Ann Arbor, Mich. -- Cha Cha Jimenez, founder of the Young Lords
Organization in Chicago, was the highlight of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Day events at the University of Michigan. Other events included some
progressive historical lectures and a student rally in defense of
affirmative action polices.

Ever since a student strike and protests successfully won University
recognition of MLK Day at the University of Michigan, the occasion has
seen a host of presentations and events around civil rights issues. Most
of these are apolitical or liberal reformist events, but this year there
were some notable exceptions.

Cha Cha Jimenez gave a speech on the history and origins of the Young
Lords Organization (YLO), founded in 1967 in Chicago. The Young Lords
Party (YLP) in New York City and the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers
Organization (PRRWO) grew from the YLO. These organizations formed the
Maoist pole among Puerto Ricans at the same time as the Black Panther
Party exerted Maoist leadership among Blacks.

Jimenez's parents were part of a big wave of Puerto Rican immigration in
the early 1950s. Many of them were fruit-pickers, but when they moved to
Chicago, settling in the Lincoln Park neighborhood, many worked in the
hotel industry in bottom-rung jobs. His father was in a "street gang"
that fought discrimination and defended the Puerto Rican community. His
uncle and grandfather were soldiers for the U.$. in previous wars.

Chicago Mayor Daley's urban renewal program drove all the Puerto Ricans
out of Lincoln Park, which helped spark a political consciousness in the
community. "What got us involved was not the independence of Puerto
Rico," Jimenez said, "but that they were taking our neighborhood from
us. . . . Everyone else thought urban renewal was good. They still think
it's good. Urban planners all over the country emulate what they did in
Chicago."

His involvement with local street gangs and drug use got him in trouble
with Chicago police, and landed him in jail as a young man. There he saw
the guards beating up the undocumented immigrant workers they were
hauling in. His early activism was helping these immigrants with
translating. While in jail, he started reading Martin Luther King, and
then Malcolm X. "Then I wanted to go to confession," he recalled. "And
after confession I wanted to overthrow the government."

His early reading also included material from the Brown Berets and the
Black Panther Party. With this influence, he helped turn the Young
Lords, then a street gang, into a political organization. They read Marx
and Lenin and Mao. "Some of it related to us, you know," he said. "The
Red Book was pretty good. We could relate to Mao because he could relate
to the community."

Their early actions were very militant, and they didn't realize how much
trouble they would get into. They took over a local police station, and
the urban renewal office: "We trashed it . . . It got shut down for a
few months" because of the damage they caused, he said. They also took
over the McCormick Theological Seminary and held it for a week,
demanding investments in public housing. And they took over People's
Church, and it became national headquarters. They gave free day care,
health clinics, lead poisoning screening, and legal advice. "We needed a
lot of lawyers," he said.

Jimenez met with Fred Hampton, the local leader of the Black Panther
Party (BPP), and Hampton told him that they were going to be in big
trouble from the takeovers, and they would need better organization. So
they created more formal organization, including ministries like the
Panthers had. Then the Young Patriots, BPP and the Young Lords together
created the original "Rainbow Coalition," whose name was later stolen by
Jesse Jackson.

Jimenez said such alliances were essential for them. "One of the things
in the Red Book, Mao said, 'United the many to defeat the few.'"

The FBI's COINTELPRO program targeted the Rainbow Coalition for
destruction. Fred Hampton was murdered by the Chicago Police in a raid
on his apartment in late 1969. The raid was made possible by the work of
an FBI infiltrator named William O'Neal, who provided the pigs with
floor plans and schedules of who would be where (see Agents of
Repression, by Ward Churchill and Jim Vanderwall, South End Press,
Boston, 1990).

According to Jimenez, O'Neal, who was in charge of security for the BPP,
was also in the Young Lords offices. Jimenez was also targeted, though
not killed. He was arrested on a bogus hostage- taking charge, which was
eventually thrown out after he spent nine months in jail. He was
arrested many times by the Chicago police, who also arrested people just
for wearing Young Lords buttons.

Jimenez was not uncritical of the early Young Lords work, for example
with regard to gender. "In terms of women, we were just like the rest of
the community," he said, "and we were very discriminatory. We were macho
. . . We're the first ones to admit that." However, like the YLP, they
had a separate women's group, "They [the wimmin] had a group called
'Mothers And Others' - - MAO -- and they met separately." The wimmin's
work also led to the day care and breakfast programs: "We just put
programs in place -- you know, we didn't do a lot of analysis of the
woman question," Jimenez said. From what MIM knows of the YLP and the
PRRWO, they did do explicit analysis of the role of wimmin in society
and in the revolution. In fact, the wimmin in these organizations
stepped forward and siezed positions of leadership (see MIM’s review of
the YLO, YLP, and PRRWO in MIM Theory 7).

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