RootsAction mourns the passing of activist/academic Johanna Fernandez, with whom we collaborated.
A pioneering and passionate scholar and activist, she fueled pride in Latino history with her definitive book on the Young Lords and is remembered for bringing scholarship into public life.
The CUNY Graduate Center community is deeply saddened by the loss of Professor Johanna Fernández, a groundbreaking historian and activist who transformed the understanding of Latino history through her scholarship on the Young Lords, the largely Puerto Rican radical group of the 1970s. She died on July 30. She was 55.
The widely reported cause was non-small cell lung cancer, which she had battled for years.
Fernández achieved widespread acclaim for her book The Young Lords: A Radical History(2019), considered a definitive history of the New York activists whose guerrilla tactics in the early 1970s drew attention to the city’s racist policies and practices and helped spur reforms.
The work was the culmination of years of dogged research, including a decade-long request under New York’s Freedom of Information Law and a subsequent court battle that yielded the release of over 1 million surveillance files compiled by the New York Police Department between 1954 and 1972.
“Professor Fernández embodied the mission of conducting history for the public good,” Professor Mark Rice (GC/Baruch, History), chair of the Baruch College History Department, wrote in a tribute.
He noted her efforts to declassify and publish previously inaccessible police archives and to establish an archive on mass incarceration at Brown University.
“She organized countless marches and meetings to advance civil rights and engaged people in the study of history through radio programs, editorials, and public events,” he added. “In doing so, Professor Fernández never shied from holding power to account in pursuit of the truth.”
The Young Lords: A Radical History by Johanna Fernández In a review for TheNation, writer Ed Morales described The Young Lords as “an exhaustive and enlightening study” of the activist group and said it made “the case for their influence as profound thinkers as well as highly capable street activists.”
Led by poor and working-class Puerto Rican youth and modeled on the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords occupied a hospital, blocked traffic with uncollected garbage, took over a church, tested children for lead poisoning, defended prisoners, fought the military police, and fed breakfast to poor children. Media-savvy, they won the sympathies of the press and large swaths of the public.
Their confrontational tactics prompted lasting change, including improved garbage pickup, a ban on lead paint in homes, and the construction of a hospital in the South Bronx. Their visibility also helped fuel Puerto Rican pride.
“The Young Lords gave Puerto Ricans a kind of coming-out party in the city,” Fernández toldThe New York Times.
The book earned several scholarly awards, including the prestigious Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians.
In conjunction with the book, Fernández directed and co-curated ¡Presente! The Young Lords in New York, an exhibition in three New York museums cited by The New York Times as one of the Top 10, Best in Art in 2015.
She maintained close ties to the Young Lords’ founders and continued to showcase the group’s work and impact, even while ill with cancer. With historian Felipe Hinojosa, she created the Latinx Freedom Movement Archive and Exhibition Project, an initiative timed to coincide with America’s 250th anniversary and now on view at The Shed in Hudson Yards.
The historians marked the launch of the project with the Latinx Freedom Movement Conference held at the Graduate Center in April.
“Most Americans — even many historians — do not know the historical origins of Latinos in the United States or the depth of their contributions to the unfinished project of American democracy,” Fernández said in an announcement of the conference. “From the 1848 annexation of Mexican territory to the 1898 U.S. colonization of Puerto Rico — from student walkouts and labor organizing to bilingual education victories — Latino communities have long fought to expand democratic rights and the meaning of freedom for all.”
Fernández grew up in the Bronx, one of four children, and the only daughter, of Tirso and Minerva Fernández, both refugees of the 1965 Dominican Civil War. Raised by Spanish-speaking parents, Fernández didn’t learn English until she started school. She was relegated to bilingual classes, a stigmatizing experience, she recalled in an interview published by the Barnard Center for Research on Women.
That shame, she said, made her determined to master English and led her to study literature at Brown, where she earned a B.A. in literature and American civilization.
She first learned about the Young Lords from a Latino studies professor at Brown. “I was shocked to learn that these very young people had a structural analysis of inequality,” she recalled.
At Columbia University, where she earned a Ph.D. in history, she wrote a master’s thesis on the group. Her adviser, Manning Marable, encouraged her to write the Young Lords’ history.
As she delved deeper into the research, though, she realized writing alone wasn’t enough.
“I felt a responsibility to amplify the Young Lords’ story in the public sphere in part because of pressure from the Young Lords to not just take the oral histories I’d conducted with them and do what academics do, write their books, and get all the acclaim,” Fernández told the Barnard interviewer.
“In subtle and not so subtle ways, they tested me, or perhaps they were organizing me,” she said. She took up their challenge.
A prison abolitionist, Fernández also collaborated with and wrote about the imprisoned radio journalist and veteran Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal. She edited Writing on the Wall Selected Prison Writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal (2015) and wrote and produced the 2010 film Justice on Trial: The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. She and Abu-Jamal co-edited a special issue of the journal Socialism and Democracy, “The Roots of Mass Incarceration in the US: Locking Up Black Dissidents and Punishing the Poor.”
At Baruch, where she joined the faculty in 2007, Fernández taught courses on the Civil Rights Movement, Black and Latino studies, and the history of incarceration in the U.S. She was jointly appointed to the Graduate Center faculty in 2022.
She introduced a talk by journalist and Young Lords' co-founder Juan González at the Graduate Center in December 2022.
“The news of Johanna Fernández’s passing is gut-wrenching,” Distinguished Professor Jeanne Theoharis (GC/Brooklyn College, History) wrote in an email. “It is hard to imagine a world without her steadfast voice. I had the blessing of her friendship and comradeship for more than two decades. One of the ways she continually inspired me was her belief in action — it didn’t have to be perfect, we just had to try.”
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