Pedro Albizu Campos

Pedro Albizu Campos was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, on the twelfth of September 1891, the son of an Afro-Puerto Rican mother and a Basque father. He took his secondary education at Ponce High School, his undergraduate education at the University of Vermont, and his law degree at Harvard in 1921 — graduating with the highest grade average in his class (the law school nonetheless declined to award him the customary class valedictory).

He served in a segregated U.S. Army infantry unit in the First World War, returned to Puerto Rico in 1921, and became president of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party in 1930. The Party committed itself to Puerto Rican independence from the United States.

He led the Party through the most violent decade of twentieth-century Puerto Rican politics. The 1937 Ponce Massacre — in which Insular Police opened fire on a Nationalist Party parade in Ponce, killing nineteen and wounding two hundred — was conducted under the governorship of Blanton Winship and was understood across the island as a response to Albizu Campos's organizing.

He was imprisoned by the United States federal government for ten years (1937-47) on the charge of conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government, then for an additional ten years (1950-65) after the Nationalist uprising of October 1950 and the attempted assassination of President Truman by Nationalists on the first of November 1950. He served a total of approximately twenty-five years in U.S. federal and Puerto Rican prisons.

Recently declassified U.S. military and intelligence documents establish that he was subjected to radiation experiments without his consent during his imprisonment at La Princesa prison in San Juan in the 1950s — among the documented cases of medical experimentation on incarcerated populations in the period.

He was released on humanitarian grounds in November 1964 and died at the home of his daughter in San Juan on the twenty-first of April 1965, age seventy-three.

He is honored here as the lawyer who refused American sovereignty and paid for it with half his life in prison.