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.
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).
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.”
“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.
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.”
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