the Jaine Collective Okay, Sophie that you can go listen to.
It's so fun.
And one of the things that I didn't realize going into that research was how I had only read about the you know, the panthers and black liberationists had very complicated relationships with abortion rights because the pel oh interesting, Yeah, because they're like, we're trying to avoid a cultural genocide.
You have to like, freedom to reproduce was what more of them were fighting for as compared to more white women were fighting for freedom to control to not reproduce, and any logical look at it is what we want. Bodily autonomy.
Yeah yeah, you know, but childcare like goes into it as well, because from what I read, like women and the young lords would talk about how working class people deserve to be able to have children, and that include that means that we will need to set up community childcare, you know, because that is the only way that we can that if you're not incredibly wealthy. They were just saying it shouldn't be a barrier to be to starting
a family, yeah, which you know. Yeah, so it's just it's a really yeah, it's this painful part of it just really moves me that there was so much like mind blowing growth and like just what these people are experiencing, you know, like so quickly within a generation.
Yeah, well, well that's an awkward place that I have to stick an ad transition, but I do. So here's some ads and we're back and yeah, we're talking about how Carmen Rodriguez died at the hospital three days after the takeover. And so this led to the most enduring and wide reaching legacy of the Young Lord's Hrum. The radical group of medical professionals that the Young Lords are
part of. They draft a new document and they call it the Patient's Bill of Rights, and it says you deserve to be treated respectfully, to have your treatment explained, that you can refuse treatment, that you can see your chart, that people deserve door to door preventative care, that people can pick their doctors, that you should get free food with your care, that there should be daycare, and that
healthcare should be free. This is obviously not I know you look at that and you're like that, Yeah, I'm in like, this is not the patient's bill of rights we have today in the US. Specifically, the stuff part didn't really survive.
Yeah, still working on that.
But some of this other stuff I have always taken for granted. I mean I didn't. I don't want to talk about my own family history too much, but it's like it makes sense to me that, of course you get to have your treatment explained. Of course you can refuse treatment. Of course you can see your chart, like, of course you can pick your doctor. Why would I mean again, complications around financial barriers, but it of course
you can refuse treatment. It's like such a clear example of that that looking back, you're like, what do you mean why would anyone ever have thought it was okay to sterilize someone without their consent? Like, y, how is that not that? Yeah?
That's called something else.
Yeah, So they start pushing for this bill of rights, and one thing that I find so fascinating about this story is that, you know, the Young Lords aren't reformists. They believe in a socialist revolution. But by not coming to the table to beg for scraps, but by demanding everything, they accomplished more reform than reformists tend to, which I would say, keep in mind, reformists, you should pretend to be socialist revolutionaries if you want reform.
Take Italian bake.
Yeah, so they do this, but they're still they haven't gotten their health. Their their harm reduction clinic, which they haven't called that yet but leads to that kind of framing. So they have a better idea than their cold Turkey clinic. Uh.
Nothing.
The other day, it was bad. It just didn't work for everyone. They got link In to sponsor a drug detoc center. They succeeded by asking nicely, just kidding. On November sixth, nineteen seventy, they occupied the sixth floor of one of the buildings of the hospital and set it up with the help of doctors, into a detox facility.
Wow.
Fifteen, yeah, exactly, Yeah. Fifteen people were arrested. So then other one other people came back the next day and they set it up again, and this time it's stuck. This gets called the first harm Reduction Clinic, and they used a novel approach in which addiction was seen as
a social problem and not as individual weakness. Oh. Soon they're treating six hundred people a week at this clinic and it and it starts as a methodone clinic and becomes an acupuncture clinic, and it lasted for eight years. It outlasts the Young Lords, and it ends up staffed by many people who'd been through the treatment themselves.
And so this is the beginning of not a.
Acupuncture Please explain.
Okay, I do not know what na na DA stands for. I will just say.
That not a detox No wait, never right, Sorry.
It's something that I've It's like ear acupuncture that I've received when I was like, you know, like they used to do it at the drop in center when I was like a young, homeless teenager, and it's I didn't know that this was created by the Young Lords or that this just you know, the treatment was like formed with the Young Lords and it was like, how do we bring accessible, effective acupuncture to working people or lower class people.
Yeah, I am I believe that that is the case. That this is. These are the pioneers of doing that in the United States.
So cool.
Yeah, yeah, they just fucking did everything. I actually didn't end up writing into the script more about how the patient's Bill of Rights developed out of what they did. There's so much that I didn't get to, you know. It's like a yeah, I didn't get to follow these threads as far as I want, you know. Yeah, yeah, So let's kind of talk about their decline. Unfortunately, but
they have so much lasting impact. So whatever, if you write high for two years then burn out and change everything along the way, so fucking goes.
And we can learn from him them.
Yeah. So these two years are kind of the high point of the Young Lords. Co intel pro is fucking with them really hard. They found an easy target in the culture of obsessive discipline and self criticism and central authority. That was I think building and growing. But I could be wrong. I could be the read of stuff I'm reading. One of the central leaders Felipe Luciano, he's practically the face of the group. He was demoted after cheating on
his wife, who was one of the other leaders. They had set really strict rules about who could talk to the press, and so a co intel Pro agent pretended to be one of the Bronx leaders speaking to the press, like, Hey, I'm this guy and I'm speaking to the press. And then so then the other leaders are so mad that this guy spoke to the press even though they have strict rules about who can speak to the press, and he wasn't on the approved.
List because I wasn't him.
Yeah, so he's in trouble. And oh and the thing that he supposedly spoke to the press about was about how Philippe had been demoted because he was a male chauvinist with unclear politics. So they're like stirring up the shit, right, which.
Is like on his Wikipedia page because I looked it up.
Oh yeah, I thought he's a male Chovenis who was Yeah.
Yeah, like the quote. So it's interesting to know, yeah, where this is coming from.
Yeah, I mean, like, and he overall co intel Pro likes to find existing cracks and expand them.
Yeah yeah.
Yeah. But so you can look at that two ways. We could be like, well, we're vulnerable to federal infiltration if we have sexists, which is true. You can also look at at as we're vulnerable to fed we're vulnerable to this shit if we're so quick to who well, now get into murky waters. But like you know, we're so quick to get mad at everyone about these things, and we have so many controls about all of these things, you know, And so it's like demoting a leader because
he's sexist is not bad. But the way it was handled was manipulated by the FEDS. Most likely within a month he left the organization that he'd started or had a hand in starting. Yeah, things start to get darker. On October seventeenth, nineteen seventy, the Young Lord j Roldin he's found it hanging in a cell in the Tombs, and he's one of eight quote suicides that year in the Tombs, one of whom had somehow fractured his own skull while hanging himself, if you believe the police, which
I don't. So when Julio died, a thousand people came to his viewing At his funeral march the onlookers chanted in his chant rules Fuego, fuego, fuego, Los Yankees kiet and fuego fire, fire fire, The Yankees want some fire whoa, which is hard as fuck.
Yeah, They're like oh you want you want some buckets?
Yeah.
Wow.
So it's at this point in the narratives that I've read that they pick up the gun more literally. Okay, the funeral stops for a second viewing at that Methodist church they'd once occupied with nothing but non trucks and community support. They go into the church, they open the casket. Alongside his body is an arsenal of guns in the casket. Yeah, that's how they hit it. Yeah, that's how they got into the church.
Whoa.
They stuffed his casket full of full of weapons and they use it to occupy the church. Their first and foremost demand was an independent investigation into Julio Roldon's death. The other demands were let us set up a legal defense center here, and also the city needs to let clergymen visit people in prison and investigate prison conditions. So a diverse group of clergy took the demand to the city.
The city was like, yeah, fuck you. So then eighteen clergy members joined the armed occupation because they were like, he's not listening to us. You're the only way to get anything fucking done.
Yeah.
And I started this off by being like, oh, they're getting this darker as during the decline. I feel like I almost I feel kind of bad using this as like because it's an escalation, but it's not. I am not putting moral judgment on this particular choice and escalation. Yeah right. They weren't trying to go down in a blaze of glory, and they started negotiations. Older women from the neighborhood secreted out the guns and pieces basically like
because they were like, we're going fucking down. We don't want to all get murdered, So like, yeah, piece by piece,
all the guns get disappeared. Negotiations picked up. The city gave in and started an independent investigation into the death of Julio Rolden, and the independent report was clear Julio did hang himself, and at least according this investigation, in twenty seven pages, some excerpted in The New York Times, it said basically, in a paraphrase, he killed himself because the tombs is a fucking nightmare pit that drives people
to suicide. And mainstream news articles basically were saying, like, yeah, sometimes suicide is murder. This is such a case. You put someone in this terrible of a situation, you are killing them, even if Julio most likely hanged himself. I bet that one who cracked his own scald didn't fucking hang himself.
Yeah, that doesn't sound like a.
They held the church for two months until December nineteen seventy is a year after the last time they held the church, you know. And they did their thing there. They fed people, they offered free legal help. Radical priests started showing up and doing stuff there, but the organization started to decline. After this, they followed a familiar course. To quote author Johanna Fernandez, the movements were on the
path of decline. Others saw mounting state repression as a reason to embrace the to self defense within their relatively small groups, which they confuse with the defense of the masses in their communities. Amid the disorientation and siege mentality produced by state repression, radicals became somewhat isolated from their communities.
They began to see themselves as enlightened actors. Before long, they began to substitute the painstaking task of grassroots mobilization with heroic acts of sacrifice taken on behalf of quote the people. The central leadership had a closed retreat just for itself to figure out what's going wrong, why things are getting bad, and they decide that the answer is
that they need to centralize more power. They decided at the retreat that the social services move was the wrong one and instead they should focus on leading a revolution to free Puerto Rico, and basically are like, if you're real revolutionaries, this is what you care about, not this volunteerism, which means we're shifting over to fundraising and now that's what we're going to do here in the United States
as fundraise and relocate organizers to Puerto Rico. And the rank and file of the Young Lords aren't really excited about this, And actually, I think some of it probably has to do with some of what you're talking about, like New Eyorekan identity and it's just from the island.
Yeah, very I mean, I'm sure some of them had connection to the island, you know, but definitely strange move to go far away and then try to free people over there who could probably if they're going to free themselves, they should probably free themselves.
Yeah. Yeah, So their membership starts to decline. It didn't help that they got really paranoid about co intel pro, which is not their fault. That is literally the purpose of co intel pro totally and they started to purge people without evidence, especially people who were critical of this new change in focus. So they dropped from one thousand members to two hundred members and not very long at all.
They were not well received in Puerto Rico. They showed up in fatigues and berets, and this didn't go over as a powerful symbol of working class and see, it just confused people. The Nationalist Party that they showed up to help didn't really like them. Most of the independence movements at the time there were rich and white, oh wow. And they also white within the Puerto Rican context, probably
in the United States context well the mainland. And also they were like buds, you can't just show up out of nowhere and tell us you're going to free us. And they were outsiders. They knew how to organize in New York City really well. On the island, they met with little success. They did do stuffy it was earnest. By June nineteen seventy one, two of the three New
York City offices shut their doors. They switched ideological focuses again, and this time they switched to a workerist attitude, meaning the lump and proletariat, the thieves and stuff. They're no longer the shit, so now we're all on the workers. But there's a problem here. Being a young lord was a full time twenty four to seven commitment, which means workers hadn't joined. It was the unemployed or the soon to be unemployed. Students, youth, and criminals were primarily who
the young Lord's recruited from. So they didn't get workers. They just lost lumpin. So they went out and tried to get jobs in industry to go organize people, which kind of went over, like showing up in Puerto Rico. Yeah, they got more rigid and dogmatic, and they spiraled. They tried to solve it in nineteen seventy two by having a forty day course of Marxist study in which they discussed in red marks for six hours a day and tried to out revolutionary each other. This further alienated them
from everyone. No, I know, I know, and it's like, I'm sure there's another read of this, you know. Yeah, but like.
Also dealing with immense pressure and like yeah, like yeah, it's so easy for us to be like and contal prow was happening It's like they didn't know Conte Pearl isn't a thing that people knew, you know.
Right, they had just learned but ah, oh okay, yeah.
With the paranoia and yeah.
So they tried to solve their further alienation from everyone by centralizing the authority from a central leadership to a central leader, a woman named Gloria Fontanas, and then they kicked out all the people who had gone to Puerto Rico. Because the people who had gone to Puerto Rico were like, hey, this isn't working, we shouldn't do this, but central leadership
was like, Nope, you've got to stay the course. Some of the leadership flew down there and barged in and yelled at everyone for betraying the movement by betraying their authority, and called them the enemies of the people. The Young Lord's Party changed their name to Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization, which isn't so catchy. They demoted their central leader for being too petty bourgeoisie. And that's kind of the tail
spin of the New York chapter. As far as I can tell, Chicago kept going and individuals from all of this right and like people still doing things as young Lords did a lot of stuff Chicago, in particular, their moment seemed kind of gone, and I don't know enough to do the rest of it real justice. A lot of Chicago Young Lords sort of move into the electoral sphere, are involved in getting I think, I want to say
Chicago's first black mayor elected. Oh wow, like ten years later or so, it's not in the scripts around the numbers in front of me. A ton of them stayed really radical and keep kept doing good work. I don't really want to linger on their fall. I want to stay with most of what they did, but I will mention one of the young lords, one of their lawyers who helped them out a lot. He went on to become a famous man.
Oh no, I know you're talking about.
The Republican Fox News host.
Oh my god, her.
Name, his name is Heraldo Rivera.
Oh my god, I mean taking my fucking head. I prefer to remember Huan Gonzales instead. Yeah, oh, co step democracy now.
Yeah, oh yeah, that's right. Yeah, and fucking and your uncle who fucking quit. Yeah yeah, he's not actually related.
Well we're going to see about that. Okay, okay, I'm scared of DNA websites. So I don't do that, but I'll do some I'll do some googling, yeah and find him, write him a random email.
Yeah. Yeah, no. And it's like every some cliche. I learned a long time ago that like every story is a tragedy if you don't know when to end it, you know, because like all of us die, right, everything passes. But god damn, they got so much done.
Yeah.
Yeah, And also there are so many of these members who even if they didn't get famous or something, you know, there was still like incredible community activists and yeah, you know are doing or making an amazing art. One woman made a really great documentary called That's Really Great on YouTube. So yeah, they're still out there and there's still total badasses.
Yeah, it's so fucking good. I listened to a bunch of different interviews where yeah, you can still listen to interviews where like the guy who stole the van, who's like, yeah, we stole the van, and like the woman who like staffed the table in the host in Lincoln Hospital and just was like every day I'm gonna sit in the butcher shop and let people tell me what's wrong here, you know, like still alive like still fucking yeah. Well that's uh, that's the Young Lord's. That's the first four
partter I ever wrote. The second one we recorded, but I don't know any any other final.
Well, no, I think we said it all. I guess, you know. For me, what I really took away from learning about the Young Lords is just is how important it was for them and it is for us to listen to the folks that live around us, to listen to people who you know, if you're someone like me who's an artist, I think it's really important for me to listen to people who have to fucking work every day and or are much older than me, or you know.
I think that was something that I really inspired me about them is their ability in the beginning to listen to their community about what they wanted and needed, yeah, you know.
And just like create a fucking to do list and just started checking boxes off seriously. Yeah.
And also the Berets were cool, let's just say it.
And first organized by a fifteen year old who was like, I need fucking I need to like throw a bunch of dance shows to like make money to get us all cool black and for the whim. Yeah, well, if people want to listen to you. I will say everyone should go listen to song Polente. You should look it up on YouTube so you can watch the video. P A l e n t E. I don't know where the g A l a n t e a n t E. Yeah, apologize.
Yeah, there's a great music video directed by my friend Chris Murk, who's an incredible director. My dad is in it, which is really cool to see him pop up in there, and a lot of there's the Pedro Pietri uh an excerpt from his his poem Puerto Rican Obituary. And I encourage anybody to just like go down the rabbit hole of like how much amazing stuff was created from this movement, like the new Arekan Poets Cafe and stuff like that.
Yeah, what's your new album called?
Well, my new album. I just finished recording it, so I'm not going to reveal the name yet.
Oh I'm sorry I timed this past.
Yeah, Okay, it's okay. Uh, it's going to come out. I hope it comes out sometime next year. I haven't gotten the rough mixes back yet, so I'm going kind of crazy because I want to hear what I did.
Okay, So this is what you're about to tour on.
No, I'm still touring on my last record. My last record is called Life on Earth. It came out last February. And I'll be out there playing music like on the West Coast in May cool, and then in July. Oh yeah, I'm going to be playing Portland cool. In July, I'll be playing all around link the Midwest and stuff sick. Yeah, So come see us, buy some merch, help us out where. It's tough out there, hanging in there.
Hasn't been a good couple of years for career musicians. Is that what we're saying?
Oh my god? Yeah, I get like, you know, a glimmer of a penny anytime you listen to me on Spotify, So head over to band camp. I encourage everyone to get music off band camp on band Camp Fridays. It really helps us.
Yeah. I try and buy albums and then I do a lot of my listening on Spotify, but I like it's nice to also buy it, you.
Know, yeah, totally, Yeah, it all helps.
Yeah.
Okay, what else can I pitch? I'm going to kickstart a tabletop role playing game this summer.
Wow.
I've been working on a stabletop role playing game called The Number City for like ten fucking years, and I'm working with a really good crew of people. If you want to play Gangs Versus the Goding tabletop role playing game, you should check that out once it gets kickstarted. I think I don't want to. I know what dates. I think we're going to kickstart it, but I don't want to say it. I don't want to be wrong. And then I'm going to be another tabletop role playing game
I'm writing for oh that was not announced yet. Ah, stupid things with things and controlling information. That's what I got. And also my most recent book is Escape from Insult Island, and if you want quick adventure, read it's a very short book. If you have a I get a lot of messages from people who are like, I don't read much because I don't have the attention span for it anymore.
But I can read your books. Takes only a couple hours to read it Escape from Insul Island, And he'd be like, I read a whole last book because it's about one hundred pages long. Uh. And you can also get my friend Jamie's book called raw dogged Rall Dog, Oh God Dog, Okay, you can get Jamie's book, which is about hot dogs. I don't know what you're talking about, Margaret, there's no double euphemism there. I'm fucking literally blushing. I think we got to end the episode. It's over, We're done.
You did it.
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