Desperate to avoid further conflagration, city officials reached out to Puerto Rican and community leaders. Forty East Harlem residents met with the police inspector and hammered out the following: 1) the appointment of a Puerto Rican as a deputy police commissioner for community relations; 2) the appointment of one or two Puerto Rican professors at the police academy to educate police to the problems of the Puerto Rican community; 3) the appointment of a Puerto Rican precinct captain in East Harlem; 4) a departmental investigation of racial bigotry among the police.
The Great Society and Black and Puerto Rican Power: 1969–1973
The Presidential Commission on Civil Disorders (popularly called the Kerner Commission) concluded its investigation into the cause of the pre-1967 race riots by warning of the ramifications of ongoing police violence: “To many Negroes police have come to symbolize white power, white racism, and white repression.”79 Similarly a New York City journalist noted that “neither New York nor any [other] American city is normal as long as thousands of black people are penned in, developing the prisoner’s mentality of hate for his keepers.”80 Yet in the South where police violence was even more brazen, riots were rare. Strong social movement organizations channeled anger into established repertoires of nonviolent action. Only after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the leader of the nonviolent movement, did riots erupt in southern cities.
In the years that followed the great race riots intense organizing efforts by both the left and the right changed the complexion of northern and western cities and the way black and Latino residents would respond to police violence in the future. Conservative groups used racial fears to win over a newly detachable sector of the electorate and gain ascendency in the Republican Party to challenge the bipartisan consensus that had existed since the New Deal. As Joe Soss and his coauthors note,
Racial conservatives, galvanized by the civil rights victories, began to pursue a “law and order” campaign that identified social protest, civil disobedience, urban riots, street crime, and deviant behaviors in poor neighborhoods as related parts of a single problem: the breakdown of social order. Together, these groups formed a powerful coalition, pushing an agenda rooted in order, discipline, personal responsibility, and a moral state. As conservative and business interests mobilized, they sought more than immediate policy victories. Adopting a longer view, they invested in efforts to transform the intellectual and organizational landscape of American politics.81
These groups used racially coded appeals for law and order (as will be discussed later in this chapter), linking the civil rights movement to riots and crime. The onslaught would eventually pay big dividends for the conservative movement. Yet the first attempt of a conservative Republican (Barry Goldwater) to use the civil rights movement to win election to national office was unsuccessful. Lyndon Johnson beat him by a landslide. Although Johnson rejected the findings of the report he himself had commissioned, he adopted a number of the commission’s recommendations, most notably the War on Poverty and the Great Society. Johnson made millions of dollars in federal aid available to cities for community-based organizations in conflict-ridden communities. The aim, notes Katznelson, was “to take the radical impulse away from the politics of race by the creation of mechanisms of participation at the community level that had the capability to limit conflicts to a community orientation, to separate issues from each other, and to stress a politics of distribution—in short, to reduce race to ethnicity in the traditional community bound sense…. [As popular power] movements absorbed the energies of insurgents [they] also transformed their protests and rendered them harmless.”82 Similarly Sugrue notes, “The irony of the War on Poverty was that the federal government did not, for the most part, address the economic problems that were the root cause of poverty…. But, unexpectedly, the federal government allied itself with local activists…. The Johnson administration unleashed and legitimated an insurgent movement for ‘community control’ that dovetailed with the growing demand for black power…. The long-term consequence was to wholly recast the terrain of debate over race, rights and equality in the United States from the federal to the local.”83
In New York, Mayor John Lindsay used the money to hire black and Puerto Rican activists and neighborhood youths as peacekeepers. In the 1970s these young people employed their new organizing skills to create radical black and Puerto Rican power organizations. In the 1980s these radical activists, most of whom had cut their teeth on the 1960s riots, forged community-based organizations, some of which were dedicated to fighting police brutality. Groups such as the Black Panthers, the Nation of Islam, the Real Great Society, the Young Lords, and the Revolutionary Communist Party gave birth in the 1980s to the NYC Coalition Against Police Brutality, the Justice Committee, Make the Road New York, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, the National Hip Hop Political Convention, the Audre Lorde Project, the Immigrant Justice Solidarity Project, and Stolen Lives. Individual activists such as Charles Barron, a former Black Panther, became an anti-police-brutality activist and councilman; Richie Perez, a former Young Lord, founded the Justice Project; Vincente Alba, a former Young Lord, now leads the Coalition against Police Brutality; Armando Perez, a Real Great Society founder, was elected district leader; Margarita Lopez, formerly of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, was elected councilwoman; David Santiago, a Puerto Rican Socialist and Young Lord, play critical organizing roles in the 1980s and 1990s.
My research was conducted in predominantly Puerto Rican neighborhoods, where the Real Great Society, the Young Lords, and the Puerto Rican Socialist Party were the most important community-based organizations. The Real Great Society (RGS) operated principally on the Lower East Side. When the RGS extended organizing efforts to East Harlem, two of its leaders influenced several young people who would later form the Young Lords Party of New York.84 The Young Lords were most active in and had their most profound impact on East Harlem and Mott Haven, South Bronx. The Puerto Rican Socialist Party was strongest in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. In all these areas, over time, participation in grassroots organizing efforts increased residents’ confidence in their own collective capacity.
While the focus here is on Puerto Rican organizing efforts, there is a thread that ties the Puerto Rican experience to that of blacks. First, migration to the city occurred in similar waves. Second, both groups of migrants fled rural poverty and political repression only to encounter racial discrimination in New York. Both were confined to the lowest wage labor market, the poorest housing, and inferior schools. Police viewed them in similar ways, enforcing ghetto boundaries, targeting them for drug arrests, and using high levels of violence and brutality. Black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods exploded in the 1960s. Riots erupted in black neighborhoods in 1964 but spread to Puerto Rican neighborhoods too. The reverse was true of the Puerto Rican riots of 1967. Similarly, the evolution of radical Puerto Rican organizations paralleled that of black organizations in the city. The following section is based on ethnographic field research conducted in three predominantly Puerto Rican neighborhoods. A parallel process, I argue, was taking place in black neighborhoods in the city.
The Real Great Society and Puerto Rican Organizing on the Lower East Side
The Lower East Side had long been a cauldron of movement activity. Puerto Ricans in cigar factories and Jews in the textile industry were early and active participants in labor, immigrant, communist, and socialist organizing efforts. In 1966 a local street gang called the Assassin Lords formed a political organization they called the University of the Streets (as mentioned earlier). Armando explained (in the first of many conversations we had between 1992 and 1999, the year Armando was murdered85):
I was in the “Assassin Lords,” another was in the “Dragons.” … The gangs were mostly about having something to do. We would get into a gang and fight each other…. We came to the realization that it didn’t make any sense for Puerto Ricans to be fighting each other. We decided to give something back to the community…. In the Lower East Side there was a huge need for day care centers. So, we applied for different grants and foundations and got funding for a day care center called “visiting mothers.” It was run out of a storefront. Then we got funding for other projects, and somewhere between 1966 and 1967 we received a fairly large grant.