Biography
Dolores 'Lolita' Lebrón Sotomayor led the four-person commando team that attacked the U.S. House of Representatives on March 1, 1954, shouting '¡Viva Puerto Rico libre!' from the visitors' gallery as she opened fire. She was 34 years old. Tried first in federal court in Washington and then in New York, she was sentenced to 56 years in federal prison and held at the Federal Reformatory for Women in Alderson, West Virginia, where she served 25 years before her sentence was commuted by President Carter in 1979. Returning to Puerto Rico, she remained a leading figure in the independence movement until her death in 2010, including a final imprisonment at age 81 for civil disobedience against the U.S. Navy bombing of Vieques.
On March 1, 1954, four members of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party — Lolita Lebrón, Rafael Cancel Miranda, Andrés Figueroa Cordero, and Irvin Flores Rodríguez — entered the U.S. Capitol, took seats in the visitors' gallery overlooking the House chamber, unfurled a Puerto Rican flag, and opened fire on the Representatives below. Thirty rounds were fired in roughly thirty seconds; five Representatives were wounded but all survived. The attack was timed to draw international attention to the Inter-American Conference of the Organization of American States then opening in Caracas, and to challenge the U.S. claim that Puerto Rico had become a self-governing 'commonwealth.' All four were arrested at the scene, tried in federal court in Washington, D.C. and again in New York for related conspiracy charges, and sentenced to consecutive terms amounting effectively to life in federal prison. President Jimmy Carter commuted Andrés Figueroa Cordero's sentence in October 1977 (he was terminally ill with cancer and died in 1979); Carter commuted the remaining three sentences on September 6, 1979. They returned to Puerto Rico to a crowd estimated at 5,000 at San Juan International Airport.
Puerto Rican nationalist imprisoned for the 1954 armed protest inside the U.S. House of Representatives; The Black Panther Vol. 17 no.13 (1977) reports she and the other Nationalists refused to personally request pardons because doing so would imply accepting U.S. sovereignty over Puerto Rico. She was released in 1979. [Source: The Black Panther (Black Panther Party newspaper), v17 no.13; digitized at marxists.org — https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/black-panther/index.htm]
