Pedro Albizu Campos

Puerto Rican-born activist for Puerto Rican independence

• Born: September 12, 1891 or June 29, 1893
• Birthplace: Ponce, Puerto Rico
• Died: April 21, 1965
• Place of death: San Juan, Puerto Rico

A lawyer, politician, orator, and president of the Nationalist Party from 1930 until his death in 1965, Albizu Campos emerged as the most significant (and controversial) figure in Puerto Rico’s struggle to gain its independence from the United States.

Early Life

Pedro Albizu Campos (PEH-droh ahl-BEE-sew KAHM-pohs) was born in Tenerías, a poor section of Ponce, Puerto Rico. Little is known of his parents except that his father, Alejandro Albizu Romero, known as “El Vizcaíno,” was a Basque businessman from Ponce and his mother, Juliana Campos, a native of Puerto Rico, was of Taíno, Spanish, and African descent. Born out of wedlock, he used the name Pedro Campos during childhood. For unknown reasons, Albizu Campos was reared by his aunt in Ponce and barely knew his mother.

Because of the dire circumstances of his early life, Albizu Campos was not enrolled in school until he was eleven years old. He finished elementary school in four years and high school in two. He was a member of the Ponce High School debate team, which debated in English, the official language of Puerto Rico at the time. He graduated with honors in 1912 and, armed with letters of recommendation from his American principal and leaders in the community, won a scholarship to study chemical engineering at Vermont State University. A year later, he transferred to Harvard University and, in 1916, received a B.A. in liberal arts.

In 1917, Albizu Campos went to Washington, D.C., and offered his services to the Department of War, Bureau of Insular Affairs. He was sent to Ponce to organize the Home Guard, a company of 180 men. He was discharged as a first lieutenant in the U.S. Army.

On his return to Harvard in 1919, Albizu Campos was elected president of the Cosmopolitan Club. Meeting Éamon de Valera and Subhas Chandra Bose piqued his interest in Irish and Indian independence. In addition to his law degree, Albizu Campos earned degrees in literature, philosophy, chemical engineering, and military sciences. He also was fluent in many languages.

In 1922, Albizu Campos married Laura Meneses, a Peruvian he met at Harvard. According to Laura, the racial prejudice Albizu Campos encountered at Harvard and in the segregated Army fueled his resolve to fight for Puerto Rico’s independence. After graduation, despite job offers in the United States, he returned to practice labor law in Puerto Rico, settling down in La Cantera, a poor section of Ponce.

Life’s Work

Albizu Campos joined the Nationalist Party and became its vice president in 1924. Three years later, in an effort to gain the support of other Hispanic nations for the party’s mission, he visited the West Indies and Central America. Upon his return home in 1930, he was elected president of the Nationalist Party. He formed the first Women’s Nationalist Committee, based in Vieques, a barrier island of Puerto Rico that was soon to be taken over by the U.S. Navy. During this time, Albizu Campos wrote articles for the newspaper El Mundo condemning U.S. imperialism and advocating autonomy for Puerto Rico.

In 1932, Albizu Campos was given a letter written by Dr. Cornelius P. Rhoads, a Rockefeller Institute pathologist. Rhoads described Puerto Ricans as a degenerate race that should be exterminated and boasted of killing eight patients and injecting others with cancer cells. Albizu Campos sent copies of the letter to the authorities and the media, accusing Rhoads of an “extermination plot.” An investigation vindicated Rhoads, who claimed the letter was a joke, and discredited Albizu Campos. The case, reopened in 2003, caused the American Association for Cancer Research to remove Rhoads’s name from its annual award.

The Nationalist Party lost the 1932 election but continued to agitate for independence. A year later, Albizu Campos led a general strike against the Puerto Rico Railway and Light and Power Company, and in 1934 he legally represented thousands of striking sugar cane workers against the U.S. sugar industry. Worried that anarchy would erupt, U.S. corporations formed the Citizens Committee of One Thousand for the Preservation of Peace and Order. They alerted President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who appointed Blanton Winship governor of Puerto Rico and dispatched Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents to monitor the Nationalists. Winship appointed Colonel Francis Riggs as police chief.

On March 5, 1936, Riggs was shot in retaliation for the killing of four Nationalists outside a university. The two men who killed Riggs were murdered while in police custody. The following month, Albizu Campos and others were arrested for seditious conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government. After they were found not guilty by a jury of seven Puerto Ricans and five Americans, the judge called for a retrial. This time, a jury of ten Americans and two Puerto Ricans condemned the defendants to the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia. U.S. Congressman Vito Marcantonio called the decision “one of the blackest pages in the history of American jurisprudence.”

On Palm Sunday, March 21, 1937, Nationalists organized a peaceful march to protest Albizu Campos’s imprisonment. At the last minute, their permit was revoked. They marched anyway and were quickly surrounded by armed police officers who opened fire, killing twenty-one and wounding more than two hundred unarmed men, women, and children, many shot in the back as they tried to flee. The Massacre of Ponce was the worst in Puerto Rico’s history; its repercussions continue to this day.

Albizu Campos took ill while incarcerated and in 1943 was sent to New York’s Columbus Hospital. He returned to Puerto Rico in 1947. To welcome him home, students at the University of Puerto Rico raised the Puerto Rican flag on campus. Their suspension led to a student strike which prompted the administration to shut down the school. The Gag Law, which criminalized acts advocating Puerto Rican independence, was enacted. As more repression followed, Albizu Campos relinquished peaceful means of achieving independence and began to advocate armed resistance.

On January 2, 1949, Luis Muñoz Marín ran on the Popular Democratic Party ticket and was elected governor of Puerto Rico. In October, 1950, revolts broke out across the island. On November 1, two men attempted to assassinate President Harry S. Truman. Albizu Campos was arrested along with three thousand supporters of independence. He was sentenced to eighty years in prison but pardoned by Muñoz Marín in 1953, a pardon that was revoked a year later when four activists attacked the United States House of Representatives.While in prison, Albizu Campos claimed he was subjected to radiationexperiments. The authorities accused him of insanity, despite visible burns covering his body. His health deteriorated quickly and on November 15, 1964, Muñoz Marín pardoned him once again. Albizu Campos entered a hospital for treatment.

Albizu Campos died in Hato Rey, a barrio in San Juan, Puerto Rico, on April 21, 1965. More than seventy-five thousand people attended his funeral. Thirty years later, the United States Department of Energy disclosed that during the 1950’s and 1970’s, prisoners had been unwitting subjects in radiation experiments.

Significance

Albizu Campos was one of the most prominent figures in Puerto Rico’s independence movement. His teachings earned him the nickname “El Maestro” (The Teacher). He argued that Spain had no legal authority to cede Puerto Rico to the United States, because Puerto Rico had been granted political and administrative autonomy in 1897 before the Treaty of Paris and thus was a sovereign independent nation under international law. The United States, however, considered Puerto Rico a strategic territory—in Albizu Campos’s words, the invaders were interested in the cage, not the bird. As a result of his activism, Spanish was restored as the island’s official language and the Puerto Rican flag was no longer outlawed. Albizu Campos is the subject of books, articles, and school curricula. Community centers, public schools, streets, and parks in Puerto Rico and the United States bear his name. He articulated for Puerto Rico a sense of national identity and pride.

Bibliography

Berríos Martínez, Rubén. “Independence for Puerto Rico: The Only Solution.” Foreign Affairs 55 (April, 1977): 561-583. The author, president of the Puerto Rican Independence Party (PIP) and candidate for governor, presents arguments to support Puerto Rican independence.

Lederer, Susan E. “Porto Ricochet”: Joking about Germs, Cancer, and Race Extermination in the 1930’s,” American Literary History 14, no. 4 (Winter, 2002): 720-746. An invaluable detailed account of the early use of “spin” in the corporate world and the press, as it relates to the infamous letter by Dr. Rhoads.

Maldonado-Denis, Manuel. Puerto Rico: A Socio-Historic Interpretation. New York: Random House, 1972. Maldonado-Denis offers a valuable overview of Puerto Rico’s quest for independence.

Ramos-Zayas, Ana Y. National Performances: The Politics of Class, Race, and Space in Puerto Rican Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Discusses the pros and cons of Albizu Campos’s far-reaching legacy in Chicago’s Puerto Rican community in the twenty-first century.

Ribes Tovar, Federico. Albizu Campos: Puerto Rican Revolutionary. New York: Plus Ultra Educational Publishers, 1971. The life and accomplishments of Albizu Campos, regarded by the author as the purest and most combative hero in Puerto Rico’s modern history.