From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Pedro Albizu Campos (September 12, 1891 – April 21, 1965) born in Tenerías Village in Ponce, Puerto Rico was the son of Alejandro Albizu and Juana Campos. He was also the nephew of Juan Morel Campos, one of Puerto Rico's greatest composers of danzas. Albizu was the leader and president of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and avid advocate of Puerto Rican independence from the United States by what ever means necessary. Albizu felt that Puerto Rico deserved the same right as the United States and other countries had to fight for independence.

Known as an energtic orator he is known also as El Maestro ("The Teacher").

Contents 1 Education 2 Nationalist Campaign 3 Later Years and Death 4 Legacy 5 See also 6 External links

In 1912, Pedro was awarded a scholarship to study Engineering, specializing in Chemistry at the University of Vermont. In 1913 he continued his studies at Harvard University.

At the outbreak of World War I, Pedro volunteered in the United States Infantry. Albizu was trained by the French Military mission and served under General Frank McIntyre where he was assigned to an African-American unit and was discharged as a First Lieutenant. During this time he was exposed to the racism of the day which left a mark in his beliefs towards the relationship of Puerto Ricans and the United States.

In 1919, Albizu returned to Harvard University and was elected president of Harvard's Cosmopolitan Club. He met with foreign students and lecturers, like Subhas Chandra Bose (Indian Nationalist leader with Gandhi) and the Hindu poet Rabindranath Tagore. He became interested in the cause of Indian independence and helped to establish several centers in Boston for Irish independence. He met Eamon de Valera and later became a consultant in the drafting of the constitution of the Irish Free State. He graduated from Harvard University obtaining a Law degree as well as degrees in Literature, Philosophy, Chemical Engineering and Military Science. He was fluent in English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Latin and Greek. At the time he received job offers as Hispanic representative for a Protestant church, as a legal aide to the U.S. Supreme Court, and in the U.S. State Department's diplomatic corps in Mexico, yet Albizu opted to return to Puerto Rico .

In 1919, José Coll y Cuchí, a member of the Union Party, felt that the party wasn't doing enough for the cause of Puerto Rico and he and some followers departed from the party and formed the Nationalist Association of Puerto Rico in San Juan. During that time there were two other organizations that were pro-independence, they were the Nationalist Youth and the Independence Association. On September 17, 1922, the three political organizations joined forces and formed the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party. José Coll y Cuchí was elected president of the party.

In 1922, Albizu married Dr. Laura Meneses, a Peruvian whom he had met at Harvard University. Two years later in 1924 he joined the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and was elected vice president. In 1927, Albizu traveled to Santo Domingo, Haiti, Cuba, Mexico, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela, seeking solidarity for the Puerto Rican Independence movement.

In 1930, there were some disagreements between Coll y Cuchí and Albizu as to how the party should be run. As a result Coll y Cuchí abandoned the party and some of his followers returned to the Union Party. On May 11, 1930, Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos was elected president of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party and formed the first Women's Nationalist Committee, in the island municipality of Vieques, Puerto Rico.

In 1932, Albizu publishes a manuscript in which he exposes Doctor Cornelius P. Rhoades. In the manuscript Doctor Rhoades admits to killing Puerto Rican patients and injecting many with cancer cells as part of a medical experimentation conducted in San Juan's Presbyterian Hospital for the Rockefeller Institute. This letter revealed the racist vision that some Americans harbored toward people of color. Dr. Rhoades later became head of two chemical warfare projects in the 1940s, served on the Atomic Energy Commission, and was awarded the U.S. Legion of Merit.

The Nationalist Party obtained poor results in the 1932 election, but continued with their campaign to teach and unite the people behind a free Puerto Rico. At the same time, continued repression from the United States against Puerto Rican independence was now met with armed resistance.

In 1934, Albizu represented sugar cane workers as a lawyer against the U.S. sugar and utilities monopolies.

In 1935, four Nationalists were killed by the police under the command of Colonel E. Francis Riggs, the incident became known as the Río Piedras massacre. The following year in 1936, nationalists Hiram Rosado and Elias Beauchamp assassinated Colonel Riggs. They were arrested, and summarily executed without a trial at the police headquarters in San Juan. Pedro Albizu Campos proclaimed them heroes.

San Juan Federal Court ordered the arrest of Pedro Albizu Campos and several other Nationalists for "seditious conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. Government in Puerto Rico." A jury of seven Puerto Rican and five Americans voted 7 to 5 not guilty. Judge Cooper called for a new jury, this time with ten Americans and two Puerto Ricans and a guilty verdict was achieved. In 1937, a group of lawyers, including a young Gilberto Concepción de Gracia tried in vain to defend the Nationalists but, the Boston court of appeals, which holds jurisdiction over federal matters in Puerto Rico, upheld the verdict. Pedro Albizu Campos along with other Nationalist leaders were sent to the Federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia. On March 21, a protest march was held in Ponce in which police opened fire on the crowd. Twenty-one unarmed marchers and bystanders as well as two policeman were killed, and 200 others wounded in what has become known as the Ponce Massacre. In 1947 Albizu returned to Puerto Rico and it was believed that he began preparing, along with other members of the Nationalist Party, an armed struggle against the proposed plans to change Puerto Rico's political status into a commonwealth of the United States.

Pedro Albizu Campos would be jailed again after the revolt of 1950 when a group of Puerto Rican nationalists staged a revolt in the island, known as the Jayuya Uprising (El Grito de Jayuya) and which an attack on La Fortaleza (the Puerto Rican governor's mansion) and Blair House, by nationalist Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola, where president Harry S. Truman was staying while the White House was being renovated. During the attack on the president, Torresola and policeman, Private Leslie Coffelt, were killed. Pedro Albizu Campos was arrested at his home after a brief shoot out with the police. Subsequently 3,000 independence supporters were arrested. In 1951 Pedro Albizu Campos was jailed and sentenced to eighty years in prison.

Albizu was pardoned in 1953 by then governor Luis Muñoz Marín but the pardon was revoked the following year after the 1954 nationalist attack of the United States House of Representatives, when four Puerto Rican Nationalists, led by Lolita Lebron opened fire from the gallery of the Capitol Building in Washington D.C.. Some members of Congress were wounded, one seriously; but no one was killed. The shooters did not resist arrest, claiming the action was to attract the world's attention to the US military occupation of Puerto Rico. Albizu refused to allow the police to enter his home in San Juan. A shootout occurred but he was later placed into custody in an unconscious state and jailed again at La Princesa in San Juan.

While in prison, Pedro Albizu Campos' health deteriorated. In 1956, he suffered a stroke in prison and was transferred to San Juan's Presbyterian Hospital under police guard. He alleged that he was the subject of human radiation experiments in prison. Officials suggested that Albizu was insane although others who attended him believe that burns on his skin where consistent with radiation exposure. On November 1964 Pedro Albizu Campos was again pardoned by outgoing governor Luis Muñoz Marín. Pedro Albizu Campos died on April 21, 1965.

In 1994, under the administration of President Bill Clinton, the United States Department of Energy disclosed that human radiation experimentation was conducted without consent on prisoners during the 1950s-1970s. It is still unclear if Pedro Albizu Campos was among the subjects of such experimentation.

The extent of Albizu's legacy is generally the subject of -sometimes passionate- discussion by both accolytes and detractors. His followers state that Albizu's political and military actions served (even unintentionally) as a primer for positive change in Puerto Rico, these being the improvement of labor conditions for peasants and workers, a belated yet more accurate assessment of the colonial relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States by the political establishment in Washington, and a set of social and political conditions that led to positive change in the political -and eventually economic- environment prevailing in the country (even if other politicians, such as Luis Muñoz Marín, were the ones who reaped the political benefit of these changes while essentially burying the Puerto Rican independence movement in the process). Detractors denounce Albizu as a radical fascist, whose actions only brought turmoil to Puerto Rico. Some claim that the weak following of the Puerto Rican independence movement in the present day can be traced, if not to Albizu, to the repression that his actions brought upon the movement (which, during Albizu's lifetime, attained its best acceptance levels in Puerto Rican history).

Albizu can be definitely credited, however, with preserving and promoting Puerto Rican nationalism and national symbols, at a time where they were virtually a taboo in the country. The formal adoption of the Puerto Rican flag as a national emblem by the Puerto Rican government can be traced to Albizu (even while he denounced this adoption as the "watering-down" of an otherwise sacred symbol into a "colonial flag"); the revival of public observance of the Grito de Lares and its significant icons was a direct mandate from him as leader of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party. Albizu was the most vocal and visible Puerto Rican of African descent of his generation; Afro-Puerto Rican leaders of other political extractions (such as Ernesto Ramos Antonini and Jose Celso Barbosa) attained similar status only after facing (and enduring) considerable bouts with racism. Albizu, while not exempt from it, confronted it head-on, and vehemently denouncing it publicly.

Albizu's diagnosis of the colonial relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States earned him prison time, yet modern scholars take surprise at how accurate the diagnosis is, even years after Albizu's death. Finally, his political philosophy persists to this day, synthesized in quotes and verbal images.

An alternative high school in Chicago, called the Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos Puerto Rican High School, is located in the Puerto Rican Cultural Center. There, students learn about Puerto Rican history and culture, in the context of local community development. Archives there include original letters, representations of Albizu Campos in sculpture and art, as well as other material related to his life.

Additionally, five public schools in Puerto Rico are named after him, as well as numerous streets in most of Puerto Rico's municipalities. In 1976, Public School 161 in Harlem in New York City was named after him as well.

• Latin American and Caribbean Congress in Solidarity with Puerto Rico’s Independence
• Gilberto Concepción de Gracia
• Blanca Canales
• Puerto Rican Nationalist Party
• Ponce Massacre
• History of Puerto Rico
• Private Leslie Coffelt
• Puerto Rican Independence Party

• 100 Years of Don Pedro Albizu Campos
• FBI Files on Puerto Rico
• DOE Openness: Human Radiation Experiments
• Profile of Don Pedro Albizu Campos High School