Introduction Movements Eras Organizations Index Contributions
About Organizations
Black Panther Party Black Liberation Army American Indian Movement FALN Weather Underground Earth Liberation Front Animal Liberation Front MOVE Republic of New Afrika Symbionese Liberation Army Los Macheteros United Freedom Front May 19th Communist Organization Young Lords George Jackson Brigade Students for a Democratic Society Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Industrial Workers of the World Communist Party USA Puerto Rican Nationalist Party Brown Berets Socialist Workers Party African People's Socialist Party Nation of Islam
About Young Lords
From Street Gang to Movement: Chicago & Cha Cha Jiménez (1968–1969) The New York Young Lords & the Garbage Offensive (1969) The First People's Church Occupation (1969–1970) The Lincoln Hospital Takeover & the Health Offensives (1970) Julio Roldán, the Tombs & the Second Church Occupation (1970) Infiltration, Repression & the Organization's End (1971–1976)
FROM STREET GANG TO MOVEMENT: CHICAGO & CHA CHA JIMéNEZ (1968–1969)
From Street Gang to Movement: Chicago & Cha Cha Jiménez (1968–1969)

The Young Lords began in 1960 as a Puerto Rican street gang in Chicago's Lincoln Park. Their transformation came through prison: José "Cha Cha" Jiménez, jailed in 1968, encountered the writings of Malcolm X and the example of the Black Panthers, and on release rebuilt the Lords as the Young Lords Organization — a political formation fighting the urban-renewal bulldozers displacing Puerto Ricans from Lincoln Park.

The YLO occupied the McCormick Theological Seminary and the People's Church (Armitage Avenue Methodist), where it ran free breakfast and daycare programs, and joined Fred Hampton's original Rainbow Coalition alongside the Panthers and the Young Patriots. The police answer was relentless: raids, hundreds of arrests of Jiménez on movement-related charges, and the never-solved 1969 killing of Lords minister Manuel Ramos by an off-duty officer.