After the 1967 riots, Armando and Chino Garcia formed the Real Great Society (RGS), named after President Johnson’s Great Society initiative. Armando credited Johnson with providing an alternative for ghetto youths. “We have never seen anything like that since, not in [the] past 30 years,” Armando insisted. “To me Johnson was the greatest president we ever had for social problems.”
In 1966 Life magazine reviewed The Gang and the Political Establishment, written by a Columbia University professor about the Real Great Society. Afterward gang leaders from around the country began to contact them. “This gave us the opportunity to travel all over the country,” Armando said. “We discovered we all had similar problems, especially regarding education and housing. We noted a pattern. We realized it was not just a problem on the Lower East Side. We had a very big struggle on our hands…. We got serious. We began to educate ourselves.”
The 1968 Teachers Strike and the Network of Organizations in Williamsburg, Brooklyn
Unlike the South Bronx or Harlem, Williamsburg was still a large working-class neighborhood during the 1960s. In 1969 one-quarter of all industrial jobs in New York were in Brooklyn and over 50 percent of those were in Greenpoint-Williamsburg and Newton Creek. The largest employers were the American Sugar Company, E. M. Schaefer Brewing Company, Lumber Exchange terminal, and, until its closure in 1966, the Brooklyn Navy Yards. In 1968 the first major political mobilization in Williamsburg emerged in response to the 1968 United Federation of Teachers citywide strike (which was launched in opposition to community control of school boards). At Eastern District High School the teacher strike prompted a student uprising. Puerto Rican high school students, radical clergy, and VISTA volunteers all participated. They forced the school principal to resign. Manny Maldonado, president of the ASPIRA club (an organization designed to help and encourage Puerto Rican high school students to succeed), emerged as one of five or six student movement leaders. Martin Needleman, who worked with ASPIRA and VISTA at the time and directed Brooklyn Legal Services during the 1990s, recalled, in 1992, “A lot of what’s happening in current efforts goes back to these school struggles…. Community activists’ contacts were made then. It turned out to be an investment in our future—this community networking.” Eusebio Cuso shared similar remembrances (1996):
Little by little we got to do a lot of things together…. Manny [Maldonado] used to come up to David’s [Santiago] house and I used to live with David…. They started calling us the Socialist building—they said we were all Socialists…. Everybody who lived in that building was into some struggle or another. So they called us the revolutionaries, the politicos, the politicians, and all that good shit…. The whole building was into whatever it took to better the neighborhood. Habitantes Unidos.
Out of their organizing efforts the Los Sures community housing organization was born, named for the area of Williamsburg (the South Side) where most Puerto Ricans lived. “We held meetings in buildings to form tenants associations and then began going out to the buildings trying to organize the tenants association to become a citywide community management program. As more landlords abandoned the apartments we began doing rehabilitation. We also began working with the tenant interim lease (TIL) program,86 helping the tenants make contracts with the city to run their own buildings,” noted Barbara Shliff (1993). The same network of activists she had known from the time she was a VISTA volunteer in 1968 led most of the organizing efforts.
The first board of Los Sures included most of the leaders of the 1968 school strike. Los Sures, Schliff told me, “was a voluntary organization that grew out of community needs, and then got funding. [It was an outgrowth of] the network of organizations and people that had been involved a long time; it was the hallmark of the struggle for the people’s community school board.” Luis Olmeda was the first chair of Los Sures. “Olmeda stressed Puerto Rican Pride and identity,” noted David Santiago, when I interviewed him in 1994: “He opened up the political struggle here. In the 1970s, he led the occupation of the Kraus housing projects, and put garbage in the street to protest the lack of sanitation in the neighborhood.” David Lopez, later an organizer for Musica Against Drugs (an organization founded by Manny Maldonado to help fight drug abuse and AIDS), and Carmen Calderon, from the South Side Mission, were also members of the first board of Los Sures. Williamsburg organizing efforts will be discussed later in the chapter.
The Young Lords and the Emergence of New Yorican Social Movements in East Harlem and South Bronx
East Harlem had been the setting of the largest Puerto Rican riot in the city, and Mayor Lindsay invested the most resources there. In so doing, he unintentionally spurred the creation of a network of skilled grassroots activists. These activists would play leading roles in channeling anger at police violence into organized forms of nonviolent protest in decades to come. By 1968 East Harlem was a cauldron of organizing activity. Miguel “Mickey” Melendez had participated in the riots. The city hired him as a “peacemaker.” Melendez commuted in from Mott Haven, South Bronx. Armando Perez came in from the Lower East Side. Armando introduced Melendez to University of the Streets. Luis Gonzalez, another organizer in East Harlem, introduced Melendez to his cousin Juan Gonzalez, the leader of the 1969 student strike at Columbia University.
In the summer of 1969, Mayor Lindsay tried to cut funding to some of the new community-based organizations. The activists used their newly honed organizational skills to fight back. Melendez called Juan Gonzalez, currently leading the student movement at Columbia, and Felipe Luciano, leading the black student movement at Queens, and told them that Puerto Ricans in East Harlem needed their help. They arrived “with a bunch of radical compañeros from Columbia,” Melendez told Ramon Gonzalez, my research assistant in 1993. They “blockaded the East River drive, and the city surrendered.” Melendez, Luciano, and Gonzalez then formed a Puerto Rican student group called Sociedad Albizpo Campos. Melendez transferred to Old Westbury, a radical and experimental new college interested in the concept of University of the Streets, and became a recruiter. On a recruiting trip to Chicago, he attended a meeting of the Chicago Young Lords where they discussed the recent takeover of Clemente High School. At the end of the meeting, Melendez was introduced to “this redheaded guy with a purple beret who is named Cha Cha Jimenez [founder of the Young Lords]. Cha Cha introduces me to David Perez [one of the student leaders].” They spoke at length about the problem of “police brutality in our barrios.”87 The following year David transferred to Old Westbury, and the New York branch of the Young Lords was born.
On July 26, 1969, Felipe Luciano announced the creation of the New York branch of the Young Lords before a crowd celebrating the anniversary of the Cuban revolution in the Lower East Side’s Tompkins Square Park. Soon afterward they began walking around 110th Street “with the memory of the riots that had erupted the week before on those same streets,” Melendez said. They were now asking people what it was they wanted. “They said basura (garbage),” Gonzales told me in 1993: “So every Sunday we would sweep the streets. More and more people kept joining. We put the garbage in the middle of 3rd Avenue, and we blocked traffic with it.” Gonzalez decided to call this action the first East Harlem garbage offensive. Once they had the garbage in the middle of the street, they set it aflame:
I did not count the people but in my recollection there could have been five hundred or five thousand neighborhoods taking part in the garbage protests. Every single Young Lord threw a match. Every single person in the community who helped threw matches…. Flames went up spectacularly and people started to scream with joy. In my mind the people—timid mothers, grandmothers, everyone—were showing their support of the Young Lords’ action. This new sight brought to mind the 1967 riots … but this time the protest was flawlessly executed.88 (emphasis mine)
Finally the city sent sanitation trucks to the neighborhood and agreed to keep the area clean. The Young Lords then initiated clothing drives and breakfast programs. When a conservative pastor called the police, Gonzalez said, “We kidnapped the church. We occupied the Methodist church in order to run a breakfast program for needy children. [The message was that] this will happen to any institution in a poor community that does not respond to the needs of the people. We initiated the ‘people’s church.’ That was the high point