Lifelong activist, organizer and educator Denise Oliver-Vélez has died at the age of 78.
She was a central figure in the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s and was the first woman elected to the Young Lords Central Committee, a radical Puerto Rican human rights group modeled on the Black Panther Party, which Oliver-Vélez was also a member of. She later became the first Black female program director in public radio and taught at SUNY New Paltz.
https://www.democracynow.org/2026/7/17/denise_oliver_velez
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