The Jayuya Uprising, also known as the Jayuya Revolt or El Grito de Jayuya, was a Nationalist insurrection that took place on October 30, 1950, in the town of Jayuya, Puerto Rico. The insurrection, led by Blanca Canales, was one of the multiple insurrections that occurred throughout Puerto Rico on that day against the Puerto Rican government supported by the United States. The insurrectionists were opposed to US sovereignty over Puerto Rico. Events leading to the revolt The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party was formed in 1922 to work for Puerto Rican Independence. By 1930 Pedro Albizu Campos, a lawyer who was the first Puerto Rican graduate from Harvard Law School, was elected president of the party. In the 1930s, the United States-appointed governor of Puerto Rico, Blanton Winship, and the police colonel, a former U.S. Army Colonel named Elisha Francis Riggs, applied harsh repressive measures against the Nationalist Party. In 1936, Albizu Campos and the leaders of the party were arrested and jailed at the La Princesa prison in San Juan, and later sent to the Federal prison in Atlanta. On March 21, 1937, the police opened fire on the crowd at a Nationalist parade, killing 19 people in what came to be known as the Ponce massacre. Albizu Campos returned to Puerto Rico on December 15, 1947, after spending ten years in prison.} On May 21, 1948, a bill was introduced before the Puerto Rican Senate which would restrain the rights of the independence and Nationalist movements on the archipelago. The Senate, controlled by the Partido Popular Democrático (PPD) and presided by Luis Muñoz Marín, approved the bill that day. This bill, which resembled the anti-communist Smith Act passed in the United States in 1940, became known as the Ley de la Mordaza (Gag Law) when the U.S.-appointed governor of Puerto Rico, Jesús T. Piñero, signed it into law on June 10, 1948. Under this new law it would be a crime to print, publish, sell, or exhibit any material intended to paralyze or destroy the insular government; or to organize any society, group or assembly of people with a similar destructive intent. It made it illegal to sing a patriotic song, and reinforced the 1898 law that had made it illegal to display the Flag of Puerto Rico, with anyone found guilty of disobeying the law in any way being subject to a sentence of up to ten