Afro-Latinos, intersectionality, and the Civil Rights Movement

By Burju Perez

Afro-Latinos, intersectionality, and the Civil Rights Movement

When we talk about the Civil Rights Movement, we don’t often discuss how there have been Afro-Latinos who have fought at a marginalized intersection challenging the Black/white binary of American race relations while advocating for justice. Afro-Latinos are often erased in the media and in the telling of history. People like Arturo Schomburg, Julia de Burgos, and Felipe Luciano made their mark on the Civil Rights Movement by utilizing cultural expression as political resistance while mobilizing communities. Their collective work forced America to confront the intersectional nature of racism, colonialism, and poverty, permanently broadening the scope of what the Civil Rights Movement achieved.

An early contributor to the movement was Arturo Schomburg (1874- 1938), an Afro-Puerto Rican historian and bibliophile from New York who himself identified as Black. He had a teacher tell him that Black people didn’t have a history worth telling. Disillusioned, Arturo dedicated his life to accumulating evidence of African global achievement. In his seminal essay, “The Negro Digs Up His Past” (1925), Artuto countered historical distortions arguing that centries of slavery and eurocentric narratives created a false history that erased Black peoples contributions, cultures, and achievements. He also emphasized the need to use primary sources to write an accurate “first true” Black history, a concept he called “vindicating evidence”. Arturo’s archival activism, through which he collected over 10,000 documents, books, and artifacts, was an act of profound civil rights resistance. By recovering and validating the obscured history of the African diaspora, he equipped future generations with the knowledge necessary for self determination and provided an undeniable refutation of racist scholarship. His collection, eventually acquired by the New York Public Library, became the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, an institution that remains vital to American academia and Black studies today.

Julia de Burgos (1914-1953) offered a cultural and feminist front in the struggle. An Afro-Puerto Rican poet, journalist, and teacher, Julia channeled her activism into literature using piercing verse to critique colonialism, gender inequality, and class exploitation. Living between Puerto Rico and New York, she served as the General Secretary of the Daughters of Freedom, the women’s branch of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party. Her famous poem, “A Julia de Burgos” (To Julia de Burgos), is a feminist manifesto that confronts the subjugated identity imposed by society, asserting autonomy over her life and art. Her poetry, which often lamented the violence inflicted on enslaved people following events like the Ponce massacre, served as a powerful mobilization tool. Julia’s fusion of cultural pride with anti-imperialist politics inspired the Nuyorican movement of the 1960s and 70s, a movement where artists of all kinds used their art to express what it meant to be a Puerto Rican, New Yorker. She fought for liberation with a weapon of words showing the world that the fight for Puerto Rican rights in America was fundamentally tied to racial, gender, and economic liberation.

Felipe Luciano (b. 1947) helped organize a revolutionary group modeled after the Black Panthers, dedicated to the immediate needs of marginalized communities, the Young Lords Party (YLP). He was a co-founder and chairman of the New York chapter. The YLP specialized in highly visible, non-violent direct action, or “offensives”, to demand social services for East Harlem. The Garbage Offensive involved cleaning up neglected community streets, then dumping the collected trash in front of City Hall to protest sanitation inequality. The YLP also executed the Church Offensive, a transformative 11 day takeover of the First Spanish Methodist Church in 1969. Renaming the church “The People’s Church”, they offered life saving services such as a health clinic, free breakfast, clothing drives, and a day care program. They also organized the takeover of Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx which led to the creation of a successful detox program and better patient treatment. Through the Young Lords Party’s militant direct action, Felipe translated the rhetoric of self pride into tangible social services forcing New York City to acknowledge and address systemic neglect in Puerto Rican and Black neighborhoods. Felipe was also a journalist, news reporter, politician, and a poet. Through his poetry he explicitly challenged Puerto Ricans to embrace their Blackness and recognize their shared struggle with Black Americans.

The contributions of Arturo Schomburg, Julia de Burgos, and Felipe Luciano represent a powerful legacy that fundamentally altered the fabric of American civil rights. Arturo provided necessary historical memory, allowing marginalized groups to fight with intellectual authority. Julia used cultural expression to champion an intersectional fight against multiple layers of oppression. Felipe established a militant, community based political framework that secured vital services for the urban poor. Their lives illustrate that the fight for civil rights in America was never solely a national or Black and white issue, but a profound transnational movement committed to justice for all people of the African diaspora, regardless of the colonial power that shaped their ethnic identity.  

Written by Tamara Rose

Sources:

• The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States- Miriam Jimenez Roman

• MasterClass- Arturo Alfonso Schomburg: A Guide to the Historian's Life

• Felipe Luciano and the Power in Words- U.S. National Park Service

• Wikipedia contributors. "Arturo Alfonso Schomburg." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia

• Wikipedia contributors. "Felipe Luciano." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia