Students Confront DePaul,” reads the headline from a news brief in the first issue of Y.L.O., the official newsletter of the Young Lords, the Chicago-based Puerto Rican political organization. The item, from March 1969, describes a forum held at DePaul University to discuss the school’s role in gentrifying the neighborhood. As the Y.L.O. put it, DePaul was “depriving the poor people of the area of housing and driving them out” of Lincoln Park.
Jiménez admits that the reorganization wasn’t easy. There was much infighting about the group’s future, but in the end, after he educated his fellow members about housing issues in the neighborhood, they agreed to refocus their mission on fighting Mayor Daley’s racist campaign to push them from their community.
One of the group’s greatest legacies is arguably its participation in the original Rainbow Coalition, a multiracial working-class liberation movement. The coalition was started in 1968 by Fred Hampton, the chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party. He invited the Young Lords and the Young Patriots—a white, working-class organizing group based in Uptown—to join forces in fighting the Daley machine. Jiménez was already well acquainted with Hampton, as the two would often attend the same political actions. He recalls being arrested alongside Hampton during an action to support unionization of the staff at the Wicker Park Welfare Office.
COINTELPRO had dire effects on the political struggles of the 1960s and ’70s, and not just on an organizational level. In December 1969, FBI officers raided Hampton’s Chicago apartment and killed Hampton and fellow BPP member Mark Clark. When the police failed to secure the crime scene, the Young Lords provided security for the Panthers, who opened the apartment for public viewing.
The Young Lords’ relationship with the university started in the mid-1990s, when they approached DePaul’s library and Center for Latino Research to discuss archiving the movement’s history. Young Lords print materials and other ephemera are now housed in the library’s special collections department. Several items, such as historical photographs and copies of the Y.L.O. newsletter, will be on display at the symposium.
“Lincoln Park is a very good example of segregation,” he continues. “It’s a beautiful place. We love beauty too, but it’s not for us. We’re for that, for the people that are going to own houses and stuff like that, but we had a community there. A community that was completely displaced. The first large Puerto Rican community in the history of Chicago. That history was in Lincoln Park.
