José 'Cha Cha' Jiménez, human rights activist and former chair of Young Lords organization, dead at 76

José "Cha Cha" Jiménez, a human rights activist who co-founded the Rainbow Coalition and served as chairman of the Young Lords Organization, died Friday. He was 76.

Mr. Jiménez spent much of the late '60s and early '70s fighting gentrification in Lincoln Park, allying with other organizations in Chicago to uplift minority and lower-class communities, and rallying for an independent Puerto Rico. He died Friday.

His family came to Chicago during a large wave of Puerto Rican migration to the mainland around the time of Operation Bootstrap, and eventually settled in the Lincoln Park neighborhood.

At 21, Mr. Jiménez helped found the Young Lords gang in 1959 and ascended to the position of chairman in 1964, spending his tenure turning the group that had started as a gang into an organization for mutual aid and protection.

He later met Black Panthers chairman Fred Hampton in jail in 1968, where they discussed the divisions between Black and Puerto Rican Chicagoans, and the similar work their two groups had been doing. He also spent time reading Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Puerto Rican Independence Party member Pedro Albízu Campos while in solitary confinement.

“I figured this is what we need in the Puerto Rican community, militant like the Black Panther Party to address the police brutality and housing issues we were facing,” Jiménez told WBEZ in 2018. “We brought the movement to include other people in the community. We built a movement from a gang.”

Donning purple berets, the group organized several marches against police brutality in response to the killing of the Young Lords Organization's 20-year-old minister of defense, Manuel Ramos, who was unarmed when he was fatally shot by an off-duty police officer, claiming he acted in self-defense against a gun that was never found, on May 4, 1969. The group's minister of education, Ralph Rivera, was also shot in the head, but survived.

Many of the Young Lords Organization programs reflected what the Black Panthers had also seen success with: free meal events, free medical and dental clinics and a free child care center, all in the basement of Armitage Avenue Methodist Church at 834 W. Armitage Ave., which they had occupied for four days to protest Chicago Department of Building orders to stop for code violations.

The child care center allowed the group to start admitting more women, while also welcoming those from all racial backgrounds and members of the LGBTQ+ community.

The group interrupted Lincoln Park Conservation Association, which had been pushing to gentrify the area, and also confronted landlords and real estate brokers while proposing plans for low-income housing in the neighborhood to the Department of Urban Renewal — ultimately losing out to the Lincoln Park Conservation Association’s plans for middle-income housing. They also fought gentrification in other neighborhoods, allying with local organizations to do so.

By June 1969, Mr. Jiménez and Hampton, along with members of the Young Patriots — a group of Confederate-flag wielding, Black Panther button-wearing, low-income white residents in Uptown — formed the Rainbow Coalition to broaden the scope of their work through solidarity.

“It was a group of people fighting side by side in an alliance for change,” Jiménez told WBEZ in 2018. “But we were in conflict with [Mayor Richard J. Daley and city officials] because we lived in prime real estate areas.”

“It’s not as racial, it’s more economic. … [And] it’s not just a housing issue, they were taking away our voice. There was a lot of repression going on.”

A New York chapter of the Young Lords Organization was established in late 1969 and made national headlines with its demonstrations.

After avoiding police for 27 months and then serving a year in jail — and motivated by the December 1969 assassination of Hampton by the Chicago Police Department and FBI — Mr. Jiménez made a run for the 46th Ward office, securing almost 40% of the vote in his 1975 run.

He helped Harold Washington win the 1983 mayoral election before leaving Chicago.

"The Young Lords Organization turned political because we found out that just giving gifts wasn't going to help our people; we had to deal with the system that was messing them over," Jiménez said.

He also worked as a youth gang and addiction counselor in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he continued to be vocal about the fight against gentrification.

“We didn’t start this movement, and we didn’t finish it, but we definitely contributed to it and that’s our victory,” Jiménez told WBEZ in 2018. “COINTELPRO and organizations like that want to keep us disunited, so our first mission is to unite our people and go from there. ... Individuals can't make any change, you have to do it united."

He is survived by his sister and longtime caretaker Daisy Rodriguez, and his daughter Melissa.

Funeral services will be held 3 p.m. Jan. 16 at Pietryka Funeral Home, 5734 W. Diversey Ave., before he is returned to Puerto Rico to be buried near his mother.