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January 10, 2019

Puerto Rican Human Rights Activist Luis Garden Acosta Dies
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And Luis Garden Acosta, the founder and president for more than 35 years
of the nationally known El Puente youth and community leadership program
in Brooklyn, and long regarded as one of New York City's foremost human
rights and Latino community activists, died Tuesday night following a
long illness. He was 72. A former seminarian who had been active in the
Catholic antiwar movement in Brooklyn, Garden Acosta joined the Young
Lords Party in 1970 and later founded that group's Massachusetts chapter
while he was still a student at Harvard Medical School. In 2009, Garden
Acosta told Democracy Now! about his participation in the Young Lords'
takeover of the First Spanish Methodist Church in East Harlem in late
1969, which the group used to house free breakfast and clothing
programs, health services, a daycare center, a liberation school and
community dinners. The occupation ended in January 1970, when police
raided the church, arresting 105 members of the Young Lords.

Luis Garden Acosta: "Here I am, very much involved in Catholic Social
Action. I am a former seminarian for the Catholic priesthood, a former
monk. And so, the question of liberation theology was very much a part
of my life, and my whole struggle was against this war in Vietnam. But
at the same time, as I said, there were many missing issues that weren't
connecting, I thought. And then I heard that young people, who were
trying to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, deal with the imprisoned,
who were actually trying to perform the Christian mandate of what we
call the Corporal Works of Mercy, had been bloodied in a church by
police officers who had come in. That is an unprecedented thing. It sent
chills up my spine. In a church! A sacred space. So I immediately, the
next Sunday, went to investigate and be part of it."

Luis Garden Acosta went on to pioneer successful nonviolent direct
action campaigns against segregated public schools and against
environmental racism in New York City. In his later years, together with
his wife Frances Lucerna, Garden Acosta created an alternative public
high school geared toward human rights activism, the El Puente Academy
for Peace and Justice.


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