Denise Oliver-Vélez, Pioneering Young Lord & Black Panther, Dies at 78

Lifelong activist, organizer and educator Denise Oliver-Vélez has died at the age of 78. She was a central figure in the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s and was the first woman elected to the Young Lords Central Committee, a radical Puerto Rican human rights group modeled on the Black Panther Party, which Oliver-Vélez was also a member of. She later became the first Black female program director in public radio and taught at SUNY New Paltz.

As a founding member of the Young Lords, Democracy Now!‘s Juan González worked alongside Oliver-Vélez. “She helped develop many of [the Young Lords’] Serve the People programs and helped to shape and write some of the key literature we produced back then,” says González, adding that “Denise was never afraid to speak her mind, to challenge authority and to tell her comrades what they needed to hear — not what they wanted to hear — and she always did it with love and kindness.”