Denise Oliver-Velez, who helped found the New York division of the leftist collective the Young Lords, championing women’s rights in the male-dominated group, and who later worked in radio, documentary film and academia, died on Wednesday at her home in Kingston, N.Y. She was 78.
The cause was complications of a brain tumor, said Devin McElderry, whom she considered a godson.
Ms. Oliver-Velez was an original member of the New York branch of the Young Lords, a group that began in Chicago as a Puerto Rican gang and turned into a pugnacious, anticapitalist collective that focused on issues related to Puerto Ricans and Black Americans.
The Young Lords became well known in New York for staging occupations of communal spaces. Most notably, its members took over Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx on July 14, 1970, to protest the hospital’s poor conditions and demand affordable health care.
“It was one of the dirtiest hospitals I have ever set foot in,” Ms. Oliver-Velez said in Emma Francis-Snyder’s 2021 documentary short “Takeover.” “You know the cart that they bring around that has the little cups with the pills? There’d be roaches in the cups.”
The 12-hour sit-in ended in an agreement that allowed the Young Lords to run community health initiatives at the hospital, such as a drug detoxification program, in exchange for leaving the building. Six years later, a new Lincoln Hospital was built near the old site.
Ms. Oliver-Velez rose through the ranks of the Young Lords to become minister of economic development, making her a rare woman in the top ranks of the organization. She remained outspoken regarding her struggles with the group’s male-dominated leadership.
“When the Young Lords started a year and a half ago, there were very few sisters,” she told The Times in 1970. “We had a hard time being heard at meetings, and most of the work we did was secretarial work.”
One of her most notable contributions to the group stemmed from an argument over the wording of its 13-point manifesto. One of its planks said “machismo must be revolutionary” and “not oppressive.”
“It was obviously written by a man,” she said years later in an interview with the website Black Women Radicals. “We were like, ‘That is an oxymoron.’”
Machismo will never be revolutionary, she added, punctuating the thought with an expletive.
She and other women in the group, including Iris Morales, forced a change so that it read: “We want equality for women. Down with machismo and male chauvinism.”
Denise Roberts Oliver was born in Brooklyn on Aug. 1, 1947. Her mother, Marjorie (Roberts) Oliver, was a teacher, and her father, George B. Oliver, was a former Tuskegee Airman and actor who became a professor of dramatic literature at Nassau Community College on Long Island.
She was raised in a milieu of Black activism, and her parents counted the singer and actor Paul Robeson among their acquaintances. “I don’t even understand what it is like to be from a family that isn’t political,” she told Black Women Radicals.
She initially enrolled at Hunter College in the Bronx, which had an almost entirely white student body. After meeting the civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, she transferred to historically Black Howard University in Washington. She also attended what is now the State University of New York at Old Westbury before joining the Young Lords.
As a contributor to Pa’lante (Spanish for “forward”), the Young Lords’s bilingual newspaper, she published the Young Lords’ Party Position Paper on Women, a manifesto she helped write calling for women’s bodily autonomy and liberation from the domestic sphere.
“Most of the publications out there on the left were male-dominated,” she later said. “It makes a difference when it is women writing.”
She also worked on the group’s platform on reproductive justice, which included the right to an abortion as well as the right of a woman to have as many children as she wanted.
Ms. Oliver-Velez left the Young Lords in 1971, when the group relocated to Puerto Rico. She then joined the Black Panthers, working for the group’s newspaper and traveling to the People’s Republic of the Congo, a newly established Marxist-Leninist state in Africa, with Kathleen Neal Cleaver, the wife of party leader Eldridge Cleaver.
Following her work with the Panthers, Ms. Oliver-Velez returned to Washington to serve as the inaugural program director for Pacifica Radio’s first minority-controlled radio station, WPFW.
She subsequently worked for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, managing its Minority and Women’s Training Program; served as executive director of the nonprofit Black Filmmaker Foundation; and wrote the short film “Color” (1983), which aired on public television and was directed by her then-husband Warrington Hudlin.
The film, about the discrimination faced by dark-skinned Black women within the African American community, was intended to provoke discomfort. Black people in attendance at a screening, Ms. Oliver-Velez told The Times, felt uneasy.
“They thought it might alienate the Black middle class, that it wasn’t a positive enough image,” she said.
She was heartened, she added, by feedback from dark-skinned women in India — and others in southern Italy, who said they felt treated with contempt by light-skinned northerners.
“Responses to the program,” Ms. Oliver-Velez said, “showed how a Black experience had meaning not just for Blacks but for all kinds of people who have been stigmatized by color.”
Her marriage to Mr. Hudlin ended in divorce. In 1997, she married Philip Velez, who survives her.
From 2002 to 2018, she was an adjunct professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at SUNY New Paltz. She also wrote for the left-wing blog The Daily Kos, built a devoted following on X and appeared in films exploring the politically charged era of her youth, including Questlove’s Oscar-winning documentary feature “Summer of Soul” (2021).
“There may not be a Young Lords right now,” she said in “Takeover,” “but guess what? A lot of us are not dead, and we’re communicating this to a young generation that’s going to carry that struggle forward.”
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