The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party was founded in 1922 in protest of U.S. colonial rule, but it became a mass force after 1930, when Pedro Albizu Campos — a Ponce-born, Harvard-trained lawyer and World War I veteran radicalized by the racism he encountered in the U.S. Army — was elected its president. Albizu reframed independence not as a policy preference but as the restoration of a nation illegally seized in 1898, and demanded the withdrawal of the United States from the island.
Under his leadership the Party organized the Cadets of the Republic, backed the great 1934 sugar strike, and confronted a colonial administration that answered with police violence. The governorship of former U.S. Army general Blanton Winship and his police chief, Colonel Francis Riggs, set the Party and the state on the road to bloodshed.