Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez is at his farewell party tonight. He has written his last regular column for the News, after almost thirty years of writing that followed the old newspaper adage of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.

As an activist and a journalist, Juan Gonzalez has been fighting for social justice for almost fifty years.

As a student protester at Columbia University in the late sixties, then as a founding member of the Young Lords, the influential Puerto Rican activist group and later as cohost of the independent radio and television program Democracy Now.

And since 1987, as a crusading columnist for the Daily News.

"Jimmy Breslin once joked that the Young Lords which I was involved in produced more journalists than Columbia."

NY1's Budd Mishkin spoke to Gonzalez as his time at the Daily News was ending.

He says he was losing energy to do the work that was his specialty, digging deep to produce more in depth reports.

However, he also cited the reduced readership of the printed newspaper and it's increased on line presence.

"Unfortunately the internet while it has enormous immediacy, it also is shallow in its ability to get people to think deeply."

Gonzalez is known for his exposés of municipal malfeasance, social injustices and income inequality.

When he began his run at the Daily News — after working nine years as a reporter in Philadelphia — some Puerto Rican businessmen arranged for a reception at the St. Regis Hotel attended by then Manhattan borough president David Dinkins and Mayor Ed Koch.

"Koch gave me one of these Tiffany apples, and I said something to the effect that laugh now, once my columns start you won't be laughing later."

Gonzalez was true to his word.

He uncovered the biggest scandal of the Bloomberg Administration, the $60 million payroll modernization project known as CityTime that ballooned to $700 million.

His reports led to investigations, and prosecutions.

There was also his ground breaking reporting on first responders and cleanup workers breathing toxic air while working atop the smoldering pile of rubble after the attacks on the World Trade Center.

"There was a lot of pushback from city officials and government, from quite a few of my editors at the time about it, but there was this enormous support from people who were reading the stories, who said  they were getting sick or that no one was telling them about this.

Juan Gonzalez's sense of fighting for the outsider started early.

He was born in Puerto Rico but grew up primarily in East Harlem, where Third Avenue divided the Puerto Ricans and the Italians, and then in the predominantly Italian neighborhood of East New York, Brooklyn.

"The churches then were very racist, lot of consternation among the white parents when the first African Americans and Latinos started going to St. Fortunatas,  the masses for Hispanics were all in the basement."

His father, a second-grade dropout in Puerto Rico demanded his children work hard in school.

"Not only insistent but harsh. We were beaten if we didn't get good grades, my sister and I."

His father died in surgery for brain cancer when Gonzalez was a senior at Franklin Lane High School in Brooklyn — a loss that had a profound effect.

Gonzalez felt his dad’s treatment was substandard.

"We never got an explanation really from any of the doctors of what had happened.  And so I think that whole experience with the medical system did color how I look at how medicine is administered in this country."

In 1964, Gonzalez went off to Columbia University on scholarship, the first person in his extended family to go to college.

"When I started at Columbia there weren't even enough Latino students to have a Latino student organization."

His time on campus coincided with the surge of anti-war protests and activism roiling colleges across the nation.

In 1968, striking Columbia students took over a building and took an acting dean hostage.

"That period definitely changed my life and made me realize the kind of career you get in life or what you do is really secondary to what happens in society around you."

Gonzalez was arrested, spent a month in jail with other protesting Columbia students and did not graduate.

His activism days were only getting started.

"This is a classic, this is a photo of about 30 or 40 members of the Young Lords."

He became a founding member of the Young Lords, fighting for reforms in education, health care and policing. The group once commandeered an East Harlem church to provide services to the neighborhood, and even taking over failing Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx for a day, barricading the police from entering.

"We allowed the patients still to come into emergency room. The doctors straed working cause quite a few of the docs and nurses supported our work, because they knew we were fighting to get a new hospital."

The Young Lords dissolved in the 1970s, but several leaders went on to distinguished careers in journalism, like Felipe Luciano and Pablo Guzman.

"We had learned something about how the system of media in America operates and that we either had skills on air or in writing in my case more in writing, that we felt that we could do something useful in terms of getting to the roots of problems."

"As I always say, we never freed Puerto Rico, but we freed our minds, we learned how to think for ourselves."

Gonzalez says the News has let him write what he wants to write, only killing two or three columns in nearly thirty years.

However, he has felt internal pressure.

"If you write a column that goes along with what the paper is trying to push, you get up front. If you write a column that is contrary to what the paper is trying to push or what is considers important, it gets buried in the back."

Gonzalez has been married twice and has children from both marriages.

His desire to go to the story, no matter what time of day or night, and then write it has come with a price.

"It's always been a problem for me. increasingly so that you sacrifice so much of the rest of your life just to be able to get this news and information out to people. So it's been difficult. You get used to it after a while but you never like it."

Gonzalez will continue to work on Democracy Now.

He's writing a new book and is scheduled to teach Journalism at Rutgers University.

And there may be an occasional column in the Daily News.

He is realistic about the past and appreciative of the new activists following his example.

"We obviously thought the world was about to change dramatically, it hasn't changed quite as dramatically as we expected.

"Climate change, Black Lives Matter, and the Occupy folks. A whole new generation of people trying to make the world change faster than it wants to change."