He is Our Malcolm
by Frederick B. Hudson
Some three years ago, when I was selling cultural artifacts on the streets of Harlem, a Puerto Rican tattoo artist who had purchased items from me in the past saw my display of photos of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Marcus Garvey, Nelson Mandala, Betty Shabazz, and other black heroes and sheroes, the man told me, “If you get a picture of Albizu Campos, I’ll buy it.”
Who’s he?” I asked.
“He was the father of Puerto Rican nationalism,” the skin artist told me.
Thus began my odyssey of exploration of the life of one of the most fascinating men this hemisphere has ever produced.
First, information about the man is very difficult to locate. When you enter his name into the renowned Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia the only reference that appears in the mention that a note from him was found the pocket of a man who was arrested in a plot to kill President Truman at Blair House.
What? A terrorist? Horrors!
Most of the material written in English about the man mentions his purported involvement in masterminding a plot to assassinate the Governor of Puerto Rico in the 1950’s and of ordering the shooting of several U.S. Congressmen in the House of Representatives in 1954. And guess what? Don Pedro Albizu Campos was twice imprisoned by the U.S. government -from 1938 to 1948 and from 1950 to 1965-when he left prison to lie on his deathbed.
Bad man, right?
When I found a good photo of Campos and began to sell it on the street, I began aware of the truth of Malcolm X’s statement that “History is a people’s memory.”
Puerto Rican people who saw his picture began to tell me bits and pieces about his personality and achievements: he spoke seven languages, he was the first Puerto Rican to graduate from Harvard Law School, when he was on trial he put his hat on top of his attorney and told the judge, “that is my attorney!” One man told me simply, “He is our Malcolm.” People told me that many schools, parks, and monuments were named after him. I remembered that my own mother in Detroit had taught at a Campos school. And I had never bothered to inquire how the school was named for! Perhaps most shocking was the allegation that the United States Government had intentionally poisoned him with radiation during his incarceration.
Not an easy man to categorize. Orphaned at two, son of a black illiterate Puerto Rican woman and a “upper class” Spaniard who rejected him, this man was born in 1891 in a Puerto Rico which was still a colony of Spain. This condition of domination steeled a resolve in him to free his land from all outside forces.
His personal journey took him to mainland shores first in 1912 to study engineering at the University of Vermont, after he met with Harvard professors a year later, they were so impressed with his brilliance that they admitted him almost immediately. At Harvard, he became a student leader and acquired degrees in Humanities, Chemical Engineering, Military Sciences, and Law. All in seven years.
Despite his achievements, he was aware of racial prejudice, first in Boston and later in the 369th Infantry during World War I where he led a company of black troops as a first lieutenant.
Campos’ sensitive mind absorbed and recoiled the brutal segregation that existed for “coloreds” not only in the Army but in the U.S. as a whole. He saw racism being imported to his homeland; the official language had become English, the history of the island was no longer being taught, political representation in the U.S. Congress was denied. Don Pedro Campos argued that the U.S. occupation of Puerto Rico was illegal since the US had been awarded proprietary rights over Puerto Rico from Spain after the Paris Peace Treaty of 1898.  Since Spain had previously granted autonomy to Puerto Rico and the island nation had assumed all the trappings of a sovereign nation with its own coin, postage stamps and customs service, Campos felt that Spain had given away something which it no longer owned.
After some years of verbal exchanges in courts, Campos felt that “if they won’t listen to legal reason then we must take up arms against the invaders.” A subsequent invasion of the House of Representatives by some of his followers and an attempted assassination of President Truman by other Nationalist Party members resulted in Campos spending more than 25 years in total in stateside prisons. There is certain credible documentation that he was indeed involuntarily radiated. After his last release from federal prison, an objective source brought a Geiger counter to his body and it clicked with an alarming rapidity. In 1994 the U.S. Department of Energy admitted it performed radiation testing on unsuspecting human subjects. More than six of Campos’ fellow Nationalist prison inmates have died of cancer. Information yielded from Freedom of Information requests about Campos has all medical information blacked out-top secret of course.
Campos is hailed today as a hero in Puerto Rico and other Caribbean and Latin American nations and in the mainland U.S. among Puerto Ricans and progressives of all nationalities-last year’s Puerto Rican Parade was dedicated to his memory, schools are named after him, art galleries feature exhibitions of artistic portraits of the fiery fighter.
As Malcolm X, predicted, the people have not forgotten this brave soul whose genetic roots stretched from Africa to the Caribbean but whose struggles mirror those of Nat Turner, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Patrick Henry, Ida Barnett Wells, W.E.B. Dubois, Chief Crazy Horse who also in their people’s darkest moments stood up for freedom although they frequently faced the contempt of even their own people.
Gifted with a poetic soul and tongue, Campos told a Customs agent when he was asked if he was bringing any seeds back to Puerto Rico after serving his first prison sentence: “The same seeds I took are the ones I bring back.”
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