José “Cha Cha” Jiménez, a prominent civil rights and liberation movement figure and founder of the Young Lords in Chicago and co-founder of the Rainbow Coalition has died. He was 76.
His sister, Daisy Rodríguez, said in a Facebook post that he died Friday morning. A cause of death was not given.
Jiménez in the 1960s founded the Young Lords as a street gang to counter the growing hostility toward the Puerto Rican community in Lincoln Park, at the time one of the most impoverished neighborhoods of Chicago. By 1968, the group became a human rights organization inspired by the Black Panther Party, according to the Library of Congress archives…