became prime real estate areas near the Loop, Lakefront, Old Town, and Lakeview neighborhoods. The rationale was to increase property tax revenues by luring White, middle-class suburbanites and creating a suburb within the city. Some Young Lords were involved in the Puerto Rican June 1966 Division Street Riots in Wicker Park and Humboldt Park. The 1968 Democratic Convention protests in Grant Park and the adjacent Lincoln Park Neighborhood, resulted in the Young Lords, under the leadership of founder José Cha Cha Jiménez, to join with others to form a broader civil and human rights movement. Puerto Rican self-determination and the displacement of Puerto Ricans and poor residents became the primary issues of organizing. The Young Lords organization also began to train students and youth to take on the leadership to organize the Latino community on a national level. Multiple chapters formed nationwide based on the original Chicago chapter, including several branches in New York City and along the East Coast. The National Headquarters in Chicago asked the loose coalition of chapters in New York to unite as a single regional branch. All chapters considered neighborhood empowerment and Puerto Rican self-determination as unifying missions. The Great Migrations of the late 1940s resulted in many Puerto Ricans coming to the mainland for opportunity and settling in the Midwest, Florida, and on the East Coast of the United States. Chicago, one of he most populated center of the Puerto Rican diaspora, took on a significant role as a regional headquarters of the movement. The office in Chicago attempted to construct a nationwide grassroots movement within the U.S. barrios to unite Puerto Ricans, other Latinos, and carry out its mission for Puerto Rican independence. The New York City regional chapter formed July 26, 1969, ten months after the Young Lords Movement began in Chicago. The National Headquarters in Chicago had gained national prominence by leading protests against conditions faced by Puerto Ricans in the U.S. Because most members in New York were students with a middle-class income, who were media-savvy, the New York chapter flourished. It provided needed support for the National Headquarters then under surveillance by the F.B.I. and the Chicago city government. The National Headquarters' first action was to ransack and close the Department of Urban Renewal office in Chicago. The Young Lords attended an Urban Renewal meeting and told the panel of the local neighborhood association that no more meetings would