Rooted in a Chicago-based street gang, the Young Lords grew into one of the most dynamic revolutionary community organizations of the late 1960s and early ’70s.
In their field jackets and signature purple berets, using militant tactics like building takeovers and mass education, the Young Lords mobilized their community for liberation and against gentrification, poverty, racism, and police brutality. Forging a Rainbow Coalition with Fred Hampton and the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords expanded from their Chicago headquarters into the Puerto Rican and Latino barrios of New York City and elsewhere, demanding an end to the US occupation of Puerto Rico and self-determination for oppressed communities everywhere.
With a foreword by founder José "Cha Cha" Jiménez, written just before his passing, The Young Lords Speak tells the story of Chicago's Young Lords in their own words through articles, essays, interviews, and speeches.
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"This dazzling collection—part archive, part memoir and ethnography, part the everyday poetry of the street—hits like a hammer and then settles like an abiding life-lesson. Its authenticity—meaning its contradictions, disagreements, ambiguities, paradoxes, and uncertainties—illuminates the movement muddle in full. There’s no attempt here to present the fragmented, dynamic, and contested reality of revolutionary struggle as linear or coherent, but rather as it truly is: achingly human, deeply aspirational, trembling, and real. I left my encounter with The Young Lords Speak energized, refreshed, and with my radical imagination unleashed and my courage renewed." —Bill Ayers, author of Demand the Impossible! and When Freedom is the Question Abolition is the Answer
"Through memoir, speeches, oral histories, primary sources, and incisive framing, this reader ushers in a long-awaited compendium of the history of the Chicago Young Lords Organization. Attending to how the history of the Young Lords has often been told through the works of their counterparts and comrades, Lazu carefully lays out an archive of political thought and action that remain ever salient." —Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez, Professor and Director of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO)
Other books of interest
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Palante
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Border and Rule
by Harsha Walia -
To Washington Park, With Love
by Rose Blouin -
The Black Antifascist Tradition
by Jeanelle K. Hope and Bill V. Mullen -
I Didn't Come Here to Lie