THE CONVERGENCE OF
BLACK AND BROWN POWER
Annual Afro-Latinx Dinner Discussion Series
Sponsored by:
The Afro-American Cultural Center
La Casa Cultural de Julia Burgos
BACKGROUND
Among the many developments of the late 1960s and
early 1970s, a generation of largely inexperienced
young radical activists from diverse racial backgrounds
established influential organizations in the volatile
environment of Northern ghettos. These groups formed,
in the aggregate, part of a growing grassroots
movement of poor and working-class urban dwellers,
mostly minority, that gave political and social direction
to the insurgent mood prevalent in Northern cities in the
second half of the 1960s and the early 1970s.
BLACK PANTHER PARTY
Officially launched October 15 th, 1966
Huey said, We need a program. We have to have a program for the people. A
program that relates to the people. A program that the people can understand. A
program that the people can read and see, and which expresses their desires and
needs at the same time. It's got to relate to the philosophical meaning of where in
the world we are going, but the philosophical meaning will also have to relate to
something specific. (37)
Huey said, This ten-point platform and program is what we want and what we
believe. These things did not just come out of the clear blue sky. This is what black
people have been voicing all along for over 100 years since the Emancipation
Proclamation and even before that. These things are directly related to the things
we had before we left Africa.
BLACK PANTHER PARTY 10-POINT PLAN
1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of Black Community
2. We want full employment for our people.
3. We want an end to the robbery by the white man of our Black Community
4.We want decent housing, fir for shelter of human beings.
5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of decadent American society.
6. We want all black men to be exempt from military service.
7. We ant an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY AND MURDER of Black people.
8. We want freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.
9. We want all black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group
or people from their black communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.
10. We want land, bread, housing, education, justice, and peace. And as our major political
objective, a United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony in which
only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate, for the purpose of determining the will of
black people as to their national destiny.
THE YOUNG LORDS
The Young Lords Organization (YLO) was a Puerto Rican revolutionary nationalist group, born in
the 1960s, that consciously fashioned itself after the Black Panther Party (BPP) and ardently
championed the independence of Puerto Rico
became a civil and human rights movement on Grito de Lares on September 23, 1968 by Jose
Cha Cha Jimenez
Challenged dominant interpretations of the civil rights and black power movements, the U. S.
Urban Crisis, and the character and complexity of the black Diaspora
With a formal leadership largely composed of Afro-Latinos and with one-quarter of its membership
comprised of African Americans, YLP members launched one of the first Latino formations that:
Saw itself as part of the African Diaspora
That was instrumental in theorizing and identifying the structures of racism embedded in
culture, language, and history in Latin America and its institution
And that would commit itself to the struggle against racism in the United States and insist that
poor African Americans and Latinos shared political and economic interests.
YOUNG LORDS PARTY
13-POINT PROGRAM & PLATFORM
1.We want self-determination for Puerto Ricans Liberation on the island and inside the
United States
2. We want self-determination for all Latinos.
3. We want liberation of all third world people.
4. We are revolutionary nationalists and oppose racism.
5. We want community control of our institutions and land.
6.We want a true education of our creole culture and Spanish language.
7. We oppose the Amerkikkkan Military.
8. We want Freedom for all political prisoners.
9. We want freedom for all political prisoners.
10. We want equality for women. Machismo must be revolutionarynot oppressive.
11. We fight anti-communism with international unity.
12. We believe armed self-defense and armed struggle are the only means to liberation.
13.We want a socialist society.
SIMILARITIES TO/ ROOTS IN THE BPP
The Chicago Young Lords was one of the numerous inner-city gangs, which in the 1960s
relinquished its defensive competition over turf control and moved toward progressive
and overly political community organizing, partially as a result of organic grassroots
leadership in inner-city neighborhoods and in particular conscious political intervention of
Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton.
Led militants, community-based campaigns to alleviate the most visible manifestations of
the new poverty in American cities: chronic unemployment, the intractable crisis of public
healthcare, childhood lead poisoning, poor sanitation, drug addiction, hunger, racism, and
police brutality.
Preoccupied with organizing the poorest sections of society, the Lords- like the Panthersembraced what Karl Marx identified as the lumpen proletariat
THE MOVEMENT FOR BLACK LIVES PLATFORM
1. We demand an end to the named and unnamed wars on Black people, including the
criminalization, incarceration, and killing of our people.
2. We demand reparations for harms inflicted on Black people: from colonialism to slavery
through food and housing redlining, mas incarceration, and surveillance.
3. We demand investments in education, health and safety of Black people, instead of
investments in the criminalizing, caging and harming of Black people.
4. We demand economic justice for all and a reconstruction of the economy to ensure
Black communities have collective ownership, not merely access.
5. We demand a world where those most impacted in our communities control the laws,
institutions, and policies that are meant to serve us.
6. We demand full and independent Black political power and Black self-determination in
all areas of society.
RESOURCES
Seale, Bobby. "Seize The Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party." 5 March 1970.
http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4039-8250-6_11
http://www.ibiblio.org/shscbch/ribb/lords-origins.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Lords
https://policy.m4bl.org/platform/
How are todays movements similar or different from the movements mobilized in
the past?
What are barriers for building solidarity across different racial and ethnic
groups?
What do you think are effective tactics for coalition building based on tonights
discussion?
Why is it important to consider how this history relates to the movements of
today?
