Situated in the Lincoln Park campus’ quiet nook of structures that stand sandwiched between Belden and Fullerton Avenues, DePaul’s School of Music Building at first appears to be an unimposing and unspectacular edifice. The building and those that surround it sit on the brink of a massive, three-phase plan of reconstruction and expansion slated to commence at the end of the 2012-13 academic year. The building will be stripped down to its foundations, and renovated completely.

The transformation of the School of Music Building will forever alter the face of a site that hosted and still harbors the memory of an important moment in the area’s history. Without so much as a signpost or a plaque for them to refer to, many students who pass through the building’s doors everyday remain unaware of the events that took place there May 14, 1969.

The structure was then the Stone-Academic Administration Building of the McCormick Theological Seminary.  In an event that was symptomatic of the politically turbulent era, the building was forcibly taken over by a Puerto Rican youth organization and human rights movement, known as the Young Lords, which originated in the Lincoln Park neighborhood.

“We went in with about 13 or 14 people, and chained all the doors … by morning, we had 350 community members with us, and we stayed there for a week,” said the Young Lords’ founder, Jose “Cha Cha” Jimenez.  The group had been asking area institutions to invest in low-income housing, and McCormick Seminary’s “blatant refusal” to do so made their building a target.  The Young Lords not only used the takeover as a means of setting an “example for other institutions,” as Jimenez said, but to make continued demands for funds for community programs.

May 6, DePaul’s Center for Interreligious Engagement welcomed Drew University Professor Elias Ortega-Aponte, who delivered a thorough and engaging presentation on the Young Lords and the People’s Church that they created in 1969. Ortega-Aponte asserted that the movement “opened the doors to conceive civic engagement as a form of radical spiritual practice.”

“Being in this neighborhood and surrounded areas, which occupy a unique place in the history of the Young Lords, is a special moment for me- I am reminded of the work still ahead,” he said.

Ortega-Aponte argued that the group’s ideals still bear relevance to contemporary issues. His presentation’s modern contextualization of the movement was timely, as September 23, 2013 marks the 45th anniversary of the founding of the Young Lords.

Birth of a Movement

“We were the sons and daughters of the first Puerto Rican immigrants to Chicago, so we started a local social club in the neighborhood,” said Jimenez. “As poverty increased and displacement disbanded the network that was set up by the original immigrants, the group became more negative.” 

The Young Lords thus morphed into a territorial street gang, motivated not by profit, but by ethnic pride as they struggled to etch out an identity in Lincoln Park. During this era, the neighborhood had a multicultural population, but nevertheless exhibited clear-cut racial divides.

“This area was always integrated, since I was a kid,” said John Farwick, 79, who has resided near the corner of Seminary and Armitage Avenues in Lincoln Park since 1934.  “We didn’t have the same kind of demarcation that you had on the South Side … but there was still de facto segregation.” 

It was in this environment that the Young Lords physically battled youth gangs of other races to assert their presence and prowess. Eventually, many members became immersed simultaneously in street gang life as well as the late ’60’s drug culture, and were incarcerated for both drug-related and violent crimes. 

Jimenez was frequently incarcerated during this period, and his sense of social inequity was amplified not only by first-hand experience in jail, but also by his exposure to revolutionary ideas through literature about political movements of the period, particularly the Black Panther Party.  When he returned to the streets of Lincoln Park, Jimenez spearheaded a shift in the group’s ideals from those of a violent street gang to those of community-service oriented human rights activists.

“I actually give the credit to Mayor Daley,” Jimenez said.  “He began a system that was a modern day land grab, as I call it.  The only purpose for it was to build an inner-city suburb in Lincoln Park, and in that way, build up the tax base … what they did was take the Latino community first, because they had no political power.

“The Young Lords were smart enough to see that this was destroying our community. We saw our parents, uncles, aunts, brothers and friends being displaced, so we decided to take matters into our own hands and say that we needed to empower the community and that we needed a voice.  It was a matter of democracy more than housing.”

The People’s Church

The Young Lords would further demonstrate their penchant for militancy when they seized control of the United Methodist Church on Armitage Avenue in 1969, the same year as the takeover at McCormick Seminary.

The group had previously approached the congregation in the hopes of renting space for their social service programs, but these negotiations broke down, as the church was uncomfortable with allowing a politically radical group of former gang members within its walls. The church was subsequently commandeered under the leadership of Luis Chavez, a Young Lord of Mexican descent.

On the night of the takeover, the police arrived on the scene with SWAT teams.  “I was standing outside at the time with Reverend Bruce Johnson, and if it wasn’t for him, it would have been a bloodbath,” said Jimenez. In spite of his congregation’s feelings about the Young Lords, Reverend Johnson had always personally sympathized with and supported the group and told the police that he had given them permission to be in the church.  They dispersed after assessing the situation, without ever entering the building.

The next day, the name of the United Methodist Church was changed to the People’s Church, and its interior and exterior walls would eventually be covered in Young Lords murals.  “We set up the first community day care center in Chicago’s history, we had a clinic there, and we had a breakfast for children there. We were able to work together for about a year,” Jimenez said. 

Rise and Fall

As time went on, the Young Lords decided to engage in less confrontational, non-violent protests, in an effort to decrease police scrutiny and to endear themselves to their community. “You don’t get anywhere by shaking up the populace and scaring the hell out of them,” said Lincoln Park resident John Farwick.

The group’s demonstrations attracted crowds numbering in the thousands as they began to branch out from Lincoln Park and work in different areas of the city. Strong advocates for Chicago’s first African-American Mayor, Harold Washington, the Young Lords celebrated his electoral victory in 1983 with a demonstration that drew more than 100,000 people to Humboldt Park. 

The group’s heightened profile came with the price of intensified inspection from law enforcement and other bureaucratic entities.  “They tried to discredit everything that we did, which was easy for them, because we were a gang, so they just kept on calling us that … the city used not only the gang intelligence unit, but they used the riot squad, and the FBI-COINTELPRO was connected to both of those groups.  In other words, they hid in the background,” said Jimenez.

After numerous factors including criminal charges adversely affected their leadership as well as their base of support, the Young Lords ceased to be the coherent movement that they once were.

Saving History

“I am sure it would surprise quite a few people if they learned that Lincoln Park and Old Town were the neighborhoods the first Puerto Rican immigrants to move to Chicago inhabited,” said Amani Conley, 37, a History major at DePaul who attended Professor Ortega-Aponte’s presentation. “Unfortunately, the history of the  Lincoln Park area is largely overlooked.”

As the 45th anniversary of their founding nears, the surviving Young Lords are seeking to commemorate and salvage the pieces of their history that lie in Lincoln Park. This has proven to be a daunting task, as the forces of gentrification and urban renewal continue unabated, crumbling whatever remnants of the past stand in their way. 

While the planned reconstruction of DePaul’s School of Music Building presents an impending threat to the preservation of the Young Lords’ historical presence, the former People’s Church has already been reduced to a pile of bricks.  Walgreens purchased the building site of the United Methodist Church and demolished the original structure.

The Church was a “staple of the Puerto Rican struggle in the community,” as Jimenez said, and although it could not be saved, the group still hopes to memorialize Reverend Bruce Johnson in some fashion. September 30, 1969, only nine months after the Church takeover, Reverend Johnson and his wife Eugenia were found murdered in their home.  The case has never been solved.

Same Issues, Different World

Jimenez has also been promoting and preserving the Young Lords’ legacy through his work on the long-term “Young Lords in Lincoln Park” project at Grand Valley State University in Michigan.  The project currently consists of oral histories from 110 former Lincoln Park residents, and will eventually encompass those of the New York City Young Lords as well.

“Our members are still there,” said Jimenez. “One thing about the Young Lords in Chicago is that we grew up together. We’re still functioning in a different way.  Most of our members are involved in community work anyway in different areas.”

The community activism of the Young Lords is still as necessary as it was when the group was first founded. The same issues that gave birth to the movement-displacement of citizens, poor health care, and the proliferation of “hopeless youth”-are alive, well and arguably even amplified in modern urban America.

“Four decades have past after the monumental social justice gains of the Labor and Civil Rights Movements … and people of color continually toil for inclusion, respect and justice in this struggle of democratic living in the United States,” said Professor Ortega-Aponte.

While the Latino community has long since dispersed from the prime real estate areas of Chicago, the Lincoln Park neighborhood that gave birth to the Young Lords comes closer to completing its full-scale transformation from the tempestuous melting pot that it once was to a thoroughly gentrified and commercial area. “It’s a community that was completely destroyed,” Jimenez said. “That was the only Puerto Rico that I knew.”

Jack Farwick also mused that “Chicago’s demographics change every 30 years, it’s just one of those things … when it really started to change was when Cha Cha and the rest of these people started to disperse in the ’70s, and the people out in the suburbs started coming back with grandma’s money. What kind of changed was the mindset, the entitlement idea…people were so entwined with making their fortunes or whatever they were doing that they lost empathy for people around them.”