Denise Oliver-velez (1947 – 2026)

Their Story

Denise Oliver-Velez was an American professor, contributing editor, activist, and community organizer. Born in Brooklyn in 1947 to a family deeply rooted in activism and cultural work—her father was an actor and professor of dramatic literature at Nassau Community College and a Tuskegee Airman, and her mother was a teacher in the New York City school system—Oliver-Velez became one of the most influential organizers of the civil rights and liberation movements of the late twentieth century. In her teen years, Oliver-Velez joined her local NAACP branch in Queens, participating in protests such as the 1963 blocking of the Rochdale Village construction to advocate for the hiring of Black workers. While she attended Howard University, she joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and participated in Students for a Democratic Society, and along with a small group of fellow Black activists including Hubert Brown (H. Rap Brown), started a campaign at the university whose goal was to improve Howard University's political and cultural methods in regard to showing awareness on Black struggles of students and administration. Denise Oliver-Velez was the first woman that was elected to be on the Young Lords Party leadership board, the central committee, and in 1970 she was appointed as Minister of Economic Development and became the highest ranking woman in the party. The women's caucus issued demands to the Central Committee of the Young Lords that called for an end to sexual discrimination and the full inclusion of women into the leadership of the Lords, and the Central Committee reacted by quickly promoting Oliver-Velez and Gloria Fontanez to the Central Committee. In addition to her activism with the Young Lords, Oliver-Velez was also an AIDS movement activist and a member of the Black Panther Party, and she published ethnographic research as part of HIV/AIDS intervention projects. She was a program director and co-founder of WPFW-FM in Washington, D.C., Pacifica's first minority-controlled radio station, and worked in public broadcasting and community media for many years, and was also the executive director of the Black Filmmaker Foundation. She was a contributing editor for the blog Daily Kos, and was a former adjunct professor of anthropology and women's studies at SUNY New Paltz.

Sources

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denise_Oliver-Velez