Felipe Luciano

Felipe Luciano became known within activist circles for his membership in the Last Poets, the group of black power era artists mentored by Amiri Baraka, whose politically charged live-music and spoken word poetry performances in the 1960s prefigured the emergence of hip hop and rap in the 1970s and 1980s. Luciano was chairman of the New York Young Lords Organization (YLO) when it was launched in 1968, later renamed the Young Lords Party. From 1972 to 1975, he founded and produced the acclaimed radio show Latin Roots, the first English language program in the United States to feature Latin culture and music and to develop an ethnically and racially diverse audience. In the mid-1970s, Luciano’s career evolved from radio to television when he joined the news team at NBC’s New York City affiliate station as general reporter and later as weekend anchor, becoming the first Puerto Rican news anchor of a major media network station in the United States.