Want to Start a Revolution?: Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle

12. Denise Oliver and the Young Lords Party: Stretching the Political Boundaries of Struggle

271 12 Denise Oliver and the Young Lords Party Stretching the Political Boundaries of Struggle Johanna Fernández Revered in movement circles for her political acuity and leadership in the Young Lords Party (YLP)—the Puerto Rican organization that consciously fashioned itself after the Black Panther Party—Denise Oliver is at once one of the most locally influential and least acknowledged African American radicals of the sixties. As an African American, Oliver’s prominent membership in a Puerto Rican organization captured the imagination of her contemporaries because it bespoke of the political dynamism and open racial and ethnic consciousness in the Young Lords. (Approximately 30 percent of the YLP was composed of African American and non–Puerto Rican Latinos.) Both as an African American and as the first woman elected to the YLP’s official leadership body, the central committee, she possessed enormous symbolic power. She seemed to embody the possibilities for building an equitable multiracial society. However, because conventional histories of the Black Power movement often overlook nationalism’s pliability and fail to look for black activism in unlikely places, Oliver’s political evolution and important presence within the movement have eluded historians. Ironically, it is precisely her crossover —during a period that profoundly challenged racial norms—that has rendered her invisible in history. Yet, despite Oliver’s relative anonymity, her contributions to the movement were exceptional. From her activism in a local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) as a teenager and participation in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) while a student at Howard 272 Johanna Fernández University, to her activism in the Young Lords and Black Panther parties, Oliver helped build some of the most important freedom organizations of the period. Oliver’s leadership in the YLP contributed to a radical reformulation of gender politics and practice within the organization. In 1970, Oliver helped pen a comprehensive position paper on gender inequality that theorized the intersection of race and class in the lives of women of color. The arc of Oliver’s life—from her early political formation in a black household with communist leanings in Queens, to her work in the black freedom movements of the 1960s and her later membership in the Young Lords Party—offers a view of the forces that created a generation of men and women who embraced the varied calls of Black Power and with it contributed to the transformation of American society. During Oliver’s tenure in the YLP’s central committee, she served first as minister of finance and later as minister of economic development. Her ascendance was a product of a pitched battle over the role of women in the organization, but also of Oliver’s confidence, breadth of knowledge, and undeniable experience in the black freedom movement. Her membership in some of the most important organizations of the period—meant that she came to the organization grounded in the major issues and debates of the civil rights and Black Power movements. And because she was a red-diaper baby, Oliver was familiar with the classic theoretical texts that were becoming required reading among young radicals. Oliver’s membership in the Young Lords points to a kind of racial and ethnic crossover that may have been more common in the movements of the 1960s than we currently acknowledge, a mingling that is not yet reflected in the historiography of the Black Power movement. The history of the Young Lords is a telling example of this underdocumented phenomenon, as approximately 25 percent of the group’s members was African American, and more than 10 percent of this Puerto Rican organization was composed of Latino men and women who were not Puerto Rican. While we do not have corresponding statistics for the Black Panther Party, we have abundant anecdotal evidence that many Latinos claimed membership in that organization . By examining such instances of racial and ethnic crossing, we can gain a more complete understanding of the potential of the civil rights movement and the dreams these organizations inspired in their participants. Denise Oliver and the Young Lords Party 273 Political Evolution Oliver was born in Brooklyn in 1947. Her parents were newcomers to postwar New York who became part of the city’s growing and vibrant black left. They came of age politically amid the explosion of black urbanization produced by the war and the expansion of civil rights protest...