Pedro Albizu Campos was a Puerto Rican attorney and politician, and the leading figure in the Puerto Rican independence movement. Gifted in languages, he spoke six; graduating from Harvard Law School with the highest grade point average in his law class, an achievement that earned him the right to give the valedictorian speech at his graduation ceremony.
Background
Albizu was born in the Tenerias suburb of Ponce on September 12, 1891, to Alejandro Albizu Romero and Juliana Campos. His father came from a family of farmers and landowners but worked during his adult life as a customs official in Ponce's naval port. His mother was the daughter of slaves. As a child, he experi-enced hardship and poverty because his father did not support him or his family. Albizu was 19 and ready to go to college before his father legally recognized him as his son.
Education
Albizu attended local schools in Ponce and excelled in his studies; in 1912 he graduated with honors from Ponce High School. He was able to secure a scholarship from a Freemason lodge in Ponce allowing him to attend the University of Vermont; he transferred to Harvard University in 1913.
As an undergraduate, he majored in both chemistry and literature and became a member of several of the most prestigious students societies such as the Polity Club, the Cosmopolitan Club, the Speaker's Club, and the Catholic Club. He also wrote for the Harvard Crimson and for the Christian Science Monitor. There is no evidence that Albizu harbored any anti-American feelings during his years as an undergraduate or that he was subjected to any type of racial or ethnic discrimination by virtue of being a black Puerto Rican. In fact, upon graduation from Harvard in 1916, he decided to study law at the very prestigious Harvard Law School. He resumed his law studies in 1919 and graduated in 1921.
Career
Albizu returned to Puerto Rico immediately after finishing his studies at Harvard and established a law practice in his native Ponce. Instead of a career path in law, Albizu became involved in Puerto Rican politics, joining the Puerto Rican Unionist Party. Initially founded in 1904, the centrist Unionist Party advocated for more autonomic powers and self-government for the island (Silvestrini and Luque 1992). Although his initial stance in the party was extremely moderate, Albizu grew disenchanted with the Unionist Party when they moved away from Puerto Rican independence.
By the end of 1950, Albizu had managed to mobilize members of his party in a series of campaigns to bring attention to the plea of the Nationalist Party. The first event was the Nationalist insurrection of October 30, 1950. Various members of the Nationalist Party, following Albizu's orders, launched an islandwide quasimilitary campaign to overthrow the island's government and attacked the official residence of Governor Luis Muñoz Marín. On November 1,1950, a group of Puerto Rican Nationalists attacked Blair House, where President Truman was temporarily residing. As a result of these events, Albizu was once again arrested on November 2, 1950, and charged with violating the Gag Law (Ley de la Mordaza). This repressive law, which had been approved by Puerto Rican law-makers in 1948, prohibited any speech aimed at destabilizing or overthrowing the government of Puerto Rico. Despite the fact that the law was in flagrant violation of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, Albizu was indicted on 12 violations of the law and sentenced to serve 80 years in a Puerto Rican prison.
Because Albizu's health further deteriorated in jail, and because of the general consensus that he had been convicted of violating an unconstitutional law, Albizu was granted an executive pardon in 1953 by Muñoz Marín against Albizu's will. One of the conditions of the pardon was that Albizu not engage in political activities against the government of Puerto Rico. When Albizu praised a group of Nationalists for attacking the U.S. Congress in March 1954, he was once again imprisoned. After suffering a heart attack in prison in 1956, he was transferred to Presbyterian Hospital where he remained until 1964 when governor Muñoz Marín once again granted a pardon shortly before his death on April 21, 1965.
Achievements
Politics
He joined the Nationalist Party in 1924, immediately becoming its vice-president. He was the most ardent spokesman on behalf of Puerto Rican independence. In 1927, he thought that the people of Latin America needed to become aware of the plea for Puerto Rican independence and undertook a three-year trip through Latin America to argue for Puerto Rican independence. When he returned to Puerto Rico in 1930, he had become a substantially more forceful speaker and developed a more hostile and combative tone against the United States.
The 1930s constitutes a significant period in Albizu's development as a major Puerto Rican political leader. On his return from Latin America he found an island in turmoil. Puerto Rican leaders and intellectuals were struggling to achieve a final definition of the island's political status. In addition, the social and economic system of Puerto Rico had started to deteriorate as a result of decades of economic oppression and exploitation from owners of the sugarcane plantations and sugarcane processing plants in the island. Sugarcane workers, who had organized into labor unions, had rebelled against the economic establishment and launched a major strike to protest meager wages and the inhuman labor conditions.
On May 11,1930, Albizu became president of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party. This moment marked his transformation from a vocal political activist into a revolutionary. Albizu and the Nationalist Party adopted a separatist agenda that advocated for independence of Puerto Rico through all possible means, including violence and aggression. His political platform was:
In summary, nationalist leaders underscored the following points: 1) the need for well distributed wealth; 2) despair over the elimination of small landowners; 3) the need to limit individual land ownership to 300 acres; 4) a proposal to create the largest possible number of small landowners and a bank to assist small scale farmers; 5) the need to turn into the hands of the government all public services (railroads, street trolleys, ports, power and lighting, and phone); 6) concerns over the situation of those people who operate public cars, small gas companies and their struggle against foreign companies; 7) the definition that all of those who can not establish independent households are slaves. (Taller de Formación Política 1982, 109).
Albizu launched a vigorous campaign for this political platform and traveled around the island making speeches and mobilizing Puerto Ricans of diverse beliefs. By 1935, the Nationalist Party had become a revolutionary organization. Puerto Rican journalist and historian Antonio Quiñones Calderón underscores the agenda of the Nationalist Party as ratified in a general assembly held in the city of Caguas on December 8, 1935:
1) declared that his party will not participate on colonial elections and would boycott them; 2) demanded that the government of the United States should leave Puerto Rico immediately in a peaceful way, or they will take on an arm struggle; 3) that military services should become obligatory for all of the members of his party; and 4) to raise money in Puerto Rico and abroad to defray the expenses of the armed struggle. (Quiñones Calderón 1990, 344)
By 1936, Albizu's fierce and violent rhetoric gained the attention of the FBI, and J. Edgar Hoover dispatched agents to Puerto Rico to investigate him. On February 23,1936, two members of the Nationalist Party participated in an armed confrontation in which Elisha Francis Riggs, head of the Puerto Rican police was killed. Since Albizu had made a call to arms previous to the attack and had encouraged the assassination, he was arrested on March 4,1936, and charged in three counts of seditious conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States, to recruit soldiers, and to incite rebellion against the United States. He was convicted of all charges on July 1936 and sentenced to serve ten years of prison at a federal penitentiary in Atlanta.
Despite a vigorous effort by several Puerto Rican political leaders and members of the American Civil Liberties Union to gain his liberation, he served six years of his sentence in Atlanta. While in Atlanta he was thought to have suffered a debilitating stroke that impaired his health. He was released on probation on 1943 and was forced to serve the remaining four years of his sentence in New York, where he was hospitalized at Colombia Hospital between 1943 and 1945. He was then forced to remain in the city until 1947 while he finished serving the remaining four years of his sentence. He was finally able to return to the island in December 1947.
Although the political realities of Puerto Rico had somewhat changed during the years that he had spent in prison, Albizu returned to the island with an un-bending will against the colonial forces that still ruled the island. Between January 1948 and December 1950, Albizu engaged in a forceful public campaign to denounce and criticize political, social, and economic conditions affecting Puerto Rico and its people. He continued to call Puerto Ricans to arms to overthrow the government of the United States.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Albizu interrupted his law studies in 1917 and enlisted in the U.S. armed forces during World War I. After joining the 375th regiment, he organized and taught at a school for non-commissioned officers in his native Ponce. Puerto Rican historian Isabel Gutiérrez del Arroyo, an expert on Albizu, has explained Albizu's participation in the U.S. armed forces as a means of acquiring military discipline, not necessarily as an expression of loyalty to the United States (Gutiérrez del Arroyo 2000).
Connections
In 1922, Albizu married Dr. Laura Meneses, a Peruvian biochemist whom he had met at Harvard University. They had four children named Pedro, Laura, Rosa Emilia, and Héctor.
La Nación puertorriqueña
"An anthology of sixteen essays regarding one of the most significant figures of Puerto Rican nationalism, Pedro Albizu Campos."