Young Lords

The gang known as the Young Lords formed in 1958 as an assembly of Puerto Rican adolescent males living in what was then one of Chicago's most impoverished neighborhoods. In the mid-1960s, the Young Lords redirected their energy from turf-oriented, intergang warfare to a spirited attack on the city of Chicago's urban renewal program, a gentrification effort that ultimately displaced thousands of poor minorities from the neighborhood. By 1968, the Lords had matured into a formidable and radical group taking part in the national civil rights movement, working alongside the Black Panther Party, the Young Patriots Organization, and other left-leaning groups to critique capitalism's oppression of poor people of color. In the early 1970s, the Lords and their com-patriots set their sights on the American prison system in hopes of revolutionizing the treatment of prisoners through militant action. To some extent their tactics worked, but in 1975 the Chicago Young Lords disbanded under the pressure of political infighting, police suppression, and narcotics addiction among the group's membership.