First Published: Party Voice, [publication of the New York State Communist Party, USA] Vol. I, No. 10, January 1954.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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EROL Note: The subject of this article, Lucille Bethencourt, went on to become a founding member of the Provisional Organizing Committe for Marxist-Leninist Communist Party (POC).
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The first Smith Act victim of Latin-American descent is a 26-year old young woman who has been in the leadership of many struggles of Puerto Rican workers in Ohio. She is Mrs. Lucille Bethencourt, a New Yorker of Venezuelan parentage who, since 1949, has lived in the steel town of Lorain. She is now free on bail of $5000 after six weeks in an Ohio jail.
A considerable Puerto Rican minority exists in Lorain today as a result of the move, initiated some seven years ago by the U.S. Steel subsidiary, National Tube, to bring workers to the town directly from Puerto Rico.
Miserably housed, discriminated against and charged exorbitant rents, the Puerto Rican workers at National Tube were nevertheless joined in Lorain by other Puerto Rican workers seeking employment. However, few other companies would hire Puerto Rican workers, while National Tube would hire only those carefully screened by their agents in Puerto Rico itself.
Mrs. Bethencourt played an active role in the formation and struggles of the Club Bienestar Puertorriqueno (Puerto Rican Welfare Club), instituted by Puerto Rican steel workers, and in winning relief for unemployed Puerto Rican workers.
The Puerto Rican group successfully campaigned to end National Tube’s discriminatory hiring policy, the steel company finally hiring 200 Puerto Ricans directly through its Lorain offices. It campaigned for better housing for Puerto Rican families, won free hospitalization for those unable to afford it. It has fought peonage treatment of Puerto Rican workers hired as farm laborers in Michigan, provided much needed and heretofore lacking social recreation for Puerto Rican workers in Lorain.
Mrs. Bethencourt has been active also in the Inter-racial Citizens Club of Lorain, which campaigned for hiring of Negro teachers, police and firemen, and which got the A&P to hire a Negro clerk in Lorain for the first time.
These are some of the “crimes” which are the real occasion for the Smith Act arrest of this young woman of Latin American parentage.
Surely the above makes clear why, in New York as well as throughout the country, the defense of Lucille Bethencourt should receive special attention within the framework of the whole struggle to free all Smith Act victims.