Denise Oliver-Velez | |
|---|---|
 Oliver-Velez photographed in Tallahassee, Florida, November 26, 1971. | |
| Born | Denise Oliver August 1, 1947 |
| Political party | Young Lords Black Panther |
| Movement | Black Power Movement |
Denise Oliver-Velez (born August 1, 1947) is an American professor, contributing editor, activist and community organizer. [1] Specifically, she is a contributing editor for the blog Daily Kos, and is a former adjunct professor of anthropology and women's studies at SUNY New Paltz. [1] [2]
Born Denise Roberts Oliver on August 1, 1947, in Brooklyn, New York, she is the daughter of George B. Oliver, an actor and professor of dramatic literature at Nassau Community College, and a Tuskegee Airman, and Marjorie Roberts Oliver, a teacher in the New York City school system.
In September 1960, Oliver-Velez enrolled in Music and Art High School. [3] During her teenage years, Oliver-Velez participated in civil rights work as a member of the Queens branch of the NAACP, which was led by former New York City judge William Booth. [3] In 1963, for example, Oliver-Velez blocked bulldozers as part of a civil disobedience action Booth organized to demand employment for black workers at a Rochdale Village (Queens) construction project. [3]
In the fall of 1965, Denise Oliver-Velez transferred to Howard University, an HBCU in Washington D.C., after a year enrolled in Hunter College. [3] At Howard University in 1968, Olive-Velez was suspended due to her refusal to "behave like a nice Howard lady". [3] While she attended Howard University, she joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and participated in Students for a Democratic Society. [3] Oliver-Velez, along with a small group of fellow black activists including Hubert Brown (H. Rap Brown), started a campaign at the university. [3] Their goal was to improve Howard University's political and cultural methods in regard to showing awareness on black struggles of students and administration. [3]
Oliver-Velez was a member of both The Young Lords and The Black Panther Party.
While in the Young Lords, according to herself she and others challenged one of the organization's points in their 13-Point Program and Platform. As she states, "I was in the Young Lords, and one of the points in the original program was ‘Revolutionary Machismo.’ Machismo is reactionary, so you can’t have revolutionary machismo. We women weren’t having it. So we made a very different kind of statement. ‘We want equality for women. Down with machismo and male chauvinism.'" [4]
Felipe Luciano invited Oliver-Velez to a meeting at poet & activist, Amiri Baraka's house in Newark, New Jersey before she was a committee member in the Young Lords Party to discuss stronger alliance. [5] [6] At this meeting, Oliver-Velez, the only female Luciano invited from the YLP, observed the inferior behavior of the women in Baraka's organization. [6] [5] After Oliver-Velez's questions about women's roles were ignored, she left the meeting concerned and reflected. [5] [6]
However, in 1970 Oliver-Velez was appointed as Minister of Economic Development and became the highest ranking woman in the party. [7] [8]
Denise Oliver-Velez was the first woman that was elected to be on the Young Lords Party leadership board, the central committee. [3] While being a member in the YLP, Oliver-Velez first served as a minister finance and then as a minister of economic development. [6] [3] Amongst Oliver-Velez's membership in the YLP, she also held the position of Officer of the Day in 1969. [3] This leadership position called for overseeing daily activity within the organization and instilling discipline on membership and duties of current members. [3]
The women's caucus issued demands to the Central Committee of the Young Lords that called for an end to sexual discrimination and the full inclusion of women into the leadership of the Lords. [9] The Central Committee reacted by quickly promoting Oliver-Velez and Gloria Fontanez to the Central Committee. They also adopted a new slogan, ¡Abajo con el machismo! (Down with Machismo!). [9] However, these changes did not happen immediately and women still faced sexism within the party regularly. Oliver-Velez became aware of gendered assumptions made by the central committee about who could and could not perform certain tasks. [10] Even when women were assigned to posts in various ministries, including the Defense Ministry, they were disproportionately assigned traditional "women's work" like child care and secretarial tasks. [10]
By May 1970, the New York section of the Young Lords followed its then Central Committee (which included Oliver-Velez, Officer of the Day) and decided to break away from the national Young Lords' office in Chicago, renaming their new group the Young Lords Party. The separation was never a hostile one and had more to do with the rapid development of the group—or "growing pains"—a natural friendly competition between cities, and primarily by infiltration and repression by government groups that were trying to create conflict between the chapters to divide and ultimately destroy the newly formed movement. [7] Despite their considerable presence in the Young Lords Party, female members were consistently overlooked to occupy high-ranking leadership positions. [11]
Denise Oliver-Velez was one of the prominent contributors to the Young Lords Party bilingual newspaper, Pa'lante. [11] Oliver-Velez wrote and edited articles for Pa'lante newspaper as well as producing political artwork, publishing and distributing the newspaper. [3] She was also included in the original Young Lords Party team, where she helped to create the newspaper's first layouts. [3]
One of the major contributions women made to the success of the Young Lords Party included publishing its Position Paper on Women, which was later included in The Young Lords: A Reader (2010), edited by Darrel Enck-Wanzer. In 1970, [3] Oliver-Velez helped construct the paper and theorized the intersection of race and class in the lives of women of color for it. [10] She and another former Young Lords member, Iris Morales, wrote a foreword for The Young Lords: A Reader (2010).
In addition to her activism with the Young Lords, Oliver-Velez was also an AIDS movement activist and a member of the Black Panther Party. [1] She published ethnographic research as part of HIV/AIDS intervention projects. [1]
Denise Oliver-Velez joined the Real Great Society (RGS), a Puerto Rican East Harlem social service in New York City with connections to anti-poverty programs. [3] She also worked with University of the Streets to reform New York's youth gangs. Through networks from University of the Streets, Oliver-Velez taught Black and Puerto Rican students who were expelled from New York public schools about Black and Puerto Rican history. [3]
Oliver-Velez was a program director and co-founder of WPFW-FM in Washington, D.C., Pacifica's first minority-controlled radio station and worked in public broadcasting and community media for many years. [1]
She was also the executive director of the Black Filmmaker Foundation. [1]
Oliver-Velez is featured in the 2014 feminist documentary film She's Beautiful When She's Angry . [12] [13]
In August 2020, Oliver-Velez gave a rare interview on Bryan Knight's Tell A Friend podcast, where she candidly spoke about her life and activism in the Young Lords. [14]
Lolita Lebrón was a Puerto Rican nationalist who was convicted of aggravated assault and other crimes after carrying out an armed attack on the United States Capitol in 1954, which resulted in the wounding of five members of the United States Congress. She was released from prison in 1979 after being granted clemency by President Jimmy Carter. Lebrón was born and raised in Lares, Puerto Rico, where she joined the Puerto Rican Liberal Party. In her youth she met Francisco Matos Paoli, a Puerto Rican poet, with whom she had a relationship. In 1941, Lebrón migrated to New York City, where she joined the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, gaining influence within the party's leadership.
Jesús Colón (1901–1974) was a Puerto Rican writer known as the Father of the Nuyorican movement. An activist and community organizer, Colón wrote poetry and stories about his experiences as an Afro-Puerto Rican living in New York.
The Young Lords, also known as the Young Lords Organization (YLO) or Young Lords Party (YLP), was a Chicago-based street gang that became a civil and human rights organization. The group aims to fight for neighborhood empowerment and self-determination for Puerto Rico, Latinos, and colonized people. Tactics used by the Young Lords include mass education, canvassing, community programs, occupations, and direct confrontation. The Young Lords became targets of the United States FBI's COINTELPRO program.
Clemente Soto Vélez was a Puerto Rican nationalist, poet, journalist and activist who mentored many generations of artists in Puerto Rico and New York City. Upon his death in 1993, he left a rich legacy that contributed to the cultural, social and economic life of Puerto Ricans in New York and Latinos everywhere.
Felipe Luciano is a poet, community activist, journalist, media personality, and politician. He is of Afro-Puerto Rican heritage. He is known for his significant involvement in both the Young Lords Party and The Last Poets, and more generally, as "an early and important participant in the awakening of the new consciousness-raising radicalism among Puerto Ricans in New York and across the country in the late 1960s and 1970s."
Machismo is the sense of being "manly" and self-reliant, a concept associated with "a strong sense of masculine pride: an exaggerated masculinity". Machismo is a term originating in the early 1930s and 1940s best defined as having pride in one's masculinity. While the term is associated with "a man's responsibility to provide for, protect, and defend his family", machismo is strongly and consistently associated with dominance, aggression, grandstanding, and an inability to nurture. The correlation to machismo is found to be deeply rooted in family dynamics and culture.
Rosa Alicia Clemente is an American community organizer, independent journalist, and hip-hop activist. She was the vice presidential running mate of Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney in the 2008 U.S. presidential election.
Carlos Vélez Rieckehoff was the President of the New York chapter of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party in the 1930s. In the 1990s Rieckehoff was among the protesters against the United States Navy's use of his birthplace, the island of Vieques, as a bombing range. He stood in front of the committee of the U.S. House of Representatives investigating the situation in Vieques and pleaded for the return of Vieques to the people of Puerto Rico.
Frances Negrón-Muntaner is a Puerto Rican filmmaker, writer, and scholar. Her work is focused on a comparative exploration of coloniality, primarily in Puerto Rico and the United States, with special attention given to the intersections between race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and politics. She is an associate professor of English and Comparative Literature and Director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University in New York City. She has also contributed to the Huffington Post, El Diario/La Prensa, and 80 Grados, and since 2008 has served as a Global Expert for the United Nations Rapid Response Media Mechanism. She is one of the best-known Puerto Rican lesbian artists currently living in the United States.
Historically, Puerto Rico, which is now an unincorporated territory of the U.S., has been dominated by a settler society of religiously and ethnically diverse Europeans, primarily of Spanish descent, and Sub-Saharan Africans. The majority of Puerto Ricans are multi-ethnic, including people of European, African, Asian, Native American, and of mixed-ethnic descent.
José "Cha Cha" Jiménez is a political activist and the founder of the Young Lords Organization, a Chicago-based street gang that became a civil and human rights organization. Started in September 23, 1968, it was most active in the late 1960s and 1970s.
Antonio Vélez Alvarado a.k.a. "The Father of the Puerto Rican Flag" was a Puerto Rican journalist, politician and revolutionary who was an advocate of Puerto Rican independence. A close friend of Cuban patriot José Martí, Vélez Alvarado joined the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Committee in New York City and is among those who allegedly designed the Flag of Puerto Rico. Vélez Alvarado was one of the founding fathers of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party.
Ruth Mary Reynolds was an American educator, political and civil rights activist who embraced the ideals of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party. She was incarcerated in La Princesa Prison for sedition during the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party Revolts of the 1950s. As one of the founders of the organization known as the "American League for Puerto Rico's Independence," she devoted many years of her life to the cause of Puerto Rico's independence from the United States after her release from prison.
The recorded history of Puerto Rican women can trace its roots back to the era of the Taíno, the indigenous people of the Caribbean, who inhabited the island that they called "Boriken" before the arrival of Spaniards. During the Spanish colonization the cultures and customs of the Taíno, Spanish, African and women from non-Hispanic European countries blended into what became the culture and customs of Puerto Rico.
The Young Lords: A Reader (2010), is a collection of speeches, essays, and images related to the Puerto Rican movement organization, Young Lords, founded in Chicago. Dr. Darrel Enck-Wanzer, its editor, uses his background studies in communication and culture to create a source book for the revolutionary organization. The Young Lords: A Reader was published in 2010, 42 years after the mass evictions and gentrification in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago that led to the organization's founding. This book includes a foreword by former Young Lords Iris Morales and Denise Oliver-Vélez.
Edgardo Miranda-Rodriguez is a writer at Marvel Entertainment, Editor-in-Chief at Darryl Makes Comics LLC, Art Director/Owner at Somos Arte and Studio Edgardo creative services, and creator of La Borinqueña, an original comic book character that has grown into a cultural phenomenon and a nationally recognized symbol of Puerto Rican patriotism, social justice, and equality.
Women in the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican nationalist group founded in the United States in 1969, advocated for racial and gender equality and challenged patriarchy in the organization from 1969-1976. Women members wrote articles in the Palante newspaper critiquing sexist and patriarchal structures and demanded a series of reproductive rights that included access to abortion and an end to forced sterilization. In November 1970, women consisted of roughly forty percent of the group’s membership and were between the ages of 13 and 28. Despite their considerable presence in the YLP, female members were consistently overlooked to occupy high-ranking leadership positions. However, in 1970 Denise Oliver-Vélez was appointed as Minister of Economic Development and became the highest ranking woman in the party.
Iris Morales is an American activist for Latino/a civil rights, filmmaker, author, and lawyer based in New York. She is best known for her work with the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican community activist group in the United States and her feminist movements within the organization. Morales continues to create a space for people of color to express their voices and histories through a variety of mediums as an advocate for underrepresented people, especially those who identify as LatinX members.
