SPEAKER_00: Hey y'all, I'm Erin Haynes. I'm the editor-at-large for The 19th News, a nonprofit newsroom reporting on gender, politics, and policy. We look at where our democracy remains unfinished, where
women, people of color, and queer people are still not included. And later this month,
I'll be your host for a brand new podcast from The 19th News and Wonder Media Network called The Amendment. More on that soon. But for now, I'm excited to be your guest host
for this month of Womanica. This Black History Month, we're talking about revolutionaries,
the Black women who led struggles for liberation from violent governments, colonial rulers, and enslavers. These women had the courage to imagine radically different worlds, and
they used their power to try and pull those worlds into view. Today, we're talking about
one of the most active contemporary revolutionaries of the 20th and 21st century. Her feminist
work made sure women were at the forefront of revolutionary movements in 1960s New York.
Let's talk about Denise Oliver-Velez. Denise was born in Brooklyn in 1947 into what she
called a political family. Family members and friends usually fell into one of three
categories, leftists, activists, and communists. Denise herself was no exception. When she
was in third grade, at the height of the Cold War, she refused to comply when her teacher
asked her to get under her desk at a bombing drill. Her teacher was furious. The next day,
Denise's father came into school demanding to know why this teacher kept trying to push
anti-Soviet propaganda on his daughter. In high school, Denise joined the NAACP, where
she participated in sit-ins and anti-war movements. She continued her activism at Hunter College, but disliked that there were very few non-white students there. So Denise got a scholarship
to attend Howard University. There, she quickly became part of the activist circle on campus.
She joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, which used nonviolent
protests to advance civil rights. But again, Denise got the sense something wasn't right.
Back home, armed self-defense and protest had always been a matter of conversation with her family. She grew up hearing stories about relatives standing off against the KKK, or
her great aunt Martha, who'd stay up at night, scoping out the house with a shotgun to catch burglars.
The idea that women, or protests more generally, should be passive wasn't the kind of revolution
Denise had in mind. While at Howard, Denise did meet some like-minded people, though they
weren't classmates. They were members of the Real Great Society, a New York City street
gang turned anti-poverty agency, who Denise let crash at her place. Later, when Denise
returned to New York, she called them up looking for a job. And so, Denise began a
lifetime of community action work in the city. Shortly thereafter, Denise became a founding
member of the New York chapter of the Young Lords. The group was founded in Chicago in
the late 1960s and led by Puerto Rican street activists. They fought against gentrification,
police brutality, and racism. The Young Lords took notes from the Black Panthers, joining
forces with other local groups to create relief efforts. They provided free breakfast programs,
and advocated for tenants' rights. They led active protests, like occupying Lincoln Hospital
in the Bronx, to demand better health care for the majority Black and Latino population it served. And they lit garbage on fire to protest the city's discriminatory deployment
of sanitation services to their neighborhoods. After a while, though, Denise began to notice
an issue. The leaders of the organization were all men, which meant all the actual day-to-day
work fell to the women, Denise included. She brought it up to the male leaders, who
offered her a position, communications secretary. Denise told them, sorry, but she couldn't
type. It was a lie, but she knew she had more to offer. She ended up taking a position as
an officer, doling out disciplinary actions. As more women joined the group, Denise organized
them into a strong faction. She invited them over on Sundays for political education classes, which she called PE, where they learn about radical women from across the globe. They
also developed a radical view on reproductive rights. Women should be able to decide not
only when and if to have kids, but they should also be supplied the support to feed and care for those kids. When the leaders of the Young Lords tried to ally themselves with a decidedly
anti-feminist group, the women of the party joined forces with some of the younger men
to demote the party's entire central committee and call for change. Among those demands,
changing a central tenet of the Young Lords, one of the party's 13 program points stated,
machismo must be revolutionary. That is an oxymoron, Denise would later say. Machismo will never be fucking revolutionary. Denise was added to the central committee as part
of the new agreement. Along with other women in the party, she helped write the party position
paper on women, which solidified the Young Lords' feminist stance. She also became a major player
in the group's newspaper, Palante, requiring at least one half of the articles to be written by women or about women's issues. Eventually, Denise became one of the Young Lords' highest ranking
members as the minister of economic development. But the party's time in New York was running short.
The committee voted to relocate headquarters to Puerto Rico, a move Denise was not willing to make.
So Denise quit, walked 15 blocks to the Black Panthers' offices, and signed up. Denise worked
primarily on the Panther newspaper in the Bronx. She continued to work in communications,
eventually becoming the executive director of the Black Filmmaker Foundation and co-founder
of the Pacifica Network's first minority-controlled radio station. As she continued to work in
community organizing, she took her lessons from her time with the Young Lords to heart, namely always have women on staff. In her own words, women need to be key in running shit and
training other women. Later on, Denise worked in HIV and AIDS research, conducting ethnographic
work in Puerto Rican neighborhoods where the crisis was often misreported. Denise taught as
an adjunct professor of anthropology and women's studies at SUNY New Paltz for many years. Today, she's a writer for The Daily Cause. All month, we're talking about revolutionaries. For more
information, you can find us on Facebook and Instagram at Wamanica Podcast. Special thanks to co-creators Jenny and Liz Kaplan for having me as a guest host. As always, we're taking a break for the weekend, so talk to you on Monday.
