Teens Dragged A Bunch Of Trash Into The Street, And Then Authorities Learned Their Ulterior Motive

Life was hard in East Harlem, the New York City neighborhood that many Puerto Ricans called home. Riddled with crime and poverty, one of the largest problems faced by East Harlem was that it had been entirely neglected by the local government. Matters appeared to be getting worse when local youths began sweeping piles of garbage into busy intersections — but they were actually making a larger point.

Over 50 percent more densely populated than other areas in Manhattan, East Harlem also had more condemned housing units than anywhere else in the city. As a result, rat-infested dumping grounds emerged throughout the neighborhood, filled with piles of animal carcasses to furniture, appliances, and other types of garbage. The question remained — why hadn't the local government done anything about it?

Well, one group wasn't willing to abandon these people. Formed in 1960, the Young Lords started out as a street gang in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago. Inspired by other social justice initiatives, the group's founder, Jose Cha Cha Jimenez, restyled the group as a national civil and human rights movement. Little did he know how influential his group would become on the streets of New York City, though things would get worse before they got better.

As the Young Lords intensified their advocacy for Chicago's Latino population, they formed new chapters in Puerto Rican communities across the East Coast, including the densely populated New York City. Members in the Big Apple took it upon themselves to uplift their struggling community — causing mass upheaval in the process.

The New York City chapter of the Young Lords was largely made up of college students whose families moved to America after World War II. Many of them had spent their childhoods as translators for their parents, dealing with schools, welfare offices, and other forms of bureaucracy. Naturally, many of these kids became talented negotiators and organizers — skills that the Young Lords desperately needed.

In order to determine how they should go about their fight for social justice, the New York City branch looked to the original Chicago chapter for inspiration. Fortunately for them, the New Yorkers had plenty to go on, especially considering the movement's actions from the year 1968 onwards.

The 1968 Democratic Convention was a turning point in U.S. politics. As the Democratic Party went about finding its replacement for incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson, demonstrations erupted in the Grant Park and Lincoln Park neighborhoods of Chicago, particularly in response to the Vietnam War. This act saw the Young Lords join with others to form a strong resistance movement that would take things to the next level.

After leading a few more protests, the Young Lords' national headquarters pulled off its most daring stunt — seizing control of the Chicago Department of Urban Renewal office. They blocked any meetings from taking place until the Urban Renewal board agreed to add more people of color to their ranks. Following that bold move, it was New York's turn to step up.

Felipe Luciano, the Young Lords chairman at the time, recalled: "So we’re on 110th Street and we actually asked the people, ‘What do you think you need? Is it housing? Is it police brutality?" Promptly, the people replied that the number one problem was the garbage. That was more than enough to convince the Young Lords that the time had come to spring into action.

In March 1969, the New York Daily News covered East Harlem's garbage problem in a series of articles. When sanitation workers finally came to collect the garbage, they only seemed to take half of it, leaving the rest in the street. Locals interpreted this neglect as a racist action by the largely Italian-American sanitation workers’ union. But the Young Lords had a plan.

After arming themselves with broomsticks snatched from the sanitation depot, the Young Lords proceeded to do something unexpected — they swept sections of the neighborhood and piled the refuse on the sidewalks, ready for the sanitation workers to collect. Unfortunately, the sanitation workers never arrived. The rebellious youths were infuriated.

With their good intentions going unnoticed, the Young Lords replaced the carrot with the stick. They promptly swept all the garbage into the middle of the street, even adding abandoned furniture from empty lots to the pile. Because the location (Third Avenue at 110th Street) was a major connecting point for suburban commuters, the authorities wouldn't be able to ignore their cries for much longer.

The Young Lords called their new plan the Garbage Offensive. This was a nod to the "Tet Offensive" — a series of guerrilla strikes by the North Vietnamese that largely turned public opinion against America's involvement in the conflict. While the Young Lords initially carried out their actions on three consecutive Sunday mornings in July and August, they ramped up their efforts, causing daily disruptions as August wore on.

Soon, the Young Lords were no longer on their own. Other frustrated residents, ranging from bored young kids to angry young adults to even grandparents, joined in. The protest action exploded in popularity, with the New York Times jumping on the bandwagon and reporting on the spectacle in East Harlem. The chaos only grew from there.

The Garbage Offensive continued to escalate, with some people setting piles of garbage on fire and others planting Puerto Rican flags on top. This was about more than the lack of sanitation work; it was a message telling everyone that the Puerto Rican people would not be messed around with. Soon, the Garbage Offensive would even decide the future leadership of America's largest city.

The Garbage Offensive came just as New York City was preparing to vote for its next mayor. With incumbent Republican Mayor John Lindsay going head-to-head with Democrat Mario Procaccino, the dirty streets of Gotham had become a major electoral issue. Soon enough, both candidates latched onto the issue, though many cynics questioned their motives.

While no one could tell for sure, it sure seemed as if both mayoral candidates only took an interest in the garbage issue once they realized that votes were up for grabs. Without any delay, they both set out to convince the residents of New York that they had what it took to clean up the streets.

While challenger Mario Procaccino wrote a paper on how he would handle the garbage crisis, Mayor John Lindsay sent his aides to meet with the Young Lords. This led to a well-received dialogue in a public square in front of the people of East Harlem. Unbelievably, the winds of change were upon them.

With Mayor Lindsay winning a second term, the Young Lords had successfully convinced him to tackle the trash issue more seriously. The local government changed up its approach, getting the Department of Sanitation to improve dumping and garbage collection schedules, mandating the use of plastic bags for garbage disposal, and introducing a new parking system to facilitate street sweeping. But this wasn't the end of the Young Lords' work.

Against all odds, the Young Lords were successful in getting East Harlem cleaned up. With this mission complete, they continued their goal to better their community. Over the next two years, they pressured the city to adopt anti-lead poisoning legislation and even contributed to the writing of the Patient Bill of Rights. However, their concrete goals sometimes conflicted with other countercultural groups' plans for upending the status quo through the use of methods that seemed to defy basic logic.

The March on the Pentagon, for instance, showed what could happen when hippie culture went unchecked. The spark for the event took place at a party in artist Michael Bowen’s San Francisco studio. On January 14, 1967, activists were celebrating another one of their successful protests, the Human Be-In. That event brought together the major ideas that would form the 1960s counterculture movement, but now they needed to up the stakes even more.

All the greatest countercultural personalities were at 1371 Haight Street that night, including poet Allen Ginsberg, Zen poet Gary Snyder, professor-turned-LSD-advocate Timothy Leary, and the founders of the Youth International Party — also called the Yippies — Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. Needless to say, they soon got to plotting their next move.

Of course, they weren't exactly sober at the time. John Starr Cooke was another major figure at the Haight party, and he was a part of the Psychedelic Rangers who lived outside of Cuernavaca, Mexico. The group’s favorite activity was consuming hallucinogens on the daily, like the toloache flowers. These narcotic plants once put John in the hospital for a month, but that hardly dissuaded his crew from experimenting.

Abbie Hoffman was the most eager to politicize the hippie movement. He joined the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, which was a part of a larger group, “the Mobe.” When Abbie became affiliated with the Mobe, they were discussing a new 100,000-person protest.

This would be a two-day antiwar demonstration in D.C., led by Jerry Rubin. The organizers originally planned to congregate around the Capitol building, but Jerry, supported by his Be-In friends, suggested another idea: the Pentagon. After all, Michael Bowen was obsessed with the Pentagon being linked to a sinister topic.

The occult. Michael insisted that the five-sided pentagram layout of the Pentagon was tied to evil events happening across the world, like the Vietnam War. He suggested that a demonstration at this key government building would highlight just how disgusted many Americans were, but this wouldn't be quite like past protests.

They tossed more conventional ideas, like simply occupying the building, out the window, as the activists feared that holding up government processes would be viewed as anti-American. Instead, Hoffman, Bowen, and the others opted for a more performative display — one that would earn plenty of criticism.

As plans developed, the organizers became more incensed about the Pentagon and all of the evil they were sure it represented. Someone eventually proposed an exorcism should be a part of The March on the Pentagon. The idea quickly spread through the ranks.

Their goal was to levitate the building, turn its color orange, and make it “vibrate until all evil emissions had fled.” If they could get the Pentagon to float, this would supposedly bring about an immediate end to the Vietnam War and send all the deployed troops back home. Obviously, nobody had tried anything like this before.

Rubin wanted their ritual to shutter the Department of Defense because he and the rest of the protestors were “now in the business of wholesale disruption and widespread resistance and dislocation of the American society.” And besides that, he knew they could gain a lot of attention by announcing, “We’re going to raise the Pentagon 300 feet in the air.”

But did they really believe their own message? “We didn’t expect the building to actually leave terra firma, but this fellow arrived with ideas on how to make it happen,” march organizer Keith Lampe said in a later interview. Bowen, on the other hand, completely trusted that their ritual would lift the Pentagon off the ground.

That did cause some contention. “What a charming moment,” Lampe joked. “All of us ‘radicals’ there suddenly became ‘moderates’ because Michael really expected to levitate it whereas the rest of us were into it merely as a witty media-project.” Though they didn’t reach an agreement on its effectiveness, their protest scheming continued.

Finally, October 21st arrived. The day began with speeches at the Lincoln Memorial from antiwar celebrities, and then the crowd of thousands marched over the bridge into Virginia. One honored attendee, writer Norman Mailer, described a notable presence that defined the event.

“The smell of [marijuana], sweet as the sweetest leaves of burning tea, floated down to the Mall,” Norman wrote. “Where its sharp bite of sugar and smoldering grass pinched the nose, relaxed the neck.” We’re sure this influenced more of the crowd to agree with Bowen about the Pentagon exorcism.

When they reached their five-sided destination, the group handed fliers to an interested audience that explained what they were about to do. The letters were addressed to “Planet Earth” and began with a lofty statement, “We Freemen, of all colors of the spectrum…” Impartial bystanders could hardly believe what they were reading.

For the ritual, the document invoked the name of every deity you could imagine: “… in the name of God, Ra, Jehovah, Anubis, Osiris, Tlaloc, Quetzalcoatl, Thoth, Ptah, Allah, Krishna, Chango, Chimeke, Chukwu, Olisa-Bulu-Uwa, Imales, Orisasu, Odudua, Kali, Shiva-Shakra, Great Spirit, Dionysus, Yahweh, Thor, Bacchus, Isis, Jesus Christ, Maitreya, Buddha, Rama do exorcise and cast out the EVIL …”

“… which has walled and captured the pentacle of power and perverted its use to the need of the total machine and its child the hydrogen bomb and has suffered the people of the planet earth, the American people and creatures of the mountains, woods, streams and oceans …” the pamphlet declared. And this over-the-top piece was only the opening act.

It finished by accusing the Pentagon of of committing “grievous mental and physical torture and the constant torment of the imminent threat of utter destruction.” While the audience members were taking in this message of dissent, the ritual was beginning. The crowd watched as the marchers went into their exorcism.

On an altar, protesters did anything they could think of: dancing, engaging in public affection to spread communal love energy, hiring Mayan healers to sprinkle cornmeal in circles, giving flowers to onlookers, and shouting mantras. The antiwar demonstrators craned their necks to see just how high the Pentagon would rise.

Well...the Pentagon resisted these influences and remained earthbound. However, another iconic event did occur: protestors put flowers down the barrels of the police and military members who surrounded their March on the Pentagon demonstration event. The white and yellow daisies dangled from the guns as a strong symbol. Additionally, some protestors claimed that the Pentagon was forever transformed.

“The Pentagon was symbolically levitated in people’s minds in the sense that it lost its authority which had been unquestioned and unchallenged until then,” Ginsberg said. “But once that notion was circulated in the air and once the kid put his flower in the barrel of the kid looking just like himself but tense and nervous, the authority of the Pentagon psychologically was dissolved.”