All,
The death of Johanna Fernandez (1970-2026) at the age of 55 to cancer is a major loss of a brilliant and groundbreaking historian, scholar, public intellectual, revolutionary grassroots organizer, social critic, teacher, and author, as well as dynamic art and cultural curator of Latin American political and social history. What follows below is in homage to and celebration of her extraordinary and powerful life, work, and legacy. Thank you and RIP Johanna for all you accomplished and tried to do in a consistently inspiring and very productive life on this planet. We will miss you deeply.
Kofi
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/12/us/johanna-fernandez-dead.html
Kofi
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/12/us/johanna-fernandez-dead.html
Johanna Fernández, Historian of the Young Lords, Dies at 55
She wrote an award-winning book about the leftist collective, a Latino counterpart to the Black Panthers.
She wrote an award-winning book about the leftist collective, a Latino counterpart to the Black Panthers.
Johanna Fernández at her home in 2014, with some of the police surveillance records which she used in her research. Credit: Christopher Gregory-Rivera for The New York Times
Listen · 8:46 minutes
by Richard Sandomir
August 12, 2026
New York Times
Johanna Fernández, a Dominican American historian whose authoritative book about the Young Lords helped revive the legacy of that leftist collective, a revolutionary Latino counterpart to the Black Panthers, died on July 30 in Manhattan. She was 55.
Her death, in a hospital, was caused by non-small-cell lung cancer, her brother Tirso Fernández Jr. said.
An associate professor of history at Baruch College, Dr. Fernández was unaware of the Young Lords until her junior year at Brown, when she took a class that covered the radical group and was angered that it had been effectively erased from public memory.
“I’d say that the children of migrants — especially from Latin America — connect more than anyone else with the history of the Young Lords,” she said in a 2020 interview with CounterPunch, a left-leaning website. “Because you wake up and all you see is death and abandoned buildings and you start believing what people and the media say about you.”
She added, “Then to see your own people take it and shred it and fight it in the streets — that’s freedom on a profound personal level.”
The Young Lords started as a street gang in Chicago and expanded to New York City in 1969. They were a confrontational, anticapitalist collective of Hispanic — mostly Puerto Rican — and Black activists who sought solutions to the deplorable conditions of neighborhoods like the South Bronx and Spanish Harlem.
Supporters of the Young Lords marched through Spanish Harlem in 1971. Credit: Librado Romero/The New York Times
To protest poor trash collection, they built walls of garbage across city streets, then set the walls on fire. They commandeered a church and used it to offer free breakfast to schoolchildren. They occupied a building at the dilapidated Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx, placed a Puerto Rican flag on the roof and made demands that included building a new hospital, door-to-door preventive care and opening a day care center for the children of patients and employees.
The group’s history was the subject of Dr. Fernández’s Ph.D. dissertation at Columbia, which she completed in 2004 and later expanded into a book.
“She interviewed me three times over 15 years,” the journalist Juan González, a founder of the group’s New York branch, said in an interview. “At first, she didn’t know a lot, but she was determined to speak to everyone. She spoke to a lot of people who weren’t speaking to each other because of past conflicts.”
Her research was impeded by the supposed inaccessibility of extensive surveillance files, more than 500 boxes’ worth, that had been accumulated by the New York Police Department’s secretive special services division from 1954 to 1972. She was told the files were missing or lost.
In 2014, after her Freedom of Information Law requests yielded little, she filed a lawsuit against the N.Y.P.D. seeking the documents. The suit was dismissed but, in 2016, a significant portion of the records of the department’s scrutiny of the Young Lords, the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam resurfaced during an inventory of a Queens warehouse.
The files told the story of “thousands of people and organizations in New York City who fought to make the city more just and democratic and were systematically obstructed by the police,” Dr. Fernández said in a 2016 interview with The New York Times.
She used information gleaned from the files in her book “The Young Lords: A Radical History” (2020).
Dr. Fernández’s book won the 2021 Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians.Credit...The University of North Carolina Press
In his review in The Nation, Ed Morales, an expert on Latino politics, wrote that the book placed the Young Lords “in the context of the political and social debates that shaped the era and reveals how so much of their activism centered on the same issues — housing, health, education and the marginalization of women, the L.G.B.T.Q. community and the working poor — that we face today.”
“The Young Lords” won the 2021 Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians.
Johanna Luisa del Carmen Fernández was born in Manhattan on Dec. 2, 1970, and grew up in the Bronx. She was one of four children of Tirso Sr. and Minerva (Estevez) Fernández, immigrants from the Dominican Republic. Mr. Fernández was a maintenance worker, and Mrs. Fernández managed the home.
Dr. Fernández’s brother Tirso Jr. said their father “had been orphaned as a child and knew real hunger, but it didn’t harden him. Instead, it made him deeply compassionate.”
A 2022 photo showing a picture of Dr. Fernández, beside some of her personal diaries, and her collection of ephemera from the Young Lords, the Black Panthers, Mumia Abu-Jamal, as well as audiotapes containing oral histories of members of the Young Lords.Credit...Philip Keith for The New York Times
“Johanna took that and ran with it,” he added. “Her own intellect took her the rest of the way, into history, race, class, power.”
In addition to Tirso Jr., she is survived by her mother and two other brothers, Osvaldo and Geovanny.
In 1992, while attending Brown on an academic scholarship, Dr. Fernández was one of 253 students arrested for taking over an administration building; their demands included a need-blind admission policy. At one point, she attracted a crowd by delivering a speech from the open window of a bathroom. Need-blind admissions at Brown did not start until 2003.
She graduated in 1992 with a bachelor’s degree in English and American civilization, then earned an M.A. in 1996, an M.Phil. in 1999 and a Ph.D. in 2004, all in history from Columbia.
As a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh from 2005 to 2006, she grew interested in prison abolition and the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther and radio journalist then on death row after being convicted of murdering a white police officer in Philadelphia in 1981. To his supporters, Mr. Abu-Jamal is a political prisoner who should be released. To his critics, he is a celebrity cop killer.
Dr. Fernández told CounterPunch that visiting Mr. Abu-Jamal and other men on death row “transformed me, because you get a sense of a whole country of human beings who’ve been thrown away.”
She became close to Mr. Abu-Jamal. She wrote and produced “Justice on Trial: The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal” (2010), a documentary about his case; edited a book of his prison writings that was published in 2015; and brought a trove of his papers to a permanent archive at Brown in 2024.
Some of the many boxes of print material Dr. Fernández acquired for Mumia Abu-Jamal’s archive. Credit: Philip Keith for The New York Times
The archive included postcards sent from around the world to Mr. Abu-Jamal. Credit: Philip Keith for The New York Times
In 2012, a year after Mr. Abu-Jamal left death row — he is now serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole — Dr. Fernández began storing boxes of his materials in her apartment. “They were pressuring him to get rid of everything in his cell,” she told The Times. “He wanted to throw it all away. But as a historian, I understood the importance of papers.”
Mr. Abu-Jamal spoke by phone at Dr. Fernández’s funeral on Sunday, calling her “a shock of light in the darkness of death row,” according to her brother.
In 2015, she was a curator of “¡Presente! The Young Lords in New York,” an exhibition that was presented at El Museo del Barrio, the Bronx Museum and the Loisaida Inc. community center and showed the group as a cultural and political force.
An exhibition about the Latino civil rights movement of the 1960s — which Dr. Fernández organized with Felipe Hinojosa of Baylor University — was scheduled to open last year in Washington under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution. But it was shelved after conservative commentators and members of Congress criticized a previous Smithsonian show about Latino history as Marxist.
With a grant from the Mellon Foundation, the project was revived in June at the Shed in Manhattan as an outdoor exhibition called “Latinx Freedom” that will be on display through Aug. 16 before touring to several American cities.
“She was such a joy — a relentless hard worker who was never satisfied with one answer,” Dr. Hinojosa said in an interview. “She took great offense at the kind of anti-Latino sentiment that exists in this country and worked as hard as she could to make people understand the gifts that Latinos bring to the United States.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 16, 2026, Section A, Page 25 of the New York edition with the headline: Johanna Fernández, a Historian of the Young Lords, Is Dead at 55
Johanna Fernández Dies at 55: Leading Scholar on the Young Lords & Latinx Freedom Movement
Democracy Now!
VIDEO:
Listen · 8:46 minutes
by Richard Sandomir
August 12, 2026
New York Times
Johanna Fernández, a Dominican American historian whose authoritative book about the Young Lords helped revive the legacy of that leftist collective, a revolutionary Latino counterpart to the Black Panthers, died on July 30 in Manhattan. She was 55.
Her death, in a hospital, was caused by non-small-cell lung cancer, her brother Tirso Fernández Jr. said.
An associate professor of history at Baruch College, Dr. Fernández was unaware of the Young Lords until her junior year at Brown, when she took a class that covered the radical group and was angered that it had been effectively erased from public memory.
“I’d say that the children of migrants — especially from Latin America — connect more than anyone else with the history of the Young Lords,” she said in a 2020 interview with CounterPunch, a left-leaning website. “Because you wake up and all you see is death and abandoned buildings and you start believing what people and the media say about you.”
She added, “Then to see your own people take it and shred it and fight it in the streets — that’s freedom on a profound personal level.”
The Young Lords started as a street gang in Chicago and expanded to New York City in 1969. They were a confrontational, anticapitalist collective of Hispanic — mostly Puerto Rican — and Black activists who sought solutions to the deplorable conditions of neighborhoods like the South Bronx and Spanish Harlem.
Supporters of the Young Lords marched through Spanish Harlem in 1971. Credit: Librado Romero/The New York Times
To protest poor trash collection, they built walls of garbage across city streets, then set the walls on fire. They commandeered a church and used it to offer free breakfast to schoolchildren. They occupied a building at the dilapidated Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx, placed a Puerto Rican flag on the roof and made demands that included building a new hospital, door-to-door preventive care and opening a day care center for the children of patients and employees.
The group’s history was the subject of Dr. Fernández’s Ph.D. dissertation at Columbia, which she completed in 2004 and later expanded into a book.
“She interviewed me three times over 15 years,” the journalist Juan González, a founder of the group’s New York branch, said in an interview. “At first, she didn’t know a lot, but she was determined to speak to everyone. She spoke to a lot of people who weren’t speaking to each other because of past conflicts.”
Her research was impeded by the supposed inaccessibility of extensive surveillance files, more than 500 boxes’ worth, that had been accumulated by the New York Police Department’s secretive special services division from 1954 to 1972. She was told the files were missing or lost.
In 2014, after her Freedom of Information Law requests yielded little, she filed a lawsuit against the N.Y.P.D. seeking the documents. The suit was dismissed but, in 2016, a significant portion of the records of the department’s scrutiny of the Young Lords, the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam resurfaced during an inventory of a Queens warehouse.
The files told the story of “thousands of people and organizations in New York City who fought to make the city more just and democratic and were systematically obstructed by the police,” Dr. Fernández said in a 2016 interview with The New York Times.
She used information gleaned from the files in her book “The Young Lords: A Radical History” (2020).
Dr. Fernández’s book won the 2021 Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians.Credit...The University of North Carolina Press
In his review in The Nation, Ed Morales, an expert on Latino politics, wrote that the book placed the Young Lords “in the context of the political and social debates that shaped the era and reveals how so much of their activism centered on the same issues — housing, health, education and the marginalization of women, the L.G.B.T.Q. community and the working poor — that we face today.”
“The Young Lords” won the 2021 Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians.
Johanna Luisa del Carmen Fernández was born in Manhattan on Dec. 2, 1970, and grew up in the Bronx. She was one of four children of Tirso Sr. and Minerva (Estevez) Fernández, immigrants from the Dominican Republic. Mr. Fernández was a maintenance worker, and Mrs. Fernández managed the home.
Dr. Fernández’s brother Tirso Jr. said their father “had been orphaned as a child and knew real hunger, but it didn’t harden him. Instead, it made him deeply compassionate.”
A 2022 photo showing a picture of Dr. Fernández, beside some of her personal diaries, and her collection of ephemera from the Young Lords, the Black Panthers, Mumia Abu-Jamal, as well as audiotapes containing oral histories of members of the Young Lords.Credit...Philip Keith for The New York Times
“Johanna took that and ran with it,” he added. “Her own intellect took her the rest of the way, into history, race, class, power.”
In addition to Tirso Jr., she is survived by her mother and two other brothers, Osvaldo and Geovanny.
In 1992, while attending Brown on an academic scholarship, Dr. Fernández was one of 253 students arrested for taking over an administration building; their demands included a need-blind admission policy. At one point, she attracted a crowd by delivering a speech from the open window of a bathroom. Need-blind admissions at Brown did not start until 2003.
She graduated in 1992 with a bachelor’s degree in English and American civilization, then earned an M.A. in 1996, an M.Phil. in 1999 and a Ph.D. in 2004, all in history from Columbia.
As a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh from 2005 to 2006, she grew interested in prison abolition and the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther and radio journalist then on death row after being convicted of murdering a white police officer in Philadelphia in 1981. To his supporters, Mr. Abu-Jamal is a political prisoner who should be released. To his critics, he is a celebrity cop killer.
Dr. Fernández told CounterPunch that visiting Mr. Abu-Jamal and other men on death row “transformed me, because you get a sense of a whole country of human beings who’ve been thrown away.”
She became close to Mr. Abu-Jamal. She wrote and produced “Justice on Trial: The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal” (2010), a documentary about his case; edited a book of his prison writings that was published in 2015; and brought a trove of his papers to a permanent archive at Brown in 2024.
Some of the many boxes of print material Dr. Fernández acquired for Mumia Abu-Jamal’s archive. Credit: Philip Keith for The New York Times
The archive included postcards sent from around the world to Mr. Abu-Jamal. Credit: Philip Keith for The New York Times
In 2012, a year after Mr. Abu-Jamal left death row — he is now serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole — Dr. Fernández began storing boxes of his materials in her apartment. “They were pressuring him to get rid of everything in his cell,” she told The Times. “He wanted to throw it all away. But as a historian, I understood the importance of papers.”
Mr. Abu-Jamal spoke by phone at Dr. Fernández’s funeral on Sunday, calling her “a shock of light in the darkness of death row,” according to her brother.
In 2015, she was a curator of “¡Presente! The Young Lords in New York,” an exhibition that was presented at El Museo del Barrio, the Bronx Museum and the Loisaida Inc. community center and showed the group as a cultural and political force.
An exhibition about the Latino civil rights movement of the 1960s — which Dr. Fernández organized with Felipe Hinojosa of Baylor University — was scheduled to open last year in Washington under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution. But it was shelved after conservative commentators and members of Congress criticized a previous Smithsonian show about Latino history as Marxist.
With a grant from the Mellon Foundation, the project was revived in June at the Shed in Manhattan as an outdoor exhibition called “Latinx Freedom” that will be on display through Aug. 16 before touring to several American cities.
“She was such a joy — a relentless hard worker who was never satisfied with one answer,” Dr. Hinojosa said in an interview. “She took great offense at the kind of anti-Latino sentiment that exists in this country and worked as hard as she could to make people understand the gifts that Latinos bring to the United States.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 16, 2026, Section A, Page 25 of the New York edition with the headline: Johanna Fernández, a Historian of the Young Lords, Is Dead at 55
Johanna Fernández Dies at 55: Leading Scholar on the Young Lords & Latinx Freedom Movement
Democracy Now!
VIDEO:
August 4, 2026
We look at the life and legacy of Dominican American historian, activist and prison abolitionist Dr. Johanna Fernández, who died on July 30 after a long battle with cancer. She was 55 years old. As a professor of history at Baruch College and the CUNY Graduate Center, Fernández was a leading scholar of the Young Lords, the radical 1960s civil rights organization founded in Chicago and New York and modeled on the Black Panthers. Fernández also created the Latinx Freedom Movement Archive and Exhibition Project, alongside historian Felipe Hinojosa. The exhibition is currently on view at The Shed in New York City, as well as in Chicago and Los Angeles. Iterations will also be presented in Houston and Washington, D.C.
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External links:
Young Lords exhibition
https://bronxmuseum.org/exhibition/young-lords/
The Bronx Museum
¡Presente! The Young Lords in New York
About the Exhibition:
The Bronx Museum organized a multi-venue artistic and cultural survey of The Young Lords Organization—a radical social activist group founded by Puerto Rican youth in the 1960s that demanded reform in health care, education, housing, employment, and policing. Exhibitions of art and archival materials at three cultural institutions in New York City explored how the Young Lords’ activities, community-focused initiatives, and their affirmation of Puerto Rican identity inspired artists from the 1960s to the present day, and had a major impact on the City and the social history of the United States.
About the Exhibition:
The Bronx Museum organized a multi-venue artistic and cultural survey of The Young Lords Organization—a radical social activist group founded by Puerto Rican youth in the 1960s that demanded reform in health care, education, housing, employment, and policing. Exhibitions of art and archival materials at three cultural institutions in New York City explored how the Young Lords’ activities, community-focused initiatives, and their affirmation of Puerto Rican identity inspired artists from the 1960s to the present day, and had a major impact on the City and the social history of the United States.
July 2 - Oct 18, 2015
The initiative included public and educational programs across partnering venues to build awareness of the Young Lords’ innovative contributions to the struggle for civil rights and influence on contemporary artists, and to spark conversations about grassroots community activism today. The institutions partnering in ¡Presente! The Young Lords in New York were all located in neighborhoods where the Young Lords were most active, and each exhibition reflects on the Young Lords’ activities in that part of the City.
“The Young Lords had a defining influence on social activism, art, and identity politics, but the lasting significance of their achievements has rarely been examined,” said The Bronx Museum’s Executive Director, Holly Block. “In ¡Presente! The Young Lords in New York, The Bronx Museum will partner with El Museo del Barrio and Loisaida Inc. to explore the Young Lords’ cultural impact in New York and the country at large. The issues the Young Lords struggled with are still timely, and their aesthetic and cultural vision still inspires both artists and community leaders today. We’re pleased to work with our partner institutions to bring this story to the public.”
Highlights of the exhibition at The Bronx Museum included:
• An artistic reconstruction of The Bronx office of the Young Lords by curator Johanna Fernández and Bronx-based artist Hatuey Ramos-Fermín.
• An overview of the Young Lords’ influence on artistic activism and production in New York featuring works in The Bronx Museum’s permanent collection curated by Yasmin Ramírez.
• An installation dedicated to the women in the Young Lords, organized in collaboration with artist Sophia Dawson and members of the Young Lords Women’s Caucus.
• A rotating screening room with rarely-seen films featuring the Young Lords and their contemporaries.
• Free reproductions of the one-year anniversary issue of Pa’lante for visitors to take.
About the Young Lords Organization:
Influenced by the Black Panthers and grassroots protests against the Vietnam War, the Young Lords were a radical social organization led by poor and working-class Puerto Rican youth in the 1960s. The Lords built a nationwide movement to address the social issues afflicting their communities—such as education, health care, affordable housing, high unemployment, and police brutality. The Young Lords’ activities were innovative, highly effective, and often resulted in legal mandates that institutionalized their policies.
In New York, the Young Lords’ actions included theatrical garbage-dumping protests in East Harlem and a series of audacious church and hospital occupations. In East Harlem and the South Bronx, where the Young Lords were highly active, the organization tested residential areas for lead poisoning, provided breakfast for schoolchildren, and demanded a “13 Point Program” calling for an end to discrimination, police brutality, and mass incarceration. Among other victories, the Young Lords’ activities led to the formulation of a patient’s bill of rights, the passing of new housing legislation, and the building of a new hospital complex in The Bronx.
Presenting Institutions:
The Bronx Museum
¡Presente! The Young Lords in New York at The Bronx Museum was organized by guest curator, scholar and professor Johanna Fernández and adjunct curator Yasmin Ramírez. The exhibition featured more than 50 works, including paintings, installations, photographs, films, and rare archival materials that highlight the presence of women in the Young Lords, the struggle for equal representation of Latinos in the media, and community actions in the South Bronx—from the takeover of Lincoln Hospital in The Bronx and the implementation of a holistic drug detox program, to the publication of a bilingual newspaper Pa’lante.
El Museo del Barrio
The exhibition at El Museo del Barrio will display work related to the Young Lords’ work in East Harlem—including the organization’s series of theatrical garbage-dumping protests and their peaceful occupation of the First People’s Church.
Loisiada Inc.
Loisiada Inc. will focus on the Young Lords’ founding in the Lower East Side—displaying rarely seen photographs and reportage of the announcement of the founding of the Young Lords Party in Tomkins Square Park on June 26, 1969, and paraphernalia from the Young Lords’ Lower East Side offices. The exhibition will examine the impact of the Young Lords Gay and Lesbian Caucus. It will also focus on the cultural activism of Young Lord Eddie Figueroa, founder of The New Rican Village, an influential multidisciplinary art space on Avenue A that later became home to the legendary gay performance space The Pyramid Club.
About Curator Johanna Fernández:
Johanna Fernández holds a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University and a B.A. in Literature and American Studies from Brown University. She is a former Fulbright Scholar to Jordan and Assistant Professor of History at Baruch College of the City University of New York, where she teaches 20th-Century U.S. History and African American History. Professor Fernández has written numerous articles on the Young Lords and is the author of the forthcoming When the World Was Their Stage: A History of the Young Lords Party, 1968–1976 (Princeton University Press). She is the editor of Writing on the Wall, Selected Prison Writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal (City Lights, 2015) and the writer and producer of the film, Justice on Trial: the Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Her writings have been published internationally, from Al Jazeera to the Huffington Post. She gives interviews often and has appeared in a diverse range of print, radio, online, and televised media, including Democracy Now! With Amy Goodman, the Fox News shows Hannity and The Kelly File, the Spanish language HITN-TV and Telemundo 47, NPR, Al Jazeera, and The New York Times.
About Curator Yasmin Ramírez:
Yasmin Ramírez holds a Ph.D. in Art History from the Graduate Center of the City of New York. Currently Adjunct Curator at The Bronx Museum, Dr. Ramírez’s prior institutional affiliations include: The Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Hunter College; El Museo Del Barrio; The Studio Museum in Harlem; The Caribbean Culture Center; and Taller Boricua. A scholar and curator, Dr. Ramírez has organized numerous exhibitions and panels, notably The Puerto Rican Art Workers and the Construction of the Nuyorican Art Movement (2014), Re-Membering Loisaida: On Archiving and the Lure of the Retro Lens (2009), and Esto A Veces Tiene Nombre: Latin@ Art Collectives in a Post-Movement Millennium (2008). Dr. Ramírez’s published essays include: Snap Shots: A Short History of the Association of Hispanic Arts (2013), The Creative Class of Color in New York (2009), The Activist Legacy of Puerto Rican Artists in New York and the Art Heritage of Puerto Rico (2007), and more. Dr. Ramírez serves on the national steering committee of the biennial conference, Latino Art Now, and the advisory board of the book series Aver: Revisioning Art History. In her former position as a Research Associate at The Center for Puerto Rican Studies, Hunter College, Dr. Ramírez oversaw the digitization of works on paper and writings on Puerto Rican artists in New York through a partnership with The International Center for Arts of the Americas, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Credit:
Support for ¡Presente! The Young Lords in New York was provided by The Cultural Services of the French Embassy in New York, the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, New York Council for the Humanities, The Rosenberg Fund for Children, Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation, and Anonymous.
IMPORTANT NEW BOOK:
The Young Lords: A Radical History
by Johanna Fernández
University of North Carolina Press, 2021
[Publication date: February 17, 2020]
Utilizing oral histories, archival records, and an enormous cache of police records released only after a decade-long Freedom of Information Law request and subsequent court battle, Johanna Fernandez has written the definitive account of the Young Lords, from their roots as a street gang to their rise and fall as a political organization. Led predominantly by poor and working-class Puerto Rican youth, and consciously fashioned after the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords confronted race and class inequality and questioned American foreign policy. Their imaginative, irreverent protests and media conscious tactics won significant reforms and exposed U.S. mainland audiences to the country's quiet imperial project in Puerto Rico. In riveting style, Fernandez demonstrates how the Young Lords redefined the character of protest, the color of politics, and the cadence of popular urban culture in the age of great dreams.
REVIEWS:
Like so many other organizations in the United States that were both leftist and radical, the Young Lords' history has been removed from most recollections of the period known as the Sixties until now. Fernandez's work is a bold, brilliant and engaging challenge to this omission.--CounterPunch
An exhaustive and enlightening study of [the Young Lords'] history [that] makes the case for their influence as profound thinkers as well as highly capable street activists. . . . Fernandez's [book] distinguishes itself by providing solid, incredibly detailed historical research. . . . It also places them in the context of the political and social debates that shaped the era and reveals how so much of their activism centered on the same issues—housing, health, education, and the marginalization of women, the LGBTQ community, and the working poor—that we face today.--The Nation
The Young Lords Party lasted essentially two years (1969–70) with an active membership of less than 3,000, yet as this book shows, its brief but spectacular history is worth studying and particularly poignant in the time of Black Lives Matter.--CHOICE
The definitive work on this political organization and tells the fascinating story with rich detail and narrative drama.--Criminal Law & Criminal Justice Books
Not only scholars and students but also activists would benefit from reading this book, for, aside from the fascinating history itself, one can glean lessons on how to organize from the failures and successes of the Young Lords.--H-Socialisms
Thanks to Johanna Fernandez's beautifully narrated and deeply researched account of the Young Lords Party, a glaring gap in our history of the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s finally has been filled. Fernandez's rich recovery of the ideas and actions of the YLP shines much-needed light on the true complexity of this moment when so many worked so tirelessly to build a more just and equitable America as well as a truly free Puerto Rico. It is a must-read.--Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Johanna Fernandez is associate professor of history at Baruch College of the City University of New York and editor of Writing on the Wall: Selected Prison Writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal.
https://manifold.umn.edu/read/ces0701-roots-of-us-fascism/section/9a25d28f-6123-409f-97e1-da57dd7a0ed3
On the Historical Roots of U.S. Fascism
by Johanna Fernández
On the Historical Roots of U.S. Fascism
by Johanna Fernández
In 2016, a fascist-leaning candidate won the U.S. election. Had it not been for an epic uprising of Black people in spring and summer of 2020, the electorate might have voted him in for another four years. In the end, the riots that engulfed Minneapolis days after the police lynching of George Floyd inspired a national political awakening of people of all races and classes that tipped the scales in the presidential contest. The atmosphere of indignation had been primed in the preceding weeks, as Americans witnessed the state’s failure to adequately respond to the biggest national health crisis in a hundred years, the novel coronavirus outbreak. Only when unfathomable images of George Floyd’s murder by police officer Derek Chauvin surfaced did close to forty million people take to the streets. And when government deployed repressive action against protesters and unsubstantiated media narratives surfaced deprecating Black Lives Matter, public discourse shifted to the imperiled state of American democracy. Together, these events galvanized one of the largest voter turnouts in the country’s history during the 2020 presidential election.
The presence and influence of fascist ideologues in the nation’s highest office from 2017 through 2021 posed a clear threat to the country. Yet journalists, pundits, academics, and others often dismissed, as hyperbole, such assessments of Donald Trump and his cabinet. But, as the world witnessed, during the January 6, 2021 storming of Congress, avoidance of critiques of an unhinged reality has dangerous consequences. Important to note, however, is that this avoidance was baked into the national culture by an uninterrupted history of government-led purges, political repression, and anticommunist fearmongering, which long ago groomed Americans to restrain their speech and deny reality.
What Is Fascism Exactly?
Many scholars agree with Marxists’ interpretations of fascism as a historical phenomenon, a government of last resort erected by a wing of the capitalist class in response to three emerging dynamics: deep economic collapse, widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo, and threats to capitalism posed by organized sections of society, especially a radicalized working class and its proposals for a socialist alternative. Fascism asserts control amid crisis by conferring absolute power to captains of one of the most autocratic and unyielding institutions in society—the corporation—through “the merger of state and corporate power,” total control of labor and production, suspension of civil society and claims to any and all individual rights.1
As seen in 1930s Germany, following the stock market crash of 1929, captains of capital relied on a charismatic fascist leader to win the consent and cooperation of German citizens to their project of “restoring order” to the nation. Unlike authoritarian rule or dictatorship, fascism depends on a large swath of the population to carry out the interests of the state. The fascist leader achieves this by articulating the anger of those deeply dissatisfied with the way things are, legitimizing that dissatisfaction before national audiences. Disproportionately found among the struggling and disgruntled middle classes, especially shopkeepers and middling professionals, the fascist constituency laments its lost standing in a changing world. Through manipulation of fears, the fascist leader channels social anxieties of this sector, whose members feel that their place, livelihood, and social standing have been usurped. Blame is cast on immigrants, outsiders, and undeserving Others perceived to be destroying the social fabric of the nation and enjoying its fruits without effort or sacrifice. Acting independently of the state yet also in concert with it, the citizen foot soldiers of fascism come to see it as their duty to contain and repress those who are then depicted as “enemies of the country.”
The Economic Underpinnings of Global Political Crisis
On the eve of the coronavirus outbreak in the fall of 2019, a wave of protests swept through every corner of the globe. Protests against a subway fare hike in Santiago, Chile, snowballed into large-scale national protests and occupations calling for sweeping change. Uprisings also erupted in France, Lebanon, Egypt, Bolivia, Ecuador, the United States, Algeria, Zimbabwe, Poland, Georgia, Iran, Sudan, and beyond as masses of people took to the streets to protest austerity, including, for example, the price of onions in India, the cost of oil in Iran, and an unpopular tax on WhatsApp usage in Lebanon.
As if on cue, the word neoliberalism was on people’s lips around the world, and everyone seemed to have had enough of it. Introduced to rescue capitalism from its precipitous fall after the oil crisis and recession of 1973, neoliberalism’s logic has enshrined market interests—above all else—in culture and law. Since then, governments have served business interests through corporate tax cuts and bailouts, deregulation of industry and financial markets, the dismantling of labor protections, privatization of public-sector services, and cuts to social welfare spending that have eliminated subsidies for electricity, gasoline, propane, and food.2 This war on the commons has deepened inequality across the globe. In 2018, the wealthiest 1 percent controlled more than 50 percent of the world’s wealth, and the bottom 80 percent owned merely 4.5 percent.3
The global uprisings we’ve seen identify the unequal distribution of resources as the source of social problems. But on the opposite end of the political spectrum, growing fascist currents interpret the social malaise of this moment as a loss of national greatness and blame it on the alleged advances in society of immigrants, Muslims, Jews, Marxists, and feminists. Across the globe, neofascist movements have either won elections or entered the political mainstream in Denmark, Italy, England, France, Germany, Greece, Turkey, Brazil, Ukraine, and beyond. In the United States, these political currents are mostly made up of angry white men and their elected officials. These groups posit that their culture and very existence as Euro-Americans face grave threats from those outside their white supremacist conception of the nation. To that end, they’re committed to forced deportations, heavy and often militarized policing of urban areas disproportionately populated by Black Americans, Latinos, and other people of color, and patriarchal order in which men work and women stick to childrearing and the home.
The political polarization seen in global protests against austerity and state violence on the one hand and those calling for the closing of national borders and a return to tradition on the other is the product of a global economy that has been trapped in a long-standing, unresolved economic crisis—with no relief in sight. At the end of 2019, even before the pandemic wreaked havoc across the globe, the world economy had been unable to fully recover from the Great Recession of 2008. In the United States, the picture was mixed. In 2019, the American economy registered its longest period of expansion, but the expansion was anemic. The country’s economy also hit a record thirteen straight years with less than 3 percent growth of real GDP. And while the U.S. economy created twenty million jobs, they were mostly low-wage and part-time jobs in a world of workers looking for full-time employment.4
At its core, twenty-first-century capitalism suffers from what economists call a deep crisis of overaccumulation—an overconcentration of capital that cannot find outlets for reinvestment. In a system dependent on expansion to overcome cyclical crises of overproduction, the absence of new investment frontiers is one of the major sources of global economic stagnation. To circumvent crisis in the short term, capitalists invested heavily in consumption markets with guaranteed short-run returns. Writing during the pandemic, David Harvey observed that contemporary capitalism’s demand for “instantaneous consumerism required massive infrastructural investments in airports and airlines, hotels and restaurants, theme parks and cultural events, etc. This site of capital accumulation is now dead in the water.”5
As the ratio of capital investment to profit has declined over the last fifty years, corporations have increased their profits, in part, by relying on an army of low-paid, part-time workers and by slashing benefits like health care. In the early decades of the twenty-first century, U.S. workers are more exploited, more debt ridden, and making less money than they were in the 1970s. And while Black American workers and other workers of color, like Puerto Ricans, have always faced low wages and Depression-era conditions, white workers have seen their livelihoods decline significantly as well. The wages of white males with only a high school diploma declined by 9 percent during the eighteen-year period between 1996 and 2014—a far cry from the experience of white workers with a high school diploma between 1945 and the early 1970s.6
Over the course of this fifty-year period of economic decline, white Americans have contended with another “social injury”—a perceived fall from the top of the country’s racial hierarchy. For them, the advent of economic hardship coincided with the growing presence of people of color, gays and lesbians, and women in the country’s public, economic, and political life—a consequence of the gains of the civil rights, women’s, and 1960s movements. The perceived rising fortunes of these Others flouted their sense of white superiority. This reality, which shattered the American Dream, produced a profound existential meltdown, an identity crisis with macabre consequences. White men in America are disproportionately dying of drug overdoses, alcohol poisoning, and suicide, what Princeton researchers call “deaths of despair,” which also includes “a slowdown in progress against mortality from heart disease and cancer, the two largest killers in middle age.”7
In the United States, the media have masterfully channeled the extraordinary social alienation and tensions produced by this level of inequality through spectacle TV—morning show “poverty porn” stereotyping the poor in the 1980s and 1990s and, in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, reality TV (Trump’s The Apprentice and The Housewives franchise). Politicians of both parties and the nation’s parroting corporate media deflected social tensions by erecting straw-man policy debates in the 1980s and 1990s against drugs, welfare, and crime that demonized and blamed Black Americans and immigrants from Mexico and Latin America for America’s social problems. They also channeled protestant work ethic propaganda—the notion that, unlike hardworking white Americans, Black people are lazy and undeserving of the franchise and their advances in the polity—a recycled Reconstruction-era trope. Late twentieth-century Democrats added to the conversation with the “superpredator” assignation in criminology.
The psychoanalyst and social psychologist Erich Fromm offered perspective on the social infrastructure that fuels the white-supremacist perspective. He wrote, “A society that lacks the means to provide adequately for the majority of its members, or a large proportion of them, must provide these members with a narcissistic satisfaction of the malignant type if it wants to prevent dissatisfaction among them. For those who are economically and culturally poor, narcissistic pride in belonging to the group is the only and often a very effective source of satisfaction.”8
History that Should Frighten Us
Many American journalists, pundits, and academics have recoiled from interpretations that linked the Trump phenomenon to a creeping fascism because they lack familiarity with the period of American history that most closely resembles the dynamics of fascism that we see now—namely, the period in which former slaveholders and their allies reacted against the social gains made by Black people after the Civil War during Reconstruction.9
What exactly was at stake? To understand this, we must grasp the magnitude of slavery as an economic system. First and foremost, American slavery was an economic system concerned with production—of cotton, tobacco, rice, and indigo—valuable as a means of exchange in the world market.10 Life was brutal in the U.S. South for the four million enslaved Africans who produced its wealth. And by the mid-nineteenth century, their labor produced the second-wealthiest society humanity had seen, second only to the British Empire.
When the full participation of enslaved Africans in the theater of war finally defeated the South in the Civil War, the old slave-owning class, which had earlier seceded from the union, seemed finished—trapped in an irreversible political and economic crisis. Its system was ostensibly overturned. But, because presidential Reconstruction set lenient terms for rejoining the union, the old planter class kept its foothold in society.11 Ironically, the class that lost the war was invited back to help remake the new society.
This leniency had consequences that continue to the current day. The old planters immediately launched a bloodthirsty counterrevolution, with the object of regaining political power and control of Black labor to return the southern economy to as close a replica as possible to slavery. Even though their plantations suffered destruction, they still owned most of the land. In the face of economic collapse, the old slavocracy achieved dominance through the consolidation and concentration of its plantation holdings: in Marengo County, Alabama, 10 percent of landowners came to control 63 percent of real estate.12 To legislate in their interest, they joined both the Republican and the Democratic Parties, eventually dominating both by disenfranchising the freedmen.
Still, the old slavocracy faced an increasingly confident and organized challenge from formerly enslaved people, whose consciousness had been transformed by their participation in the Civil War. And while most of them were forced to work for the old planter class in an economy that continued to be tied to cotton production, they fought fiercely for what they believed they deserved. They refused to work daylight to dusk as they had under slavery. They demanded wages, not provisions, and went on strike for better terms of hire.13 The fierce strike of Atlanta laundresses in 1881 best captures what the old planters were up against. Influenced by the revolutionary consciousness of an era wherein enslaved Africans struggled for liberation in the context of the Civil War, the washerwomen struck not only for higher wages but to gain control of production—namely, to be allowed to work from their home. They sought to avoid employer supervision, to be able to tend to family and children during work hours, and to collectivize their labor alongside other washerwomen. They won.14
To consolidate political power and regain control of the land and Black labor, the South’s old ruling class would have to snuff out epic examples of autonomy by Black people like these, which modeled alternative modes of organizing production. In the face of the freedmen’s confidence and growing power, the old planters crafted a multipronged campaign of white supremacy. The Ku Klux Klan became the terrorist wing of this campaign, recruiting white people of all classes as its foot soldiers. For the next century, white southerners carried out pogroms against Black people as a matter of communal ritual. These campaigns of terror were animated by the logic that white people were victims of Black aggression, threatened by the possible takeover of a mongrel race. Their real purpose, however, was to control Black labor by keeping the freedmen in their place tied to cotton production on rented land, away from potential alliances with poor white farmers.15
The KKK was the most extreme form of white supremacist repression. Control was also wielded in the courts, through the Black Codes, a series of laws passed during reconstruction whose purpose was to contain Black life and subdue Black labor. The laws denied Black people the right to vote, serve on state militias, testify against whites, and serve on juries. They also criminalized and imprisoned the freedmen for loitering, failure to pay their debts, and for failing to hold to work contracts with the old planter class. To save the state the expense of imprisonment, the labor of the imprisoned was auctioned and the first bid given to the prisoner’s former master.
As ideology, white supremacy won over poor whites to a cross-class alliance. It offered them a psychological wage, conferring onto them the sense of superiority over Black people.16 It erected a patriarchal society where the defense and protection of white womanhood—ever threatened by the alleged predatory sexuality of Black men—became the charge of white men.17 And with the help of the Daughters of the Confederacy, the old planter class rewrote the history of the Civil War.
In America, the past is prologue. And in the era of Donald Trump, we hear the echo of the slavocracy’s counterrevolution. His propaganda fits well with the ideology that the keepers of the old South have fed generations of schoolchildren: that the Confederacy fought a valiant fight for the dignity of a glorious South, that Southerners were victims of Northern tyranny, abuse, and corruption, and that the North forsook those of their own “glorious” race to give the crown jewels to an allegedly criminally minded, inept, undeserving race—whose men pose a threat to white women.
The mass recruitment of citizens in the execution of southern race terror and the legal character of U.S. race-based citizenship and immigration policy inspired Nazi travels to the United States in the 1930s, on official business, to study the country’s race law and culture.18
If active buy-in from and participation of large self-deputized sectors of the civilian population is a lynchpin of fascism, the entire history of the United States has well prepared it for the advent of the protofascist currents of today. In the face of Native American resistance and rebellions by enslaved Africans, the colonial governments of what later became the United States made gun ownership compulsory among white men and women of all classes. Seventeenth-century Virginia, for example, advanced loans to those who could not afford to buy personal weapons and required that men carry arms with them to work and church or be fined. White citizens were also compelled by law to serve in self-organized militias and later slave patrols. In essence, the colonial governments deputized Euro-American residents to secure the borders and integrity of the nascent American state. Before long, war with the Indians gave way to “savage war”—the targeting and killing of Native American men, women, and children by self-organized militias—a practice that continued until the last of the western territories were settled in the late nineteenth century.19
The country also has a profoundly conservative citizenry that’s been raised on anticommunism and subjected to Americanization campaigns throughout the twentieth century. Many live in remote rural settings, and after the 1950s, most were suburbanized, atomized in private homes, living in fear of Black people and Black crime, raised on a strong diet of middle-class individualism, living with high levels of indebtedness.20
We recognize the 1960s for the many ways the decade’s struggles civilized the country, expanded the meaning of freedom for historically oppressed people, and popularized critiques of U.S. government and foreign policy. But the 1960s also brought dramatic government-sponsored violence in the theater of war and against dissidents at home, which set the country along the dangerous path we are on today.
Under Robert McNamara, the U.S. secretary of defense, the military mandated “kill ratios” in Vietnam that pressed American soldiers to kill any Vietnamese in sight. The United States dropped napalm and more bombs in Vietnam than were dropped by all sides combined during World War II. War policy skirted genocide. Unlike the founding days of the nation that witnessed the genesis of savage war, acts of resistance from different sectors of society, including the military, exposed these war crimes and challenged standards of acceptable conduct.21
At home, the police murders of dozens of Black Panthers rivaled the rampages of Latin American dictators. And the FBI recruited citizen-agents on a mass scale to disrupt organizations fighting to expand the meaning and experience of democracy for women, racialized people, and the poor. In spring 1969, the Black Panther Party sounded the alarm. They held an antifascism conference in Oakland; in part, it was a response to the ruthless and homicidal character of state-sponsored violence. Features of this repression have been normalized since then in other less obvious ways, through prison and police expansion and the mass employment of Americans in the carceral industry, the third-largest employer in the nation.22
A confluence of American exceptionalism and the suppression and rewriting of history has left the nation clueless about the extent of its barbarism. This leaves it ill equipped to fend off the rise of a fascist leader, especially in the context of economic and social crisis. The only thing that can save us is a political movement that identifies the root cause of social antagonisms and, on that basis, radically transforms society.
The presence and influence of fascist ideologues in the nation’s highest office from 2017 through 2021 posed a clear threat to the country. Yet journalists, pundits, academics, and others often dismissed, as hyperbole, such assessments of Donald Trump and his cabinet. But, as the world witnessed, during the January 6, 2021 storming of Congress, avoidance of critiques of an unhinged reality has dangerous consequences. Important to note, however, is that this avoidance was baked into the national culture by an uninterrupted history of government-led purges, political repression, and anticommunist fearmongering, which long ago groomed Americans to restrain their speech and deny reality.
What Is Fascism Exactly?
Many scholars agree with Marxists’ interpretations of fascism as a historical phenomenon, a government of last resort erected by a wing of the capitalist class in response to three emerging dynamics: deep economic collapse, widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo, and threats to capitalism posed by organized sections of society, especially a radicalized working class and its proposals for a socialist alternative. Fascism asserts control amid crisis by conferring absolute power to captains of one of the most autocratic and unyielding institutions in society—the corporation—through “the merger of state and corporate power,” total control of labor and production, suspension of civil society and claims to any and all individual rights.1
As seen in 1930s Germany, following the stock market crash of 1929, captains of capital relied on a charismatic fascist leader to win the consent and cooperation of German citizens to their project of “restoring order” to the nation. Unlike authoritarian rule or dictatorship, fascism depends on a large swath of the population to carry out the interests of the state. The fascist leader achieves this by articulating the anger of those deeply dissatisfied with the way things are, legitimizing that dissatisfaction before national audiences. Disproportionately found among the struggling and disgruntled middle classes, especially shopkeepers and middling professionals, the fascist constituency laments its lost standing in a changing world. Through manipulation of fears, the fascist leader channels social anxieties of this sector, whose members feel that their place, livelihood, and social standing have been usurped. Blame is cast on immigrants, outsiders, and undeserving Others perceived to be destroying the social fabric of the nation and enjoying its fruits without effort or sacrifice. Acting independently of the state yet also in concert with it, the citizen foot soldiers of fascism come to see it as their duty to contain and repress those who are then depicted as “enemies of the country.”
The Economic Underpinnings of Global Political Crisis
On the eve of the coronavirus outbreak in the fall of 2019, a wave of protests swept through every corner of the globe. Protests against a subway fare hike in Santiago, Chile, snowballed into large-scale national protests and occupations calling for sweeping change. Uprisings also erupted in France, Lebanon, Egypt, Bolivia, Ecuador, the United States, Algeria, Zimbabwe, Poland, Georgia, Iran, Sudan, and beyond as masses of people took to the streets to protest austerity, including, for example, the price of onions in India, the cost of oil in Iran, and an unpopular tax on WhatsApp usage in Lebanon.
As if on cue, the word neoliberalism was on people’s lips around the world, and everyone seemed to have had enough of it. Introduced to rescue capitalism from its precipitous fall after the oil crisis and recession of 1973, neoliberalism’s logic has enshrined market interests—above all else—in culture and law. Since then, governments have served business interests through corporate tax cuts and bailouts, deregulation of industry and financial markets, the dismantling of labor protections, privatization of public-sector services, and cuts to social welfare spending that have eliminated subsidies for electricity, gasoline, propane, and food.2 This war on the commons has deepened inequality across the globe. In 2018, the wealthiest 1 percent controlled more than 50 percent of the world’s wealth, and the bottom 80 percent owned merely 4.5 percent.3
The global uprisings we’ve seen identify the unequal distribution of resources as the source of social problems. But on the opposite end of the political spectrum, growing fascist currents interpret the social malaise of this moment as a loss of national greatness and blame it on the alleged advances in society of immigrants, Muslims, Jews, Marxists, and feminists. Across the globe, neofascist movements have either won elections or entered the political mainstream in Denmark, Italy, England, France, Germany, Greece, Turkey, Brazil, Ukraine, and beyond. In the United States, these political currents are mostly made up of angry white men and their elected officials. These groups posit that their culture and very existence as Euro-Americans face grave threats from those outside their white supremacist conception of the nation. To that end, they’re committed to forced deportations, heavy and often militarized policing of urban areas disproportionately populated by Black Americans, Latinos, and other people of color, and patriarchal order in which men work and women stick to childrearing and the home.
The political polarization seen in global protests against austerity and state violence on the one hand and those calling for the closing of national borders and a return to tradition on the other is the product of a global economy that has been trapped in a long-standing, unresolved economic crisis—with no relief in sight. At the end of 2019, even before the pandemic wreaked havoc across the globe, the world economy had been unable to fully recover from the Great Recession of 2008. In the United States, the picture was mixed. In 2019, the American economy registered its longest period of expansion, but the expansion was anemic. The country’s economy also hit a record thirteen straight years with less than 3 percent growth of real GDP. And while the U.S. economy created twenty million jobs, they were mostly low-wage and part-time jobs in a world of workers looking for full-time employment.4
At its core, twenty-first-century capitalism suffers from what economists call a deep crisis of overaccumulation—an overconcentration of capital that cannot find outlets for reinvestment. In a system dependent on expansion to overcome cyclical crises of overproduction, the absence of new investment frontiers is one of the major sources of global economic stagnation. To circumvent crisis in the short term, capitalists invested heavily in consumption markets with guaranteed short-run returns. Writing during the pandemic, David Harvey observed that contemporary capitalism’s demand for “instantaneous consumerism required massive infrastructural investments in airports and airlines, hotels and restaurants, theme parks and cultural events, etc. This site of capital accumulation is now dead in the water.”5
As the ratio of capital investment to profit has declined over the last fifty years, corporations have increased their profits, in part, by relying on an army of low-paid, part-time workers and by slashing benefits like health care. In the early decades of the twenty-first century, U.S. workers are more exploited, more debt ridden, and making less money than they were in the 1970s. And while Black American workers and other workers of color, like Puerto Ricans, have always faced low wages and Depression-era conditions, white workers have seen their livelihoods decline significantly as well. The wages of white males with only a high school diploma declined by 9 percent during the eighteen-year period between 1996 and 2014—a far cry from the experience of white workers with a high school diploma between 1945 and the early 1970s.6
Over the course of this fifty-year period of economic decline, white Americans have contended with another “social injury”—a perceived fall from the top of the country’s racial hierarchy. For them, the advent of economic hardship coincided with the growing presence of people of color, gays and lesbians, and women in the country’s public, economic, and political life—a consequence of the gains of the civil rights, women’s, and 1960s movements. The perceived rising fortunes of these Others flouted their sense of white superiority. This reality, which shattered the American Dream, produced a profound existential meltdown, an identity crisis with macabre consequences. White men in America are disproportionately dying of drug overdoses, alcohol poisoning, and suicide, what Princeton researchers call “deaths of despair,” which also includes “a slowdown in progress against mortality from heart disease and cancer, the two largest killers in middle age.”7
In the United States, the media have masterfully channeled the extraordinary social alienation and tensions produced by this level of inequality through spectacle TV—morning show “poverty porn” stereotyping the poor in the 1980s and 1990s and, in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, reality TV (Trump’s The Apprentice and The Housewives franchise). Politicians of both parties and the nation’s parroting corporate media deflected social tensions by erecting straw-man policy debates in the 1980s and 1990s against drugs, welfare, and crime that demonized and blamed Black Americans and immigrants from Mexico and Latin America for America’s social problems. They also channeled protestant work ethic propaganda—the notion that, unlike hardworking white Americans, Black people are lazy and undeserving of the franchise and their advances in the polity—a recycled Reconstruction-era trope. Late twentieth-century Democrats added to the conversation with the “superpredator” assignation in criminology.
The psychoanalyst and social psychologist Erich Fromm offered perspective on the social infrastructure that fuels the white-supremacist perspective. He wrote, “A society that lacks the means to provide adequately for the majority of its members, or a large proportion of them, must provide these members with a narcissistic satisfaction of the malignant type if it wants to prevent dissatisfaction among them. For those who are economically and culturally poor, narcissistic pride in belonging to the group is the only and often a very effective source of satisfaction.”8
History that Should Frighten Us
Many American journalists, pundits, and academics have recoiled from interpretations that linked the Trump phenomenon to a creeping fascism because they lack familiarity with the period of American history that most closely resembles the dynamics of fascism that we see now—namely, the period in which former slaveholders and their allies reacted against the social gains made by Black people after the Civil War during Reconstruction.9
What exactly was at stake? To understand this, we must grasp the magnitude of slavery as an economic system. First and foremost, American slavery was an economic system concerned with production—of cotton, tobacco, rice, and indigo—valuable as a means of exchange in the world market.10 Life was brutal in the U.S. South for the four million enslaved Africans who produced its wealth. And by the mid-nineteenth century, their labor produced the second-wealthiest society humanity had seen, second only to the British Empire.
When the full participation of enslaved Africans in the theater of war finally defeated the South in the Civil War, the old slave-owning class, which had earlier seceded from the union, seemed finished—trapped in an irreversible political and economic crisis. Its system was ostensibly overturned. But, because presidential Reconstruction set lenient terms for rejoining the union, the old planter class kept its foothold in society.11 Ironically, the class that lost the war was invited back to help remake the new society.
This leniency had consequences that continue to the current day. The old planters immediately launched a bloodthirsty counterrevolution, with the object of regaining political power and control of Black labor to return the southern economy to as close a replica as possible to slavery. Even though their plantations suffered destruction, they still owned most of the land. In the face of economic collapse, the old slavocracy achieved dominance through the consolidation and concentration of its plantation holdings: in Marengo County, Alabama, 10 percent of landowners came to control 63 percent of real estate.12 To legislate in their interest, they joined both the Republican and the Democratic Parties, eventually dominating both by disenfranchising the freedmen.
Still, the old slavocracy faced an increasingly confident and organized challenge from formerly enslaved people, whose consciousness had been transformed by their participation in the Civil War. And while most of them were forced to work for the old planter class in an economy that continued to be tied to cotton production, they fought fiercely for what they believed they deserved. They refused to work daylight to dusk as they had under slavery. They demanded wages, not provisions, and went on strike for better terms of hire.13 The fierce strike of Atlanta laundresses in 1881 best captures what the old planters were up against. Influenced by the revolutionary consciousness of an era wherein enslaved Africans struggled for liberation in the context of the Civil War, the washerwomen struck not only for higher wages but to gain control of production—namely, to be allowed to work from their home. They sought to avoid employer supervision, to be able to tend to family and children during work hours, and to collectivize their labor alongside other washerwomen. They won.14
To consolidate political power and regain control of the land and Black labor, the South’s old ruling class would have to snuff out epic examples of autonomy by Black people like these, which modeled alternative modes of organizing production. In the face of the freedmen’s confidence and growing power, the old planters crafted a multipronged campaign of white supremacy. The Ku Klux Klan became the terrorist wing of this campaign, recruiting white people of all classes as its foot soldiers. For the next century, white southerners carried out pogroms against Black people as a matter of communal ritual. These campaigns of terror were animated by the logic that white people were victims of Black aggression, threatened by the possible takeover of a mongrel race. Their real purpose, however, was to control Black labor by keeping the freedmen in their place tied to cotton production on rented land, away from potential alliances with poor white farmers.15
The KKK was the most extreme form of white supremacist repression. Control was also wielded in the courts, through the Black Codes, a series of laws passed during reconstruction whose purpose was to contain Black life and subdue Black labor. The laws denied Black people the right to vote, serve on state militias, testify against whites, and serve on juries. They also criminalized and imprisoned the freedmen for loitering, failure to pay their debts, and for failing to hold to work contracts with the old planter class. To save the state the expense of imprisonment, the labor of the imprisoned was auctioned and the first bid given to the prisoner’s former master.
As ideology, white supremacy won over poor whites to a cross-class alliance. It offered them a psychological wage, conferring onto them the sense of superiority over Black people.16 It erected a patriarchal society where the defense and protection of white womanhood—ever threatened by the alleged predatory sexuality of Black men—became the charge of white men.17 And with the help of the Daughters of the Confederacy, the old planter class rewrote the history of the Civil War.
In America, the past is prologue. And in the era of Donald Trump, we hear the echo of the slavocracy’s counterrevolution. His propaganda fits well with the ideology that the keepers of the old South have fed generations of schoolchildren: that the Confederacy fought a valiant fight for the dignity of a glorious South, that Southerners were victims of Northern tyranny, abuse, and corruption, and that the North forsook those of their own “glorious” race to give the crown jewels to an allegedly criminally minded, inept, undeserving race—whose men pose a threat to white women.
The mass recruitment of citizens in the execution of southern race terror and the legal character of U.S. race-based citizenship and immigration policy inspired Nazi travels to the United States in the 1930s, on official business, to study the country’s race law and culture.18
If active buy-in from and participation of large self-deputized sectors of the civilian population is a lynchpin of fascism, the entire history of the United States has well prepared it for the advent of the protofascist currents of today. In the face of Native American resistance and rebellions by enslaved Africans, the colonial governments of what later became the United States made gun ownership compulsory among white men and women of all classes. Seventeenth-century Virginia, for example, advanced loans to those who could not afford to buy personal weapons and required that men carry arms with them to work and church or be fined. White citizens were also compelled by law to serve in self-organized militias and later slave patrols. In essence, the colonial governments deputized Euro-American residents to secure the borders and integrity of the nascent American state. Before long, war with the Indians gave way to “savage war”—the targeting and killing of Native American men, women, and children by self-organized militias—a practice that continued until the last of the western territories were settled in the late nineteenth century.19
The country also has a profoundly conservative citizenry that’s been raised on anticommunism and subjected to Americanization campaigns throughout the twentieth century. Many live in remote rural settings, and after the 1950s, most were suburbanized, atomized in private homes, living in fear of Black people and Black crime, raised on a strong diet of middle-class individualism, living with high levels of indebtedness.20
We recognize the 1960s for the many ways the decade’s struggles civilized the country, expanded the meaning of freedom for historically oppressed people, and popularized critiques of U.S. government and foreign policy. But the 1960s also brought dramatic government-sponsored violence in the theater of war and against dissidents at home, which set the country along the dangerous path we are on today.
Under Robert McNamara, the U.S. secretary of defense, the military mandated “kill ratios” in Vietnam that pressed American soldiers to kill any Vietnamese in sight. The United States dropped napalm and more bombs in Vietnam than were dropped by all sides combined during World War II. War policy skirted genocide. Unlike the founding days of the nation that witnessed the genesis of savage war, acts of resistance from different sectors of society, including the military, exposed these war crimes and challenged standards of acceptable conduct.21
At home, the police murders of dozens of Black Panthers rivaled the rampages of Latin American dictators. And the FBI recruited citizen-agents on a mass scale to disrupt organizations fighting to expand the meaning and experience of democracy for women, racialized people, and the poor. In spring 1969, the Black Panther Party sounded the alarm. They held an antifascism conference in Oakland; in part, it was a response to the ruthless and homicidal character of state-sponsored violence. Features of this repression have been normalized since then in other less obvious ways, through prison and police expansion and the mass employment of Americans in the carceral industry, the third-largest employer in the nation.22
A confluence of American exceptionalism and the suppression and rewriting of history has left the nation clueless about the extent of its barbarism. This leaves it ill equipped to fend off the rise of a fascist leader, especially in the context of economic and social crisis. The only thing that can save us is a political movement that identifies the root cause of social antagonisms and, on that basis, radically transforms society.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Johanna Fernández is associate professor of History at Baruch College (CUNY) and author of The Young Lords: A Radical History, recipient of the New York Society Library’s New York City Book award and three Organization of American Historians (OAH) awards: the prestigious Frederick Jackson Turner Award for best first book in history, the Liberty Legacy Foundation Award for best book on civil rights, and the Merle Curti Award for best Social History. Dr. Fernández’s 2014 Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) lawsuit against the NYPD led to the recovery of the “lost” Handschu files, the largest repository of police surveillance records in the country—namely, over one million surveillance files of New Yorkers compiled by the NYPD between 1954–1972, including those of Malcolm X. She is editor of Writing on the Wall: Selected Prison Writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal and writer and producer of the film, Justice on Trial: The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. Her awards include the Fulbright Scholars grant to the Middle East and North Africa, which took her to Jordan; and a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in the Scholars-in-Residence program at the Schomburg Center in Harlem. She directed and cocurated ¡Presente! The Young Lords in New York, an exhibition in three NYC museums. She’s the host of A New Day, WBAI’s morning show, from 7:00–8:00 a.m., M–F, at 99.5 FM in New York.
Notes:
See Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933–1944 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1944).
Return to note reference
See David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Verso, 2007); Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2017).
Return to note reference
Oxfam (London), Wealth: Having It All and Wanting More, Oxfam (website), January 9, 2015, http://policy-practice.oxfam.org.uk/publications/wealth-having-it-all-and-wanting-more-338125.
Cited in William I. Robinson, “A Disease Deadlier than COVID-19: Global Capitalism in Crisis,” in When China Sneezes: From the Wuhan Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Implications, ed. Cynthia McKinney (Atlanta: Clarity, 2020), 145–160.
Return to note reference
Pat Evans, “11 Mind Blowing Facts about the US Economy,” Business Insider, April 10, 2019, https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/us-economy-facts-2019-4-1028101291.
Return to note reference
David Harvey, “Anti-Capitalist Politics in the Time of COVID-19,” Jacobin Magazine, March 2020, https://jacobinmag.com/2020/03/david-harvey-coronavirus-political-economy-disruptions.
Return to note reference
John Coder and Gordon Green, “Working Class Males Falling Behind,” Household Trends Statistical Brief, Sentier Research press release, 2016. See also, “Comparing Earnings of White Males by Education for Selected Age Cohorts: High School vs. College Graduates,” Sentier Research, October 2016.
Return to note reference
Anne Case and Sir Angus Deaton, “Mortality and Morbidity in the 21st Century,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activities, Spring 2017, https://www.brookings.edu/bpea-articles/mortality-and-morbidity-in-the-21st-century/.
Return to note reference
Pat Evans, “11 Mind Blowing Facts about the US Economy,” Business Insider, April 10, 2019, https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/us-economy-facts-2019-4-1028101291.
Return to note reference
David Harvey, “Anti-Capitalist Politics in the Time of COVID-19,” Jacobin Magazine, March 2020, https://jacobinmag.com/2020/03/david-harvey-coronavirus-political-economy-disruptions.
Return to note reference
John Coder and Gordon Green, “Working Class Males Falling Behind,” Household Trends Statistical Brief, Sentier Research press release, 2016. See also, “Comparing Earnings of White Males by Education for Selected Age Cohorts: High School vs. College Graduates,” Sentier Research, October 2016.
Return to note reference
Anne Case and Sir Angus Deaton, “Mortality and Morbidity in the 21st Century,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activities, Spring 2017, https://www.brookings.edu/bpea-articles/mortality-and-morbidity-in-the-21st-century/.
Synopsis of Anne Case and Sir Angus Deaton, “Rising Morbidity and Mortality in Midlife among White Non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st Century,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, November 2, 2015.
Return to note reference
Erich Fromm, The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil (Brooklyn: American Mental Health Foundation, 2010).
Return to note reference
The United States did not lack its own manifestations of 1930s fascism; see Michael Joseph Roberto, The Coming of the American Behemoth: The Origins of Fascism in the United States, 1920–1940 (New York: Monthly Review, 2018). The later rise of McCarthyism drew on similar forces; see Cedric Belfrage, The American Inquisition, 1945–1960 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973). What I contend is that the underlying drive was set in motion much earlier. See also Jonathan Scott, ed., “US Fascism Comes to the Surface,” special issue, Socialism and Democracy 22, no. 2 (July 2008).
Return to note reference
Barbara Jeanne Fields, “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the USA,” New Left Review 181 (1990): 95–118.
Return to note reference
Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877, rev. ed. (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2014).
Return to note reference
Jack Bloom, Class, Race, and the Civil Rights Movement: The Changing Political Economy of Southern Racism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), chap. 1.
Return to note reference
Bloom, Class, Race, and the Civil Rights Movements, 24.
Return to note reference
Tera Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labor after the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
Return to note reference
Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
Return to note reference
W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935).
Return to note reference
Tyson, Timothy B. Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
Return to note reference
James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).
Return to note reference
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2018).
Return to note reference
Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
Return to note reference
On military resistance, see Christian G. Appy, Working Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Jonathan Neale, The American War: Vietnam, 1960–1975 (London: Bookmarks, 2001); Terry Wallace, Bloods: Black Veterans of the Vietnam War; An Oral History (New York: Ballantine Books,1985); and David Zeiger’s documentary, Sir! No Sir! (Displaced Films, 2005).
Return to note reference
See Mumia Abu-Jamal and Johanna Fernández, eds., “The Roots of Mass Incarceration in the US: Locking Up Black Dissidents and Punishing the Poor,” special issue, Socialism and Democracy 28, no. 3 (November 2014).
Return to note reference
Erich Fromm, The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil (Brooklyn: American Mental Health Foundation, 2010).
Return to note reference
The United States did not lack its own manifestations of 1930s fascism; see Michael Joseph Roberto, The Coming of the American Behemoth: The Origins of Fascism in the United States, 1920–1940 (New York: Monthly Review, 2018). The later rise of McCarthyism drew on similar forces; see Cedric Belfrage, The American Inquisition, 1945–1960 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973). What I contend is that the underlying drive was set in motion much earlier. See also Jonathan Scott, ed., “US Fascism Comes to the Surface,” special issue, Socialism and Democracy 22, no. 2 (July 2008).
Return to note reference
Barbara Jeanne Fields, “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the USA,” New Left Review 181 (1990): 95–118.
Return to note reference
Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877, rev. ed. (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2014).
Return to note reference
Jack Bloom, Class, Race, and the Civil Rights Movement: The Changing Political Economy of Southern Racism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), chap. 1.
Return to note reference
Bloom, Class, Race, and the Civil Rights Movements, 24.
Return to note reference
Tera Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labor after the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
Return to note reference
Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
Return to note reference
W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935).
Return to note reference
Tyson, Timothy B. Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
Return to note reference
James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).
Return to note reference
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2018).
Return to note reference
Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
Return to note reference
On military resistance, see Christian G. Appy, Working Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Jonathan Neale, The American War: Vietnam, 1960–1975 (London: Bookmarks, 2001); Terry Wallace, Bloods: Black Veterans of the Vietnam War; An Oral History (New York: Ballantine Books,1985); and David Zeiger’s documentary, Sir! No Sir! (Displaced Films, 2005).
Return to note reference
See Mumia Abu-Jamal and Johanna Fernández, eds., “The Roots of Mass Incarceration in the US: Locking Up Black Dissidents and Punishing the Poor,” special issue, Socialism and Democracy 28, no. 3 (November 2014).
Critical Ethnic Studies
edition
7
issn
2373-504X
language
en-US
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis, MN
Copyright 2021 by the Critical Ethnic Studies Association
Critical Ethnic Studies Association
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johanna_Fern%C3%A1ndez_(historian)
Johanna Fernández (historian)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Johanna Fernández
Fernández in 2020
Born
December 2, 1970
New York City, U.S.
Died
July 30, 2026 (aged 55)
New York City, U.S.
Education
Brown University, Columbia University
Occupations
Historian, professor
Notable work
The Young Lords: A Radical History (2019)
Website
www.johannafernandez.info
Johanna Luisa del Carmen Fernández (December 2, 1970 – July 30, 2026) was an American historian, police/prison abolitionist and revolutionary socialist. An associate professor of history at Baruch College, her academic work has centered on the Young Lords, culminating in The Young Lords: A Radical History (2019). Since its publication, she worked on a book about the history of fascism in the United States and co-curated the first exhibit at the National Museum of the American Latino in 2022.
Her activism began in 1991 as a leader of Students for Admissions and Minority Aid (SAMA) at Brown University. As an advocate for need-blind admission and affirmative action, she participated in the April 22–23, 1992 occupation of University Hall. Her 21st-century activism has primarily centered around the Free Mumia Abu-Jamal campaign. In this endeavor, she produced the film Justice on Trial (2010), co-edited a special issue of Socialism and Democracy with Abu-Jamal, and edited a collection of his works titled Writing on the Wall (2015).
Life and career
Early life and education
On December 2, 1970, Fernández was born in New York City[1] to Dominican refugees of the Dominican Civil War. She grew up in an apartment in The Bronx.[2] Living in a Spanish-speaking-only household, she attended bilingual classes for the first three years of elementary school. However, since their establishment in the 1960s due to the activism of Evelina López Antonetty and others, they were stigmatized. In defiance, she became determined "to master the English language", birthing an interest in literature that remained influential into college.[3] She did not have English proficiency until sixth grade, reading her first book, East of Eden (1952), around that time. She attended Murry Bergtraum High School her freshman and sophomore years, but in response to her truancy there her father transferred her to the Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics. There she enrolled in Columbia University's Double Discovery Program. Despite her parents not being overtly political, she developed anti-capitalist sentiments from encounters with poverty and the crack epidemic in New York, comparing it to better environments in the Dominican Republic she visited during the summers. In 1988, she graduated from Charterhouse School in Godalming, England, in a year-long program organized by the British American Educational Foundation. She toured Europe, including a visit to the Soviet Union, where the visible poverty left her with a negative impression of Soviet socialism.[2]
Although she wished to attend Wesleyan University, she was only accepted to Brown University. There she was influenced academically by classes under Dorothy Denniston and Suzanne Oboler. Additionally, she has labeled studying postmodernism as "the most important intellectual experience of my life". Moreover, she explored her Afro-Dominican and lesbian identity during her early years at Brown.[2] Coming from a family making $22,000 annually,[4] she became a leader of Students for Admissions and Minority Aid (SAMA) her junior year, advocating for need-blind admission and affirmative action and joining teach-ins. When attempts to collaborate with President Vartan Gregorian on allocating $50 million for financial aid failed, she participated in the April 22–23, 1992 occupation of University Hall. While the initial group was under guard, she went to the bathroom and delivered a speech through a window facing approximately 400 students on the ground.[2] The Brown Daily Herald quotes her at one point saying, "There are people out there who can't come in because they don't have money. The Van Wickle Gates are locked to them." She and other speakers prompted students to storm the building.[5] Once police arrived outside the campus, she was committed to being arrested rather than acceding to vacating the building. Accordingly, she was one of the 253 arrestees. However, by the time SAMA activists had gone through court, which for Fernández resulted in a fine, the semester ended and students demobilized. In 1993, she graduated with a bachelor's degree of arts in literature and American civilization.[2]
Having been exposed to Marxism and becoming an adherent at Brown, by the time she went to Columbia University for graduate studies she was a revolutionary socialist that referred to Mumia Abu-Jamal as the "Che Guevara of our era". Influenced by her activist experience at Brown she studied social movements and graduated with a PhD in history in 2004. As a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University, she attended a lecture by activist and former Black Panther Elaine Brown, whom she spontaneously introduced in light of students' unpreparedness. Afterward,[6] professor emeritus David P. Demarest suggested she visit Abu-Jamal, whom she began seeing weekly along with other death row inmates at State Correctional Institution – Greene. The "transformative" experience influenced her approach to prison abolition.[3]
Post-graduate work and activism
Free Mumia street poster, 2012
Fernández's and Kouross Esmaeli's film Justice on Trial (2010) sympathetically covered the details of Abu-Jamal's case. Author Robert Zaller notes that the film's point "is not how exceptional Mumia's trial was, but how typical. The film details the runaway corruption and brutality of Philadelphia's police force under Mayor Frank Rizzo in the 1970s, and the hand-in-glove collaboration of the District Attorney's Office with it. … Nor, as the film points out, is the system much improved today. Every few years brings renewed scandal. The Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) remains as resistant to reform as ever, and no mayor, police commissioner, or D.A. has dared to confront its culture of impunity." It was contrasted to Tigre Hill's anti-Mumia documentary The Barrel of a Gun (2010).[7] In November she debated Hill and R. Seth Williams following a showing of The Barrel of a Gun characterized by a vocally pro-Mumia audience.[8] In 2014, she co-edited a special issue of Socialism and Democracy with Abu-Jamal on mass incarceration in the United States. The following year, a collection of works edited by Fernández entitled Writing on the Wall was published. Her expressed goal "was to place Mumia in the context of the Black radical tradition".[3]
1970 Young Lords platform poster, held at the Smithsonian Institution
Following the completion of her Columbia doctoral dissertation on the Young Lords,[1] she further examined the work of the organization's photographers, specifically Hiram Maristany (New York City) and Luis Avila (Chicago). She then integrated these in lectures. During one on the southern civil rights movement at the Bronx Museum, an audience member asked about the participation of Latinos, leading to an explanation of the Young Lords and Holly Block inviting her to curate an exhibit.[3] In 2015, she co-curated with Yasmín Ramírez "¡Presente! The Young Lords in New York", which was presented at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, El Museo del Barrio, and Losaida Inc.[9][10] Art critic Holland Cotter's New York Times review provides background, particularly for the portions of the exhibition pertaining to the Garbage and Church Offensives.[11]
In 2014, she made a Freedom of Information Act request to the New York City Police Department (NYPD) for 1960s—1970s surveillance files ordered to be preserved by the Handschu agreement, but was led on for 6 months before being informed the NYPD was dismissing her FOIA request. She borrowed money, hired attorney Gideon Oliver, and sued the NYPD.[12][13] In 2016, +1 million documents dated 1954–1972 were found in the Queens Warehouse and covered the Young Lords, Black Panther Party, Hard Hat Riot, and 1968 Columbia University protests.[14] Her subsequent book, The Young Lords: A Radical History (2019), was well received by the press and academia.
During racial unrest in summer 2020, she helped coordinate the June 14 Puerto Rican pride and solidarity march with Black Lives Matter. It involved 60 organizations and drew 5,000 people. Protesting against police brutality and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), she stated, "I have been dreaming of this moment. Black and Brown people are sharing their history of the colonial experience and class struggle."[15] She pinpoints American police origins to slave catching and declared, "White supremacy is part of the DNA in America. It cannot be reformed. It has to be abolished."[16]
In collaboration with historian Felipe Hinojosa, she began curating the inaugural exhibit, "¡Presente!", on 20th-century Latino youth movements for the National Museum of the American Latino in July 2021. However, it was "paused" in November 2022 shortly after opening at the National Museum of American History over political backlash. An opinion article in The Hill criticized it as "advancing a classic oppressor-oppressed agenda of textbook Marxism". Florida Republican representative Mario Diaz-Balart in reaction stated he would block funding. Director Jorge Zamanillo explained that continuing the exhibit's direction was not financially viable and that the research could be utilized later. Following Zamanillo's meeting with Diaz-Balart and Texas Republican Tony Gonzales, material on a 1992 Cuban post-revolution exodus raft including language on Cuba's "dictatorship" was added. Diaz-Balart and Gonzales deemed this and similar changes sufficient in changing their view, yet Zamanillo maintained no changes were agreed upon. However, historian Vicki L. Ruiz, Fernández, and Hinojosa stated concessions undermined relationships established with living historical subjects.[17][18]
Fernández curated the Latinx Freedom Movement Archive and Exhibition Project with historian Felipe Hinojosa, which was displayed at The Shed.[19][9]
She wrote a book about the history of fascism in the United States.[20]
Death
Fernández died from lung cancer on July 30, 2026, at the age of 55.[9][19][21] At the time of her death, Fernández was working with Mickey Melendez and Cionin Lorenzo to develop a scripted miniseries about the Young Lords.[9]
Works
Books
Abu-Jamal, Mumia; Fernández, Johanna; West, Cornel (2015). Writing on the wall: selected prison writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal. San Francisco: City Lights books. ISBN 978-0-87286-675-1.
The Young Lords: A Radical History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2019. p. 480. ISBN 978-1469669328.
Articles
"On the Historical Roots of U.S. Fascism". Critical Ethnic Studies. 7 (1). January 7, 2022. doi:10.5749/CES.0701.Fernandez. ISSN 2373-504X.
See also
Neoabolitionism (race relations)
Nuyorican movement
Sources
Sandomir, Richard (August 12, 2026). "Johanna Fernández, Historian of the Young Lords, Dies at 55". The New York Times. Retrieved August 12, 2026.
Fernández, Johanna (January 10, 2017). "Johanna Fernández, class of 1993". Pembroke Center Oral History Project (Interview). Interviewed by Circus, Judith. New York City: Brown University.
Fernández, Johanna (February 2, 2024). "Political Origins: An Interview with Johanna Fernández" (Interview). Interviewed by Harrison, Ana Sofia. New York City: Barnard Center for Research on Women.
Jordan, Mary (April 26, 1992). "'Need-Blind' Admissions Policy at Top Private Colleges Losing Favor to Wealth". Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. ProQuest 307527158.
Bartlett, John W. (April 23, 1992). "Need-Blind Activists Seize U. Hall: Sit-In Ends With Mass Arrests; SAMA To Rally Today". The Brown Daily Herald. Vol. CXXVII, no. 58. Brown University. pp. 1, 9.
Joseph Colon (September 24, 2023). "The Limbo Latino Podcast with Johanna Fernández". The Limbo Latino Podcast (Podcast).
Zaller, Robert (September 26, 2010). "Mumia again: "Justice On Trial'". Broad Street Review.
"Pro-Mumia Film Screening Leads To Heated Debate". CBS. November 9, 2010.
Carrillo, Karen Juanita (August 1, 2026). "Johanna Fernández, Young Lords historian and prison abolitionist, makes her transition". New York Amsterdam News. Retrieved August 4, 2026.
Wang, Hansi Lo (July 29, 2015). "Once Outlaws, Young Lords Find A Museum Home For Radical Roots". NPR.
Cotter, Holland (July 23, 2015). "When the Young Lords Were Outlaws in New York". New York Times.
Moynihan, Colin (August 12, 2014). "Police Files on Radicals Are at Center of a Lawsuit". New York Times.
Fernández, Johanna (February 20, 2020). Glaser, Phil (ed.). Johanna Fernández presents "The Young Lords: A Radical History" (Speech). Book tour. Red Emma's: Red Emma's (published February 25, 2020). Event occurs at 01:09:53–01:13:12.
Goldstein, Joseph (June 17, 2016). "Old New York Police Surveillance Is Found, Forcing Big Brother Out of Hiding". New York Times.
Parra, Daniel (July 2, 2020). "Why 'Black Lives Matter' to NYC's Latino Police-Reform Marchers". City Limits.
Thomas, Kiara (June 15, 2020). "In Lieu of a Puerto Rican Day Parade, Activists Rally to Defund the Police". The Indypendent.
Waxman, Olivia B. (September 18, 2023). "Inside the Controversy Over the National Museum of the American Latino". TIME.
Schuessler, Jennifer (September 23, 2023). "Smithsonian's Latino Museum Faces Political Winds Before a Brick Is Laid". New York Times.
"Johanna Fernández Dies at 55: Leading Scholar on the Young Lords & Latinx Freedom Movement". Democracy Now!. Retrieved August 4, 2026.
"About". johannafernandez.info.
Rice, Mark. "Johanna Fernández, in memoriam". Baruch College Department of History. Retrieved August 3, 2026.
External links
Young Lords exhibition
Black Agenda Report
News, commentary and analysis from the black left.
https://www.blackagendareport.com/when-i-heard-passing-johanna-fernandez
When I Heard of the Passing of Johanna Fernandez
Stevie Wilson
4 August 2026
🖨️ Print Article
Johanna Fernandez was the author of "The Young Lords: A Radical History"
Johanna Fernandez touched many lives through her scholarship, activism, and belief that people themselves can change history and be "the ones we've been waiting for."
When I heard of the passing of Johanna Fernandez, my heart was filled with sorrow and profound gratitude. Sorrow for the loss of a relentless supporter of justice and truth. Profound gratitude that I lived in a time when her voice, her brilliance and her unwavering commitment to justice helped shape our understanding of the world- and our place within it. I encountered her voice and brilliance as an imprisoned person. She was an unstinting supporter of political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal. She was the author of The Young Lords: A Radical History, a book I read and used in the inside study group I founded: 9971.
Johanna was many things: a historian, a writer, an educator, an organizer, and an intellectual. But above all else, she was a person who deeply believed in the capacity of ordinary people to transform history. For Johanna, history was alive. It lived in the streets, in our communities, in our classrooms, in prison visiting rooms, in organizing meetings, and in every act of resistance carried out by people who refused to accept injustice as inevitable.
She dedicated her life to telling stories that too often went untold. She gave voice to movements and communities that powerful institutions tried to erase. She reminded us that the struggle for freedom is not the work of a few extraordinary individuals, but of countless ordinary people who dare to dream beyond the limits imposed upon them. She taught us that to recover forgotten histories is to reclaim collective humanity.
Johanna understood something that many of us spend a lifetime trying to learn, that love and struggle are inseparable. She believed that our movements must be rooted not only in analysis but in care. Not only in critique but in community. Not only in resistance but in the courage to imagine a world where everyone belongs.
Today, we mourn a tremendous loss. There is no replacing a voice like Johanna’s. There is no replacing her insight, her fierce determination, or the way she could connect history to the urgent demands of the present. We will miss her at our tables, in our classrooms, on our panels, and in our meetings. But today is not the end of her story.
The measure of her life is found not only in what she accomplished, but in what she made possible for others. Her work and activism made it possible for me to become a teacher, a thinker, a leader and an organizer. Her life reminds us that our greatest legacy is not what we build for ourselves, but what we build in one another.
Her work taught me to refuse the world as it is. Johanna taught me that history was never simply about the past. It was a living archive of struggle, sacrifice, imagination and possibility. She taught me that to remember is a political act.
She taught me that scholarship should not be detached from the people whose lives shaped it. She stood in the tradition of intellectuals who understood that ideas matter because they help ordinary people transform the conditions of their lives. Whether writing about the Young Lords, defending the freedom of Mumia Abu-Jamal, or illuminating the long history of resistance to racism, colonialism, and state violence, she approached every project with rigor, courage, and deep love for humanity. She reminded that history belongs not only to universities or archives, but to neighborhoods, prisons, picket lines, classrooms, and communities in struggle.
Johanna taught us that movements are built through relationships. She crossed boundaries between generations, between academics and organizers, between those behind prison walls and those outside of them. She refused the false divide between thinking and doing. She taught us that knowledge demanded action, and action demanded reflection. She showed us that scholarship could be an act of solidarity, and that solidarity required discipline, patience, and hope.
Her absence leaves an immeasurable void. The measure of a life is not only found in the years it spans, but in the lives it changes. Johanna changed countless lives, including my own, through her teaching, writing, organizing and unwavering belief that another world is possible. We who have benefited from her work must continue to benefit the world through her work. We must continue to tell the histories she fought to preserve. We must continue to defend the people whose humanity she insisted the world recognize. We must continue to build the future she spent her life imagining and working for. We must amplify her voice wherever people study together, organize together, and refuse to surrender to injustice. That is our charge.
The words of activist/poet June Jordan perfectly encapsulate the lesson Johanna Fernandez taught us: “We are the ones we have been waiting for.” We are responsible for our history, our future and each other. May we honor Johanna not only with our memories, but with our continued struggle for justice. And may she rest in power, knowing that the seeds she planted will continue to grow in all of us.
Always,
Stevie
Stevie Wilson is a formerly incarcerated, abolitionist writer and organizer. He is currently a Fellow with Critical Resistance and Fellowship Coordinator for The Work and Us. He resides in Philadelphia.
Johanna Fernandez
Young Lords
political prisoners
Mumia Abu Jamal
https://www.blackagendareport.com/tribute-johanna-fernandez
A Tribute to Johanna Fernandez
Julia Wright
4 August 2026
Johanna Fernandez with Mumia Abu Jamal
Johanna Fernandez left a powerful and revolutionary legacy through her scholarship and activism.
"solidarity is emotional"
Johanna Fernandez (1970-2026)
As the tributes pour in, we are slowly, soberly and somberly putting together the Johanna each one of us knew. The collective Johanna that emerges is tall, fierce but loving, a burning passionaria with ice cold determination. A woman warrior ready to pay the price.
The intrepid biographer of the Young Lords, Johanna had joined the Mumia Abu-Jamal campaign in the late nineties. In 2023, I was honored to have collaborated with Johanna on bringing Mumia's archives to Brown University and to have co-founded with her, Professor Mark Taylor and Michael and Annette Schiffmann: the UN Mumia Liaison group. The same year, Johanna was key in obtaining an amicus curiae for Mumia which was presented to Judge Lucretia Clemons although the latter dismissed both the United Nations human rights document and Mumia's last appeal founded on solid Brady and Batson evidence found in six boxes locked away for 36 years.
Johanna was not only Mumia's PhD advisor, she was the political apple of his eye, his unfailing sister whose healing company had sustained him for decades. When he was informed of her passing two nights ago, Mumia was devastated.
Johanna had a strategic view of the struggle but she also knew tactically how to seize the time. She had that see-through vision of time that was both feline and analytic.
I remember, six years ago, when she was watching Amy Goodman interviewing Larry Krasner live on Democracy Now , she seized her smartphone, called the studio, asked that a message be passed on to Amy requesting her to raise Mumia Abu-Jamal with Krasner in real time thus eliciting from the Philadelphia District Attorney the famous response that Mumia's case remains "a microcosm" of all that was corrupt in the justice system that preceded him. That statement remains a testament to what Larry Krasner has yet to do while he is in the prosecutor's seat. Johanna had an uncanny way of holding up mirrors to double-talk.
I remember when Johanna was in remission from her last illness and the encampments of City University of New York (CUNY) and Columbia University were up in support of Gaza, frail as she was, she went in person to those campuses to air Mumia's commentaries for a Free Palestine through a megaphone she held out for the students to hear.
Johanna had a sense of historical Time and knew how not to let it pass us by. And she was more than just the teacher of her students, she was a passer-on of revolutionary ideology and practice between the generations.
Johanna was a community healer. In 2021 she organized a panel against sexual abuse targeting women in the struggle which instead of being an academic panel of talking heads gave the mic to those among us who had been abused and some of us for the first time found the words to say it. I was able to bear testimony to my own abuse and to how I felt my body had become a piece of land up for grabs. I had been taken like a colony.
After the panel, for the first time in my life, although I was almost eighty years old, was able to dance to my own ancestral music. Johanna is to be thanked for many things - and many of us did not have the time to thank her.
Like Denise Oliver-Velez, the Economic Development Minister of the Young Lords and others in revolutionary leadership, Johanna fought both the mass incarceration state on the outside and cancer within. Since Amilcar Cabral's Cancer of Betrayal speech on the death of Kwame Nkrumah in 1972, we understand that cancer can be the physical expression of the inner betrayal of the revolution. "The personal is political" is a Young Lords slogan. Both Denise and Johanna were relentlessly tracking such betrayals or festering inner contradictions, for instance the paradoxical role of capitalism's dollars in our movements.
More than ever, the losses of Denise Oliver-Velez and Johanna Fernandez leave us with the need for a Fanon who could write a psychopathology of everyday abolitionism showing us how in spite of the necessity of being in fight or flight mode day and night, in spite of the accumulation of cortisol and stored adrenaline, we can solve our contradictions before they go to our cells and we can address the root cause that prevents the unity of the new body politic we work to free our political prisoners into, from sub-dividing into rogue elements.
Yesterday my son who never met Johanna listened to her story and added: "Mum, just as oncologists have found that the sugar we are over dependent on - like our dollars - is the poison that makes cancer grow in us".
Johanna Presente!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Julia Wright is the elder daughter of Richard Wright and executrix of his estate. She worked as a journalist in Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana until the coup d'etat in 1966. She was a member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and accompanied the Black Panther Party to the First Panafrican Festival in Algiers. She has been in the campaign to free Mumia since the mid-eighties.
https://www.instagram.com/p/DbdmG4fERG2/
blackpuertoricanphd
4w
A huge loss for so many. Johanna Fernandez, author, scholar, activist has joined the ancestors. May we all carry her work in our work. Rest in Freedom. from @galabklyn : "A few months ago, Johanna Fernandez gave so many of us a gift by way of the Latinx Freedom Project conference she organized with Felipe Hinojosa where OG revolutionaries from across the country had an extraordinary opportunity to come together, break bread and share their stories. If you to visit The Shed in Hudson Yards, you’ll witness a glorious exhibit based on that concept. One could say that her comprehensive book on The Young Lords was also a gift to present and future generations of activists searching for meaning and method. Indeed, Johanna was a gift to humanity. On the radio at a rally or in her classroom, she ever so humbly gave us all hope and courage and wisdom beyond her years. I will miss her but will never forget that voice, that commitment to our collective struggle and her love for her people. Johanna Presente! May you live forever in peace and power. Pa’lante, Siempre!"
https://brownipc.wordpress.com/2020/01/07/congratulations-to-johanna-fernandez-phd-93-for-publication-of-the-young-lords-a-radical-history/
Inman Page Black Alumni Council of Brown Alumni Association
Congratulations to Johanna Fernández, PhD ’93 for publication of The Young Lords: A Radical History
7 January 2020
Brown University Inman Page Black Alumni Council congratulates Johanna Fernández, PhD ’93 for publication of The Young Lords: A Radical History
480 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 34 halftones, notes, index
HARDCOVER ISBN: 978-1-4696-5344-0 Published: February 2020
EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-4696-5345-7 Published: December 2019
Against the backdrop of America’s escalating urban rebellions in the 1960s, an unexpected cohort of New York radicals unleashed a series of urban guerrilla actions against the city’s racist policies and contempt for the poor. Their dramatic flair, uncompromising vision, and skillful ability to link local problems to international crises riveted the media, alarmed New York’s political class, and challenged nationwide perceptions of civil rights and black power protest. The group called itself the Young Lords.
Utilizing oral histories, archival records, and an enormous cache of police records released only after a decade-long Freedom of Information Law request and subsequent court battle, Johanna Fernández has written the definitive account of the Young Lords, from their roots as a street gang to their rise and fall as a political organization. Led predominantly by poor and working-class Puerto Rican youth, and consciously fashioned after the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords confronted race and class inequality and questioned American foreign policy. Their imaginative, irreverent protests and media conscious tactics won significant reforms and exposed U.S. mainland audiences to the country’s quiet imperial project in Puerto Rico. In riveting style, Fernández demonstrates how the Young Lords redefined the character of protest, the color of politics, and the cadence of popular urban culture in the age of great dreams.
Attend author events
FEBRUARY
Thursday, February 20, 2020 | 7:00pm
The Young Lords
Red Emma’s Bookstore Coffeehouse
Baltimore, MD
MARCH
Tuesday, March 3, 2020 | 6:00pm
The Young Lords
Busboys and Poets (450 K St location)
Washington, DC
Photo by: JonGunnar Gylfason
Johanna Fernández is a native New Yorker. She received a PhD in History from Columbia University and a BA in Literature and American Civilization from Brown University. Professor Fernández teaches 20th Century U.S. History, the history of social movements, the political economy of American cities, and African-American history at City University of New York, Baruch College, Department of Black and Latino Studies.
Listen to Johanna’s Brown University experience recorded on Jan 10, 2017 in an interview by Judith Circus. Courtesy of the Pembroke Center Oral History.
Sources: © The University of North Carolina Press, © Baruch College and © 2020 Brown University
http://www.beforecolumbusfoundation.com/.../American-Book…
The Before Columbus Foundation announces the winners of the Forty-Second Annual
AMERICAN BOOK AWARDS
2021 RECEIPIENTS
JOHANNA FERNANDEZ IS A 2021 AMERICAN BOOK AWARDS WINNER:
PHOTO: Johanna Fernández (Photo: Jon Gunnar)
Ceremonies: Sunday, September 19, 2021, from 2:00–4:00 p.m.
Oakland, CA—The Before Columbus Foundation announces the Winners of the Forty-Second Annual AMERICAN BOOK AWARDS. The 2021 American Book Award winners will be formally recognized on Sunday, September 19, 2021, from 2:00–4:00 p.m., online.
YouTube Event – https://youtu.be/IG6LQCpHtBQ
Connect with the Before Columbus Foundation: Website | Facebook
The American Book Awards were created to provide recognition for outstanding literary achievement from the entire spectrum of America’s diverse literary community. The purpose of the awards is to recognize literary excellence without limitations or restrictions. There are no categories, no nominees, and therefore no losers. The award winners range from well-known and established writers to under-recognized authors and first works. There are no quotas for diversity, the winners list simply reflects it as a natural process. The Before Columbus Foundation views American culture as inclusive and has always considered the term “multicultural” to be not a description of various categories, groups, or “special interests,” but rather as the definition of all of American literature. The Awards are not bestowed by an industry organization, but rather are a writers’ award given by other writers.
ABOUT THE RECEIPIENT:
Johanna Fernández is associate professor of History at Baruch College of the City University of New York and author of The Young Lords: A Radical History, recipient in 2021 of the New York Society Library’s New York City Book Award and three Organization of American Historians (OAH) awards: the prestigious Frederick Jackson Turner award for best first book in history, the Liberty Legacy Foundation award for best book on civil rights and the Merle Curti award for best Social History. Dr. Fernández’s 2014 Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) lawsuit against the NYPD, led to the recovery of the “lost” Handschu files, the largest repository of police surveillance records in the country, namely over one million surveillance files of New Yorkers compiled by the NYPD between 1954-1972, including those of Malcolm X. She’s also the host of the morning show A New Day at 99.5 FM in New York on Pacifica’s WBAI, M-F, 7-8am.
Johanna Fernández
Author
The Young Lords: A Radical History (University of North Carolina Press, 2018)
"Johanna Fernández has not only produced the definitive history of the Young Lords; she also has single-handedly shifted our understanding of the post-1968 political landscape. Richly documented, beautifully written, and brutally honest, this book moves the Young Lords from the margins of the New Left and Puerto Rican nationalism to the very epicenter of global struggles against racism, imperialism, and patriarchy and for national self-determination, medical justice, reproductive rights, and socialism. A work as monumental and expansive as the Young Lords’ vision of revolution.”
— Robin D. G. Kelley
"In this remarkable book, historian Johanna Fernández tells us that the children of Puerto Rican migration to the U.S. colonizer’s continent developed a ‘second sight,’ experiencing poverty and discrimination while possessing knowledge of Puerto Rico as a U.S. colony and U.S. imperialism, making their organization, the Young Lords, a powerful force. Challenging Latino antiblack racism and machismo and the church, and using intense community organizing, they not only brought liberation and class consciousness to Puerto Ricans but also infused the social movements of the 1960s with solidarity, launching the famed Rainbow Coalition. This is history writing at its best, rigorously researched yet powerful and moving, often poetic. And it is not ‘just history,’ but rather profoundly a cautionary tale of the present and the future given the limitation of social revolution within the powerful settler-colonial state that is the United States.”
— Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
PHOTO: Johanna Fernández (by Jon Gunnar)
https://amsterdamnews.com/news/2026/08/01/johanna-fernandez-young-lords-historian-makes-her-transition/
Obits
Johanna Fernández, Young Lords historian and prison abolitionist, makes her transition
August 1, 2026
Amsterdam News
NYC
Amsterdam News
NYC
Dr. Johanna Fernández, Dominican American historian and prison abolitionist, passed away on July 30, 2026. Photo credit: David Galarza
Dr. Johanna Fernández, the Dominican American historian, prison abolitionist, and movement scholar, died on July 30, 2026, after a years-long struggle with non-small cell lung cancer. She was 55.
Fernández’s life –– a mix of scholarship, activism, family, and friendship — was rooted, her brother Geovanny Fernández explained, in lessons learned from their parents, especially their father, Tirso Fernández.
Tirso Fernández was from the Dominican Republic, from a small place near the city of San Juan de la Maguana called Lavapiés. He and his wife, Minerva Fernández, who is from La Vega, were refugees of the 1965 Dominican Civil War. They raised Johanna and her brothers, Geovanny, Osvaldo, and Tirso Fernández Jr., in New York City, with a politics that Geovanny described as based on generosity. “I think the idea was to help people, particularly those who didn’t have a voice,” he said. Their father, he remembered, measured family visits back home partly by whether his children had helped others: “Did I give any money? How much money did I give?
“As for politics, my cousin said that the purpose of politics is to help others. Certainly, that was an ethos (helping others) of my sister, [that] she learned from her father, Tirso Fernandez.
A professor of history at Baruch College and the CUNY Graduate Center, Johanna Fernández was a leading scholar of the Young Lords, the Puerto Rican and Latinx radical organization whose New York chapter fought for health care, sanitation, breakfast programs, lead-poisoning testing, and community control. Her award-winning book, “The Young Lords: A Radical History,” was based on oral histories, archives, and recovered police surveillance files obtained through a Freedom of Information Law lawsuit she filed against the New York Police Department. Her suit helped uncover the Handschu files, more than one million NYPD surveillance files compiled between 1954 and 1972 on anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, civil rights rallies, early LGBTQ+ rights protests, the Black Panthers, the Young Lords, and the Nation of Islam. The NYPD had for decades claimed the files were lost.
Former Young Lord and veteran journalist Juan González told the AmNews Fernández’s book stands apart because of the scope and seriousness of her research. “There’s been about a dozen books on the Young Lords that have been published,” González said: “There’s even one in French by a French journalist, published in France several years ago. And there have been numerous memoirs and academic studies, and Johanna’s book is by far the best, the most complete and the most analytical, and one that best places the role and contributions of the Young Lords in the historical context of social change in the United States and of revolutionary movements. She really was, I guess, the only person who really distilled and summarized what was unique about the Lords compared to other organizations, other revolutionary social change organizations of that era.
“She really was not only the best analyst,” González added, “and I say this even though I had some disagreements with some of the stuff in her book. I didn’t agree with all of it, but I totally respect the devotion and the time she took to try to place the Lords in the proper historical context of that era. And she was very dogged in her research, digging up many documents that other people had not.”
“I think there are going to be some memorials happening,” Mickey Melendez, co-founder and former head of security for the New York Young Lords, said. “We don’t know the dates yet, and we don’t know if there’s going to be a viewing or not. The family’s going to follow up … But basically, as her brother said, you know, she was so busy living life that she left no instructions.”
The interviews and exchanges Johanna had with Young Lords’ founders while writing her book helped her build relationships with them. For the rest of her life, Fernández stayed close to Young Lords veterans, pushed to protect their archives, and insisted on bridging their work with the efforts of today’s organizers. The exhibition, ¡Presente! The Young Lords in New York, which she co-curated with Dr. Yasmín Ramírez, was on view at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, El Museo del Barrio, and Loisaida Inc. between July and December 2015. In later work, she created the Latinx Freedom Movement Archive and Exhibition Project, with historian Felipe Hinojosa, and it is currently on view at The Shed in Hudson Yards.
Filmmaker and producer Cionin Lorenzo said Fernández’s archives “need to really be protected,” calling the work “brave” and “brilliant.” She recalled watching visitors encounter the Latinx Freedom exhibition at The Shed and realizing the reach of Fernández’s labor. “It made me very emotional to see it,” Lorenzo said, “and I knew what it was about. I knew the background. We’ve talked about all these things so many times. But just seeing it there, at The Shed, where there are so many tourists, I was waiting for someone, so I had an hour to kill, and I really just wanted to sit there and watch people see the exhibition. And I was really blown away. People from all over the world, all different cultures, ages, languages, you know, whether they stopped for five minutes or stayed half an hour. You would hear their conversations, and they were smart. People would talk to each other. They would see something and be kind of blown away.
“Like, that’s the effect her work has. It doesn’t matter where you’re from; it’s a universal struggle, telling the story of people who love and want everyone to be equal, to be safe, and to live their freedom and their truth. And that resonates with people. I saw it in that one hour that I was standing by the Latinx Freedom.”
Fernández’s commitment to prison abolition led her to edit Writing on the Wall: Selected Prison Writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal, co-edit a special issue of Socialism and Democracy with Abu-Jamal on the roots of mass incarceration, and write and produce “Justice on Trial: the Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal.”
Mickey Melendez says there will be upcoming events to celebrate Dr. Fernández and the legacy of her work, along with remembrances of three original Young Lords female founders who all passed away this year: Denise Oliver-Vélez, Minerva Solla, and Connie Cruz.
Even while ill, Fernández kept working. González said that he last saw her in April at the Latinx Freedom Conference at the CUNY Graduate Center. “She insisted on participating in everything and continued to coordinate the conference even as she was battling her cancer,” he said. The project brought movement veterans, scholars, artists, and community leaders together to preserve oral histories and archives of Latinx freedom struggles across the country.
At the time of her death, Fernández was also working with Melendez and Lorenzo on a scripted miniseries about the Young Lords, intended to bring the organization’s story to broader audiences. Lorenzo said Fernández would have been essential as a consultant because of the historical knowledge she brought and because “she had such deep relationships with so many of the members and they trust each other so much.” Melendez said the goal was to create an exciting series that showed the momentum and urgency of the Young Lords’ organizing. “The intent of the series was to make it exciting, to end each episode with a cliffhanger so you come back, and things of that nature,” Melendez said. “So I’m going to continue that work as best as I possibly can to see this finished.”
Geovanny Fernández attests that his sister was a professor, organizer, activist, friend, daughter, and sibling—someone who “was too busy living to have left us instructions on what to do” now that she has passed. She carried forward her parents’ political ethic of generosity and expanded it into archives, classrooms, exhibitions, prison justice work, and intergenerational organizing. “She did a lot in 55 years,” he said.
Fernández’s family said in a statement: “Our family is taking time to grieve and make arrangements. Funeral and memorial service information will be shared as soon as it is available. Thank you for your prayers, love, and support during this incredibly difficult time. With love, The Fernandez Family
Dr. Johanna Fernández, the Dominican American historian, prison abolitionist, and movement scholar, died on July 30, 2026, after a years-long struggle with non-small cell lung cancer. She was 55.
Fernández’s life –– a mix of scholarship, activism, family, and friendship — was rooted, her brother Geovanny Fernández explained, in lessons learned from their parents, especially their father, Tirso Fernández.
Tirso Fernández was from the Dominican Republic, from a small place near the city of San Juan de la Maguana called Lavapiés. He and his wife, Minerva Fernández, who is from La Vega, were refugees of the 1965 Dominican Civil War. They raised Johanna and her brothers, Geovanny, Osvaldo, and Tirso Fernández Jr., in New York City, with a politics that Geovanny described as based on generosity. “I think the idea was to help people, particularly those who didn’t have a voice,” he said. Their father, he remembered, measured family visits back home partly by whether his children had helped others: “Did I give any money? How much money did I give?
“As for politics, my cousin said that the purpose of politics is to help others. Certainly, that was an ethos (helping others) of my sister, [that] she learned from her father, Tirso Fernandez.
A professor of history at Baruch College and the CUNY Graduate Center, Johanna Fernández was a leading scholar of the Young Lords, the Puerto Rican and Latinx radical organization whose New York chapter fought for health care, sanitation, breakfast programs, lead-poisoning testing, and community control. Her award-winning book, “The Young Lords: A Radical History,” was based on oral histories, archives, and recovered police surveillance files obtained through a Freedom of Information Law lawsuit she filed against the New York Police Department. Her suit helped uncover the Handschu files, more than one million NYPD surveillance files compiled between 1954 and 1972 on anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, civil rights rallies, early LGBTQ+ rights protests, the Black Panthers, the Young Lords, and the Nation of Islam. The NYPD had for decades claimed the files were lost.
Former Young Lord and veteran journalist Juan González told the AmNews Fernández’s book stands apart because of the scope and seriousness of her research. “There’s been about a dozen books on the Young Lords that have been published,” González said: “There’s even one in French by a French journalist, published in France several years ago. And there have been numerous memoirs and academic studies, and Johanna’s book is by far the best, the most complete and the most analytical, and one that best places the role and contributions of the Young Lords in the historical context of social change in the United States and of revolutionary movements. She really was, I guess, the only person who really distilled and summarized what was unique about the Lords compared to other organizations, other revolutionary social change organizations of that era.
“She really was not only the best analyst,” González added, “and I say this even though I had some disagreements with some of the stuff in her book. I didn’t agree with all of it, but I totally respect the devotion and the time she took to try to place the Lords in the proper historical context of that era. And she was very dogged in her research, digging up many documents that other people had not.”
“I think there are going to be some memorials happening,” Mickey Melendez, co-founder and former head of security for the New York Young Lords, said. “We don’t know the dates yet, and we don’t know if there’s going to be a viewing or not. The family’s going to follow up … But basically, as her brother said, you know, she was so busy living life that she left no instructions.”
The interviews and exchanges Johanna had with Young Lords’ founders while writing her book helped her build relationships with them. For the rest of her life, Fernández stayed close to Young Lords veterans, pushed to protect their archives, and insisted on bridging their work with the efforts of today’s organizers. The exhibition, ¡Presente! The Young Lords in New York, which she co-curated with Dr. Yasmín Ramírez, was on view at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, El Museo del Barrio, and Loisaida Inc. between July and December 2015. In later work, she created the Latinx Freedom Movement Archive and Exhibition Project, with historian Felipe Hinojosa, and it is currently on view at The Shed in Hudson Yards.
Filmmaker and producer Cionin Lorenzo said Fernández’s archives “need to really be protected,” calling the work “brave” and “brilliant.” She recalled watching visitors encounter the Latinx Freedom exhibition at The Shed and realizing the reach of Fernández’s labor. “It made me very emotional to see it,” Lorenzo said, “and I knew what it was about. I knew the background. We’ve talked about all these things so many times. But just seeing it there, at The Shed, where there are so many tourists, I was waiting for someone, so I had an hour to kill, and I really just wanted to sit there and watch people see the exhibition. And I was really blown away. People from all over the world, all different cultures, ages, languages, you know, whether they stopped for five minutes or stayed half an hour. You would hear their conversations, and they were smart. People would talk to each other. They would see something and be kind of blown away.
“Like, that’s the effect her work has. It doesn’t matter where you’re from; it’s a universal struggle, telling the story of people who love and want everyone to be equal, to be safe, and to live their freedom and their truth. And that resonates with people. I saw it in that one hour that I was standing by the Latinx Freedom.”
Fernández’s commitment to prison abolition led her to edit Writing on the Wall: Selected Prison Writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal, co-edit a special issue of Socialism and Democracy with Abu-Jamal on the roots of mass incarceration, and write and produce “Justice on Trial: the Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal.”
Mickey Melendez says there will be upcoming events to celebrate Dr. Fernández and the legacy of her work, along with remembrances of three original Young Lords female founders who all passed away this year: Denise Oliver-Vélez, Minerva Solla, and Connie Cruz.
Even while ill, Fernández kept working. González said that he last saw her in April at the Latinx Freedom Conference at the CUNY Graduate Center. “She insisted on participating in everything and continued to coordinate the conference even as she was battling her cancer,” he said. The project brought movement veterans, scholars, artists, and community leaders together to preserve oral histories and archives of Latinx freedom struggles across the country.
At the time of her death, Fernández was also working with Melendez and Lorenzo on a scripted miniseries about the Young Lords, intended to bring the organization’s story to broader audiences. Lorenzo said Fernández would have been essential as a consultant because of the historical knowledge she brought and because “she had such deep relationships with so many of the members and they trust each other so much.” Melendez said the goal was to create an exciting series that showed the momentum and urgency of the Young Lords’ organizing. “The intent of the series was to make it exciting, to end each episode with a cliffhanger so you come back, and things of that nature,” Melendez said. “So I’m going to continue that work as best as I possibly can to see this finished.”
Geovanny Fernández attests that his sister was a professor, organizer, activist, friend, daughter, and sibling—someone who “was too busy living to have left us instructions on what to do” now that she has passed. She carried forward her parents’ political ethic of generosity and expanded it into archives, classrooms, exhibitions, prison justice work, and intergenerational organizing. “She did a lot in 55 years,” he said.
Fernández’s family said in a statement: “Our family is taking time to grieve and make arrangements. Funeral and memorial service information will be shared as soon as it is available. Thank you for your prayers, love, and support during this incredibly difficult time. With love, The Fernandez Family
https://www.johannafernandez.info/about.”
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