Saluting 60s Radicals: Three Local Cultural Institutions Celebrate The Young Lords

"If you live long enough, you'll see that every victory turns into a defeat,” wrote Simone de Beauvoir. In politics, the adage's flipside is also true: Live long enough and you'll see discredited ideas gain acceptance — and even be celebrated.

How else to explain the sudden fascination with the Young Lords, a group of Puerto Rican nationalists and militant Marxists last heard from in the late 1970s?

Three city museums are currently celebrating the group with a multi-venue “artistic and cultural survey.” “¡Presente! The Young Lords in New York” runs through October at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, El Museo del Barrio and Loisaida Inc.

The Young Lords were born as a street gang in Chicago in the early 1960s. Its members became radicalized through contact with the Black Panthers and opened chapters in other cities with large concentrations of Puerto Ricans.

In New York, the Young Lords made their mark with an August 1969 protest in the streets of East Harlem. They dragged mountains of trash into 3rd Ave. and set them alight. Such “garbage offensives” became the group's signature.

A description of the new exhibit posted by the Bronx Museum calls the Young Lords “radical social activists” who “demanded reform in health care, education, housing, employment and policing.”

“Demanded” is the key word.

In late 1969, the Young Lords nailed shut the doors of the First Spanish Methodist Church on Lexington Ave. and East 111th St. The congregation had resisted the group's efforts to open a free breakfast program. Tired of negotiating, the Lords simply took over the building and occupied it for 11 days.

But that was small potatoes compared to what came next. In 1970, 25 Young Lords invaded Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx and demanded to be allowed to open a drug-treatment center. The hospital administrators caved, and the resulting clinic — Lincoln Detox — became the Young Lords' base of operations.

“From the beginning it was like no other clinic in New York,” writes Bryan Burrough in “Days of Rage,” his excellent new history of 1970s underground movements. “Lincoln Detox drew many of its volunteers and paid staffers from the ranks of New York's militant leftists.”

Funded by government grants, Lincoln Detox became a far-left fever swamp. Weather Underground mastermind Bernadine Dohrn's sister, Jennifer, worked there and married Mickey Melendez, one of the Young Lords' founders. Volunteers from groups like Weather festooned Lincoln Detox's offices with posters of their heroes: Che Guevara, Malcolm X and cop-killer Joanne Chesimard.

What they didn't do was help people kick drugs. Addicts were counseled to redirect their passion for drugs into revolution.

One of Lincoln Detox's leading lights was Jeral Wayne Williams, a veteran of the Black Nationalist movement whose belief in the power of acupuncture to cure addiction couldn't keep him from getting hooked on cocaine.

Williams later changed his name to Mutulu Shakur and, using Lincoln Detox as his base, began robbing banks to finance his habit. Still a hero to the radical left, Shakur is serving a 60-year prison sentence for his role in the 1981 murder of two police officers and a security guard during the robbery of a Brinks truck at the Nanuet Mall.

Lincoln Detox enjoyed an improbable eight year-run on the taxpayers' dime. In 1978, with the city in financial free-fall, Mayor Koch terminated the center's funding and sent the NYPD to surround the building and evict the staff.

That was effectively the end of the Young Lords. With the current exhibit, though, the group's modern admirers seek to turn defeat into victory.

The Young Lords weren't violent revolutionaries like the FALN, who planted more than 130 bombs in Chicago and New York. But they were bullies who weren't above using terror and intimidation to advance their radical left-wing agenda.

This piece originally appeared in New York Daily News