ESENDOM

Cultura y conciencia

Johanna Fernández, Historian and Socialist Activist Passes Away at 55

Nelson SantanaComment

By ESENDOM
August 4, 2026

Johanna Fernández, a US-born Dominican scholar, author and revolutionary passed away on July 30 after a long battle with cancer. She was 55. 

Born in the seventies in New York City, Fernández was a child of the Dominican diaspora. She grew up in the Bronx. In the late 1960s her parents fled the Dominican Republic to New York as a result of the economic uncertainty and political instability created by the 1965 US military occupation of the Dominican Republic. 

During her high school years, Fernández received a scholarship that allowed her to study in England for a year. In a 2017 interview, Fernández recounts how she was able to travel from England to other countries such as the former Soviet Union, France, and Switzerland. At Brown University, coming of age at a contradictory time of educational gains for people of color and right-wing rollback, Fernández became involved in the student movement. In 1992, Fernández was part of the student occupation at Brown led by the Students for Aid and Minority Admission (SAMA).

Her unexpected death sent shockwaves throughout activist and academic circles in New York City and beyond. Well regarded as a professor and mentor,  Fernández was an Associate Professor of history at Baruch at the time of her death. 

The Schomburg Center posted a tribute on Instagram:

“The Schomburg Center honors the life of activist, scholar, and educator Dr. Johanna Fernández (1970-2026). She was a fellow in our Scholars-in-Residence Program from 2007–2008, where she studied our Black Panther Party collection. The archive consists of the files of its Harlem chapter. The research would become part of her book, The Young Lords: A Radical History.

“In 2019, she hosted and moderated the program The Young Lords, New York @ 50: Activism Past & Present, to a sold out audience and overflow crowd. We also streamed the program live on our then-Livestream channel. The conversation was our most-viewed of 2019. If you would like to watch this program, it is currently posted on our Vimeo channel. Tap the link in our bio to view.

“Rest in power Johanna. “

Professor Johanna Fernández was an Afro-Dominican working-class intellectual who overcame many challenges due to her social condition, becoming a rigorous and accomplished scholar driven to preserve the collective memory of resistance of Puerto Ricans, Caribbean and working-class people in general.  In 2021, she received three prestigious awards from the Organization of American Historians (OAH) for her book The Young Lords: A Radical History. 

In The Young Lords: A Radical History, Johanna Fernández charted the origin, trajectory and dissolution of the Young Lords Party (YLP) from a multi-racial street gang founded in Chicago in 1959 to a radicalized activist organization by the late 1960s with several chapters across the US including New York City where Young Lords members advocated for Puerto Rican independence and fought for bilingual education, free healthcare and garbage collection while embracing a socialist outlook. And while the Young Lords were Puerto Rican-led, the group included Cubans, Mexicans, Dominicans and Panamanians. Founding Young Lord member and independent journalist Juan González noted in a Democracy Now! segment that Johanna Fernández “did more than any other scholar of the past half-century to chronicle and preserve the legacy of the Young Lords, to document and analyze the lasting impact the Lords had on movements of Puerto Ricans and other Latinos for self-determination, for civil rights and for revolutionary change.”

Although her focus was on Puerto Rican radicalism in the US, Fernández was also preoccupied with Dominican politics and the destructive effects of reactionary policies carried out by the Dominican state. In that vein, Fernández opposed the 2013 denationalization of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian origins, and expressed her solidarity with anti-racist activists here and abroad, building political relationships that contributed to advance struggles in her parents’ homeland of which she was a regular visitor. In 2023, Fernández, who opposed both Zionism and the Apartheid state of Israel, expressed support for a boycott against the Santo Domingo International Book Fair which the government of President Luis Abinader dedicated to Israel.

Johanna Fernández’s commitment to abolish capital punishment led her to immerse herself in the arduous and difficult work to free political prisoners. For two decades, Fernández was part of the local and international campaign to free political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal. In 2015 she edited Writing on the Wall: Selected Prison Writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal, a collection of essays by Mumia Abu-Jamal who has been incarcerated for approximately 44 years. He spent about 28 years under a death sentence before receiving life without parole in 2011. In 2014, Fernández and Mumia co-edited a special issue of Socialism and Democracy journal on the roots of mass incarceration in the US. 

A radical historian committed to uncovering the past, Professor Fernández was also committed to changing the present. From the early 1990s to the early 2000s, Johanna Fernández was a member of the now-defunct International Socialist Organization (ISO) which was the US affiliate of the Trotskyist International Socialist Tendency (IST).

Driven by her fierce criticism of imperialism and capitalist exploitation and oppression, Fernández wrote articles, organized and attended teach-ins, rallies and protests in support of immigrant rights, Black Lives Matter, women and LGBTQ rights as well as anti-war mobilizations and marches in solidarity with the Palestinian cause. At the time of her passing, she was working on a book addressing the history of fascism in the United States.