Posted on 07/29/2014 9:48:16 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
A Puerto Rican community group received a special honor in East Harlem this past weekend.
The corner of 111th Street and Lexington Avenue has been renamed "Young Lords Way."
Young Lords was founded in the 1960s to organize and educate young Latinos.
City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito and Congressman Charlie Rangel say the group is often misunderstood which made it difficult to get the corner renamed.
The Speaker was born in Puerto Rico and lives currently lives in East Harlem.
"The Young Lords name was in to be voted on, Mayor Bloomberg threatened to veto all of the street namings that were attached to it," Mark-Viverito said.
"And so those people who did not have the courage to stand with the Black Panthers, to stand with the Young Lords, today they can come out," Rangel said.
"As long as their name is around somebody's gonna ask questions, and our kids, our youth, have to be told about our past," said one ceremony attendee.
Saturday was the 45th Anniversary of the founding of the activist organization.
Not MS-13?
High time we gave Puerto Rico back to Spain and Manhattan back to Holland.
Meanwhile, AK-47’s are illegal in NYC. Talk about irony... ;)
Hell, they should've named it for the Sharks... at least they could dance.
I can’t wait for Latin Kings Avenue and MS-13th Street.
Street Gang Street.
“It’s not a gang, it’s a club.”
We would have to take Suriname back from the Dutch then, because that was part of the deal.
Even Old New York was once New Amsterdam.
“We would have to take Suriname back from the Dutch then, because that was part of the deal.”
I didn’t know that; how did we end up with territory on the South American mainland? I know we bought the US Virgin Islands from Denmark (how did they get that?); I have an old coin that reads “Dansk Vestindies”.
As you know, New York predates the USA as such, so we, as part of the British Empire then, had the territory next to British Guyana that is now called Suriname (instead of Dutch Guyana as it was, I think, at one time). New Amsterdam became New York, but not without it becoming New Amsterdam again, briefly. Part of the deal to make the Dutch a little happier to accept this was to give them what’s now Suriname in exchange for not just New Amsterdam, but the whole of New Netherlands, which extended up the Hudson River, and included the former New Sweden.
There was a lot going on in the region that I never learned at school, just picked up along the way from reading. Sweden’s colors are still in the Delaware flag because of their former colony. The Dutch had tried to colonize what’s now Brazil, in competition with the Portuguese and French. Brazil itself is named after an Irish legend that Catholic exiles from there taught the Portuguese. And there used to be a Scottish colony on the east coast of Nicaragua, short-lived, and predating the union of crowns.
Interesting; I know Swedes had settled part of southwestern Jersey (we have a Swedesboro there today), and the Dutch were the first European settlers in northeastern NJ. The Dutch lost their colony when the Brits took it (Wall Street is named so because that was one of the walls of the original Dutch fort). I know Florida and Alabama have Spain’s old flag in the background, and Hawaii has the Union Jack in one corner.
Thanks for the history; interesting stuff. I see some neat things on coins in my collection.
Yeah, there’s much more to it than we were taught in school. I have to correct myself above though - the Scottish colony I was thinking of was actually more in Panama, and was after the union of crowns.
I thought that about Hawaii too, but when I was trying to find out more, I didn’t get further than ‘they just liked the design’. Apparently they were never a British colony though - maybe they were hedging their bets in dealings with us Americans by putting the Union Jack on their flag.
I assumed that Cook may have been an original discoverer of Hawaii (on his way further south).
Could you imagine a Scot’s complexion in Panama?
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