Alison Stewart: This is All Of It from WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. If you grew up in the area like I did, you may remember Felipe Luciano as a WNYC news anchor in the mid-'70s. It was a long road to that point, given that the first line of Luciano's candid new memoir is, "I didn't mean to kill him, but I certainly wanted him dead." The him refers to a man named Larry who attacked Luciano's brother in 1964. Luciano confronted the man, and as he writes, describing himself after that moment, "I was a skinny 5'7, 16-year-old Black Puerto Rican who belonged to the All City Chorus, who loved history and music, and who had just helped kill someone."

He went to prison where he learned and saw a lot. After being incarcerated while applying for a job, the employer noticed how smart he was and encouraged him to think about college. It took some coaxing, but he did. He emerged himself in poetry and activism, which he put into action when he co-founded the New York Chapter of the Young Lords. What started out as a street gang in Chicago, went on to become a civil rights group fighting for Latino empowerment, and transformation mirrored in his personal life.

He writes about this in his memoir, Flesh and Spirit: Confessions of a Young Lord. Felipe Luciano joins us today. Felipe, welcome to All Of It.

Felipe Luciano: Thank you very much, Alison. How are you?

Alison Stewart: I'm doing well, sir. How are you?

Felipe Luciano: I'm very well. Have we met before?

Alison Stewart: I think we have in the way back machine.

Felipe Luciano: I saw your face and I said, "I've seen this woman, I've seen her before." I just can't put it together. I can't put the two together, but in any case, I'm happy that you're there and I'm happy I'm here.

Alison Stewart: Thank you so much. Why did you want to write this memoir at this particular point in your life, sir?

Felipe Luciano: I had to get rid of the demons, Alison. They were legion. They were all over me. The past pulls you back into a vortex that sometimes is not only self-incriminating but also makes you impotent creatively. You can't move forward until you let the past go and I mean, cut it severely, cut it with the sharpest knife you can. I couldn't do that. It surrounded me. It permeated every core of my being. I had to write the book, put it all down on paper, just lay it out, and then move forward.

Alison Stewart: In the book, when you first introduce us to your teenage self, you write about Philip with a P-H instead of Felipe.

Felipe Luciano: P-H-L-I-P. Yes.

Alison Stewart: Why?

Felipe Luciano: Philip was the child who watched Disney every week. I knew all of the series. I knew Zoro. I knew Cisco and Poncho. I knew everything that Disney had done. I watched this stuff without any discretion. I loved it. It was my babysitter. It was my dream. It was everything to me. I didn't know that I was taking on values that were not necessarily values that were being fought out in the streets. Civil rights had no meaning to me until I went to jail.

When I went to jail, I realized that all of the stuff that I had been reading about in the newspapers was very real, Alison. People were being killed because they were Black. There was such a thing as injustice. I believed in meritocracy. I used to read the biographies of Patton and Eisenhower and Albert Schweitzer. Those are the people I grew up with. I didn't grow up with Martin. I didn't grow up with Malcolm. It was when I went to jail that I realized, "Wait a minute. Something is wrong." There was a complete confrontation with self. The psyche had to change, and it did.

Alison Stewart: In the memoir, you referenced two different neighborhoods you grew up in, Harlem and Canarsie, and you said you didn't choose Canarsie. You got exiled there.

Felipe Luciano: Yes.

Alison Stewart: How did your family end up living in Canarsie?

Felipe Luciano: Night Show, though they may not admit that today, had a policy that if you were on welfare and you were a single mother they would give you the more dangerous, the more brutal projects. Brownsville projects, Brookline Projects, Marcy Avenue projects. If you were a couple that they felt that was promising, they would put you in the Eden Wall projects, which are off in The Bronx. Eden Wall now is just as bad as the others but that was a nice place to be. They put you in white communities so that you had a chance at some chance of success.

That didn't happen with us. We were always put in the worst projects in the world. The only project that I remember that was pretty much violentless was the Johnson Projects on 112th Street between Third and Lexington, 165 East 112th Street, which is where I spent the first 10 years of my life and it was wonderful. I remember it being almost idyllic.

Alison Stewart: Oh, we've lost Felipe Luciano. He was on a phone line. Our phone line just disappeared. What we're going to do is we're going to take a quick break, and hopefully, after the break, we'll have Felipe Luciano back to continue discussing his memoir, Flesh and Spirit: Confessions of a Young Lord.

This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest this hour is Felipe Luciano. His new memoir is called Flesh and Spirit: Confessions of a Young Lord. Felipe, when you were in Canarsie, you joined a gang and you wrote in your memoir, "The bonds for this gang were born of a desperate need for protection and it didn't matter where you were born or what language you spoke in the house, Gullah or Spanish." What were the rules that most gang members lived by at this time? What was the code and why was it important?

Felipe Luciano: The code was that the love had to be translated into physical reality. You couldn't say, "You are my boy," and not jump in to help him when he's in danger. You couldn't say that you were a gang member and not stand up to other gangs. You had to eat in his house. You had to sleep in his bed. You had to love his mother.

I grew up with a Black and Puerto Rican unity that is unheard of today. I hear about Black and Puerto Rican unity today, but I'm talking about being so close to this guy that you would kill if you had to to defend him. That's the way I grew up. I miss those days. I know that we were antisocial. I know we did things that would not be considered good-boy stuff, but the gangs, in many ways, saved my life.

I was able to use the principles of the gang to keep the young lords alive. You love that guy. That guy is your boy. By the way, that also included women. We used to call them bebs, but you love your family. To this day, my kids are always surprised when someone calls me, "Felipe, I need your help." I leave everything and I go there immediately. It's a spirit inside that says, "That's my boy. That's my brother."

It didn't matter if you were from Beaufort, South Carolina, and spoke with a deep Geechee accent, or you were from Ponce, Puerto Rico. We have these bonds. I know, guys-- let me give you an example. Dapper Dan. Dapper Dan is an entrepreneur up in Harlem. Do you know him, Alison?

Alison Stewart: Oh, yes.

Felipe Luciano: He is the most incredible Black man. By the way, he dances Latin music better than me. He grew up in that period, and he knows how to mumble. I knew how to dance to Smokey & The Miracles. That's the kind of interconnected, the intersectionality of Black and Puerto Rican cultures that I believe in. I don't know if it exists today. I hope it does, but I don't see it manifested often on the streets.

We were family. When one member is attacked, it's a wrap. The Puerto Rican culture is so circle-ish. It demands that if one is hurt, all of you go down. Many brothers have told me, "I hate fighting you guys because once I hit this kid, and he may have started it, the whole family comes out." They scream from the rooftops. The third aunt of the guy that you're fighting comes out and she doesn't even know him. Latinos are like that. We believe in family. It's amazing. That's what I grew up in.

In the projects, it was like this. I spoke to my cousin who was part of this gang, [unintelligible 00:08:14], and I said, "Look Paul has been hurt." He said, "Don't worry about it. When do you want me there?" It was like that. Most of the guys I got busted with were all African American. There was no such thing as, "Well, I'm not going to go because he's Puerto Rican." Out of the question. We grew up with eating all of the food that Black folks ate. Black-eyed peas, what else? Stewed chicken and they ate pernil and rice and beans. To this day we talk about and laugh about how we grew up in each other's culture. It was a beautiful time to be alive.

Alison Stewart: It sounds like being part of this group was also really emotionally fortifying for you. Not just physically, not just protection, and you're going to take care of that one because that one took care of you, but that there's an emotional element. Is that right?

Felipe Luciano: Alison, it was my life. I grew up knowing that if I walked outside that door, I was not going to be killed. I grew up feeling the embrace of big, big brothers. Remember, they were growing them big in '66. In '64. I knew some South Carolina brothers that were like in-- I knew one guy with forearms that was so thick, I told him, "How did you get your forearms this big? Do you lift weights?" He said, "No, man. I just used to lift hay and throw it onto the wagon."

I grew up with a love for Black people that is beyond description. It's hard to describe it because it's internal, it's spiritual. By the same token, there are many, many Black people who grew up with Puerto Ricans that speak with Puerto Rican accents. You say, "How is it possible that this Blue-Black brother speaks with a Puerto Rican accent?" That's the kind of intimacy that I demand of any culture, of any friendship.

Alison Stewart: My guest, Felipe Luciano, the name of his memoir is Flesh and Spirit: Confessions of a Young Lord. I wanted to be clear about how and the circumstances of why you ended up in prison. Your brother was attacked by a rival gang member, a man named Larry. You confronted him alongside with your friends and cousin, and it was a fight. Larry was fatally stabbed. You didn't stab him, but you saw who did, hid the weapon. That's what landed you in trouble. What intention did you have? Do you remember back in the moment when first, you and your peeps went out and confronted Larry?

Felipe Luciano: Alison, I'm going to say this as slowly and as unemotional as I can, because I always get emotional when I talk about this.

Alison Stewart: That's okay.

Felipe Luciano: I knew he was going to die. I knew that these were his last days, his last breath because he had violated the code that was inviable. You do not hurt someone who has nothing to do with your failure. They went down, he and his gang had gone down the night before and had beaten up on some Puerto Ricans. They came back into the party that my brother was in, and they beat him up. They beat him all four or five blocks. In fact, as he was about to stab him, his hand was in a vertical, stance, then my mother came on the scene and said, please and he stopped, thank God. I knew that my brother almost was gone.

I knew at that point he was going to die. I had no problems with it. That was the code of the streets. You play, you pay, you don't, you die. I said, "He has to go." It was very clear to me. I didn't understand how much time I would do. I just knew that he had to go. I don't understand that people-- Puerto Ricans on a certain level are very primal. They're very tribal. There are some Black folk like this too. It's the law of the streets. No one's going to protect you. The cops are not going to protect you. No DA is going to, you don't have the money to get a high-priced lawyer, you have to take this person out. You don't go to the cops. You don't say, "Look, my brother was hit and I want this guy taken down." You already know that's futile. You've got to take the law into your own hands because if not, your family will be the marks, the victims for the rest of their lives. My mother had to move eventually.

Alison Stewart: Right. When you got--

Felipe Luciano: That's where it was at.

Alison Stewart: Yes. When you got out of prison, this is the part that was, I thought, really touching in the memoir is that you apply for a job and this person can tell you're smart and tests you about language and words, and you keep passing the tests.

Felipe Luciano: Ms. Francis.

Alison Stewart: You keep passing the tests. Did you believe in yourself the way she believed in you?

Felipe Luciano: Oh, hell no. Alison, that's why I went to jail. I didn't know that I was smart. My mother didn't tell me I was smart. She said, "You're kind of bright," but I didn't know I was brilliant. If you can use that word. My teachers would tell me, but I didn't know. I had a lot of insecurity about my intelligence. Finally, when I went to this person, Ms. Francis, I had to do a typing test. She said I passed it. She said, "Do you know the meaning of these words?" Of course, I was at Anglo, so I knew all of the words that I was typing. Then she gave me another test. I think it was an IQ test. She ran out of the room, "Do you know what you've done? Do you know what you've done?"

At which point my heart sank. I said, "Man, I blew this." She said, "You passed. You don't deserve to be just picking up garbage." Because I wanted a garbage job. She said, "What you need to do is go to school." Now my heart sank because I didn't think I deserved more than a garbage job. Sure enough, she got me into Queens College. I met a guy named Franz Mulholland, Mr. Mulholland, in the SEEK program, Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge. I began in Queens College. For me, that was the beginning of my intellectual foray into literature, into politics, into science, into physics, into Jewish relations, into Black culture. The whole thing began to make sense once I was in Queens College. I took political science courses. I took sociology courses. Of course, I wrote.

Under the direction of a woman named Joy Meinhardt who I love very dearly, I began to write, and that's how it started. Queens College for me, was like going into Nirvana. It was like walking into heaven. It was golden. For once I could sit down with someone and discuss something intellectual without someone coming up to me and saying, "Oh, you just trying to be White man. You're just trying to be a White man." Nothing like that. I could discuss everything. Sex, criminology, zoology, physio-- I could discuss these things without being seen as odd.

Alison Stewart: What would you say to a young person, a Brown or Black person today who's like, "You know what? No man. College, that's a White thing. It's not for me. I'm not doing it. No interest?"

Felipe Luciano: I have two reactions. You have to look at the person and immediately figure out what their souls are and where their souls are. If it is a mild person who has been beaten down by his mother, father, or the environment, you have to hold them by the shoulders, shake them violently, and say, "Sit down. I want to talk to you about something." Begin to imbue them with platitudes. You have to tell them how beautiful they are. You have to tell them they are capable, that they are capable of great things. You have to imbue them with a strength that they've never had before. No one tells people, "You are brilliant. You're beautiful." I don't care if you're fat. I don't care if you're light-skinned. I don't care if you almost look white as a Black person or black as a Black person.

You have to tell them, and you have to touch them. I touch their nappy hair. I kiss them on the cheek. I tell them, "You are beautiful and you can do this, and I'll be here for you." On the other hand, if you find somebody who's very tough on the outside, but you know has a tender side inside, you have to sit with them calmly and just begin to talk about your own fears. Talk about how scared you were of going into a white citadel with no preparation. I thought that the high school education that I had would suffice. It would not. I got my GED in jail. I didn't know that I could handle topics as complex and as obtuse as aesthetics in-- I got an A+ in aesthetics. Go figure. I had a guy named John McDermott who was wonderful in Queens College.

I realized that I had an inclination and a predilection for philosophy. I had been raised on the Old Testament, so I knew all of this esoteric stuff. I didn't know that. You have to figure out an individual program for that particular person and then carry through because they're going to be calling you all the time. They're going to be saying, "Look, I just got screamed at by my mother. I was almost attacked by my stepfather or my uncle." Understand that violation is the middle word in uptown. You have to buoy them up, fill them not with air, but with substance and most of them can do it.

Alison Stewart: Fine. Just meet them where they are and then go forward from there.

Felipe Luciano: That's right, where they are. Have them also step out of their communities. We get isolated. Do you know a lot of people in Brooklyn have never been to Manhattan? They call it the city, Alison, the city as if it's some nirvana. "Oh, I'm going to the city." What are you talking about? This is the city. If I had my druthers, I'd take all of that money that we're spending on education and make sure that each one of these kids, Black, Puerto Rican, Asian, poor, White, whatever, it goes into Montana, Wyoming, goes into places like Kansas. Get to know this country. You can't be an American if you don't know this country. I have seen these places. I've seen the wheat fields of Illinois, the wheat fields of Nevada. I've seen the strawberry fields of California. We have a beautiful country. We don't know it.

Now, our politics are completely awry. We have humans who mess it up, but this country, physically, it's gorgeous. How do you get people to say-- I met a guy, a tobacco farmer when I did a speech in Iowa, I'm sorry. I met a tobacco farmer who sat with me. We were having a drink, and I could see he had a Trump sign on. I began a small conversation with him, and he looked at me, and I can't explain to you the eyes that he gave me. It was like, "Oh my God, you know me?" I was talking to about how much yield does he get per acre? I'm interested in farming. I love farmers. He [unintelligible 00:17:58] I get about [unintelligible 00:17:59] and he gave me the number.

I said, "That's interesting. Do you use pesticides? What do you use?" We began to talk. I talked to him about Cuba and how Cuba has to work out their yield per acre. He looked at me, and he said, "Son, do you know all of this?" I said, "Yes, I do. I'm interested in it and I'm a city boy." He gave me his hand. I can't believe it, it's the strongest grip I've ever had. He said, "Whenever you are in this part of town, you come see me." Now, this guy's going to vote for Trump, but he's going to love me and he's going to like me, and I'm going to love him and like him. It was a wonderful experience. We got a country that we need to know. We need to know it intimately. We need to know its innards. We need to know why we love this country.

We need to begin to talk about progress and benevolence, compassion and love. That's what we need to do. That doesn't mean we sit there passively and take what we're being given. We need to start fighting for this country. We need to fight it in a way that provides a pathway to greatness. This country is great. We've forgotten how great we are. I'm not talking about Trump great. I'm talking about this is the country that made the Peace Corps. This is the country that liberated Europe from the Nazism. We got to be careful it doesn't happen again.

Alison Stewart: We have a caller who wants to know how you formed the Young Lords. What brought you together? I think that's what they really want to know. The early days of the Young Lords.

Felipe Luciano: I was working with the East Wind. We had a loft. The last poets who are the godfathers of rap, by the way. We were doing political stuff that would've been-- how can we put it? Would've been stigmatized today. We were doing poetic stuff that was very militant. I would also give lectures on Black culture. Some Puerto Ricans kept on coming to the lectures. I was speaking on Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the Nietzsche treatise, and in came five Puerto Ricans, and they stayed there for a few. I wondered, "What are they doing here? I never saw Puerto Ricans in my group." One of them was a guy named Mickey Melendez. It was Mickey Melendez, David Paris, Denise Oliver, and Robert Ortiz they came, and they said, "We would like you to join--" After one of the lectures, I was sweating. "We'd like you to join our group called, The Sociedad De Albizu Campos." Albizu Campos is the Malcom X of Puerto Rico. I said, "Okay, but I don't believe you guys are ready for struggle," because I was very much into that at that time. They said, "Give us a chance." I said, "I can't give you a chance. I'm putting my life on the line." It started with that. Some students who-- they were all from the University of Old Westbury which I had never heard of.

With those few, we started a study group. From the study group, we went into activism. We started sweeping up the streets, we had some consultations with the Sanitation Department, and then after that, we decided to become full-time activists, full-time revolutionaries. We didn't know what we were getting ourselves into. Had we known, we probably would have backed off. We were what? 16, 17. I had just come out of jail. It was '66. I was 18.

I didn't know what was going on, but sure enough, we moved in, we started working, and when we saw the repression, when we saw what happened to us simply because we wanted to clean the streets, we knew were on the right track. That group, that core group became the Young Lords Organization. We had gone to Chicago, there was a guy named Cha-Cha Jimenez who started a group there, mentored by Fred Hampton, by the way, who was a brilliant Black revolutionary of the Black Panthers. He said, "Why don't you guys start becoming political? Rather than fighting each other in gang warfare, why don't you start a political group?" He did.

Cha-Cha Jimenez started that group. We heard about him, we went to Chicago. I didn't go, the others went, and they got a charter from him. They came to New York and said, "We're going to be the Young Lords Organization." I said, "Who are they?" We started talking, we found that we loved their style, we loved their commitment, we loved their substance, and we became the Young Lords Organization of New York and began to make history in New York, particularly, around the issue of health.

Alison Stewart: Some people who know them, may know the documentary, Takeover.

Felipe Luciano: Yes. That was Lincoln Hospital.

Alison Stewart: Yes. Is that the thing you're the most proud of in terms of your time with Young Lords?

Felipe Luciano: You know what I'm most proud of, Alison? I'm most proud not of the individual offenses that we took, I'm most proud that we stood up to a nation-state that didn't see us as human beings. I'm most proud that we stood there. We were the first Puerto Rican organization to stand up as men and women and say, "You are not going to call us peons, you're not going to treat us like Cisco and Puncho, you're not going to treat us like cute Cesar Romeros, we are not that. We are Black, we are Brown, we are White, we are Baige, we're Puerto Ricans. We were the first tier and we're going to make sure that you know who we are. Our island is a colony, you know it, we know it, we want our Island free."

No one had ever said that in an organized way in the United States. We were the first ones to do it. This is not to say it wasn't being done. Albizu Campo had done this in 1950. Independence was a strain within the political spectrum of the island of Puerto Rico that had been there for years, but it had never really taken root in America. We decided to do that in the United States. We fought hard, we got our bones broken, but we did it.

To this day, I'm very proud. I'm not so much proud of the individual-- I'm proud that we have breakfast programs all over New York. We started a breakfast program in a church we took over. We're happy about that. They now have lunch and dinner and everything else. We're proud that we were the initiators of a new Lincoln hospital which is 149th Street off Grand Concourse. I'm proud of that, but I'm mostly proud that this is the first time an organized group, a collective group through concerted effort were able to achieve justice in this country for Puerto Ricans and for Latinos.

Alison Stewart: You're such an intense fellow. What do you do to relax?

Felipe Luciano: You know something, I was just telling my friend, it's hard for me to relax, Alison. I'm so emotional. These days, at my age, I cry at the drop of a hat. The reason I wrote the book is I had to get all of these images out of my mind. There's a new reality going on. It has to do with AI, it has to do with these computer images, the iPhone. Everyone is reading these little, what do they call them? Blurbs. No one is reading, Alison. No one is reading the Federalist Papers. No one is reading John Brown. No one is reading the Bacon Rebellion.

No one is reading what this country stood for. It is not what you think it is. This is an incredibly diverse and complicated country. The first people who came here saw Native Americans who are my forebearers because 90% of all Black Americans have Native American blood in them. I don't care how you look at it. I don't care if you think you're that-- you have Native American blood in you. They came here, took the land, and refused to listen to the Native Americans. We would not have-

Alison Stewart: Felipe, I'm going to interrupt you for a second because this is just proving my point. I asked you how you relaxed. [laughs]

Felipe Luciano: What I do [crosstalk]

Alison Stewart: I'm just playing with you.

Felipe Luciano: You know what I do, Alison?

Alison Stewart: I'm playing with you.

Felipe Luciano: I watch a movie. I listen to music. That's what I do.

Alison Stewart: Love it.

Felipe Luciano: I play with my grandchildren.

Alison Stewart: That's even better. Name of the memoir, Flesh and Spirit: Confessions of a Young Lord. My guest has been Felipe Luciano. It is a pleasure to talk to you, sir.

Felipe Luciano: Thank you, ma'am. Thank you for having me. I think you're Native American too.

Alison Stewart: Yes, that's what the old folks say. [chuckles] There's more All Of It on the way. I'll meet you right back here after the news.

 

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