Hundreds of people filled FSUMC The People’s Church in East Harlem on Saturday, Oct. 24, to remember five women who helped run the Young Lords, the New York organization that fought for tenants, patients and workers in the early 1970s. All five died between 2025 and 2026, as the Amsterdam News reported.
Two of them were Black women whose names sit at the center of the group’s story. Denise Oliver-Velez was the first woman elected to the Young Lords Central Committee. Cleo Silvers, an African American organizer, led the 1970 takeover of Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx, a protest over the care the neighborhood received. Their work is a reminder that the Young Lords, a mostly Puerto Rican organization, was also shaped by Black organizers and by Black Panther allies.
The other three honored were Minerva Solla, one of the first women in the group’s Ministry of Defense; the historian Johanna Fernández, author of “The Young Lords: A Radical History”; and Concepción “Connie” Cruz, who pushed the movement to confront machismo within its own ranks.
Oliver-Velez died in July at 78. She transferred to Howard University in 1965, where she met figures such as Fannie Lou Hamer and Amiri Baraka, before joining the Young Lords. She served as its minister of finance and minister of economic development, helped found its Women’s Caucus with Iris Morales, and worked on the newspaper Pa’lante and the weekly WBAI radio program. She later became the first Black woman to serve as a public radio program director, taught anthropology and women’s studies at SUNY New Paltz, and wrote for Daily Kos for two decades, according to HBCU Buzz. “It’s impossible really to overstate the impact that Denise had,” Juan González, a founding Young Lords member, said.
At the memorial, speakers described women who did the daily work of the movement. Gloria Santiago Rodriguez, a Young Lords veteran who hosted, told the crowd: “You shared your life partners, mothers, sisters, aunts and grandmothers with a movement.” Jamal Joseph, a former Black Panther leader, called Cruz “a dynamic force” and said the argument over machismo “was true in the Young Lords.” Rosemari Mealy, an activist and CUNY professor, said Silvers “was an excellent organizer” who “merged her interests in community mental health with organizing.”
Co-host Indiana Soto called the evening “both a celebration and a responsibility.” Geovany Fernández, speaking of his sister, said the five were “lives that while on this earth tried to do good.”
The Lincoln Hospital takeover and the group’s health programs are part of the record Fernández’s book documents, and Morales’s book “Through the Eyes of Rebel Women” tells the story of the women’s caucus.
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