I learned a lot about #MumiaAbuJamal from her. The #FreeMumiaMovement has lost one of its top leaders and #AfricanaStudies one of its top, award-winning scholars!
The panel in question is here:
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Two Ladies of the Young Lords—Denise Oliver-Velez and Joanna Fernandez
By Herb Boyd
The deaths of Denise Oliver-Velez (August 1, 1947-July 15, 2026) and Dr. Joanna Fernandez (December 2, 1970 -July 30, 2026) occurring fifteen days apart provides a double significance to the history of the Young Lords Party. Oliver-Velez was a founder of the Young Lords and Fernandez became one of its chief biographers. In a pamphlet on the Ideology of the Young Lords, Oliver-Velez, who was the party’s Minister of Economic Development, wrote “We are all fighting against an enemy, the Yankee and the Puerto Rican lombrices (earthworms). The major thing that holds us back in our fight to liberate Puerto Ricans and all oppressed people is a lack of unity. If we are not united, like a fist, we are weaker in our battle. In unity there is strength, and a nation divided is a weak nation.”
Fernandez touched on the same topic in her book The Young Lords: A Radical History (University of North Carolina Press, 2019) in her exposition of the party’s fight against imperialism. “Over the course of their brief yet productive life-span, the Young Lords won significant reforms and used local battles to expose the United States’ quiet imperial project in Puerto Rico, which became a colony of the United States in 1898. In just a few short years, the group grew from a little-known organization to the stuff of legend. In the process, their media-conscious urban guerrilla offensives, combined with the group’s multiethnic membership, redefined the character of protest, the color of politics, and the cadence of popular culture in the city” she wrote.
Among her comments about Denise, she notes that “Denise Oliver was one of several Young Lords who witnessed the fallout. In 1957, with the help of a white proxy, Oliver’s middle-class, black American parents purchased a home in Hollis, one of the predominantly white Queens neighborhoods to which children of color were bused in 1959. During her first day at Junior High School 59, Oliver remembers “getting off the bus, commotion going on, and a white kid with blood streaming down his face. There were fights going on in the yard. There were white students who had jumped on some black students, there were black students fighting back, there were [white] parents protesting the busing of kids into their neighborhood. The bus monitor rushed us into the building. You could feel the hostility immediately.”
Fernandez allocates considerable space for Denise’s stance against male chauvinism or “Machismo,” which is just one element of Denise’s determination to embrace “the revolution within the revolution.” This was, Fernandez further observes, “a deliberate part of her struggle to deconstruct and challenge the manifestations of power dynamics, racism, and sexism in everyday life among movement participants. The effort was also a trademark of the radical wing of the women’s movement, articulated in the slogan ‘The personal is political.’”
Both were dedicated writers and teachers, (Fernandez for many years a professor at Baruch College and Denise at SUNY New Paltz) and shortly before she joined the Young Lords, Denise “taught Black American and Puerto Rican history at East Harlem Prep, an East Harlem school launched by the RGS that offered an educational space to this new class of young people permanently expelled from the public school system. After having been expelled for her activism at Howard University, Oliver was startled by her success with what the school system perceived as “incorrigible students … a lot of kids in the community who weren’t in school at all. They were considered to be refuse, unteachable, unreachable; a lot of them were in gangs,” Fernandez wrote.
There isn’t time or space here to fully dissect the intersection of these two marvelously revolutionary activists, that will and should be done by comrades more informed of their lives. And it shouldn’t be ignored that both succumbed to cancer after relentlessly battling the disease. During appearances on “Dialolos” Intimedia.org, the two were separately interviewed last December. Dr. Fernandez expounded at length on the subject of fascism, and Denise, because of her illness, offered a brief discussion on the origins of the Young Lords that stemmed from the city’s reluctance to remove garbage.
https://www.johannafernandez.info/about
https://www.gc.cuny.edu/people/johanna-fernandez
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johanna_Fern%C3%A1ndez_(historian)
https://www.democracynow.org/2016/6/17/nypd_surveillance_unveiled_city_claims_to
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0872866750?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback
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From Julia Wright, in an email to the Free Mumia Listserv, August 2, 2026:
” 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, but she was also the political apple of his eye, his unfailing sister whose healing company had sustained him for decades. When he was informed 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 Philly DA 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 CUNY and Columbia were up and going for 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 a human colony.
After the panel, for the first time in my life, although I was almost eighty years old, I 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 other 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 ( 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!
Julia Wright
Drums in the Global Village 