Vito Anthony Marcantonio (December 10, 1902 – August 9, 1954) was an American lawyer and politician who served East Harlem for seven terms in the United States House of Representatives.

Marcantonio was a socialist and supporter of political causes and positions which he deemed in the interests of the working class, poor, immigrants, labor unions, and African-American civil rights.

Marcantonio was the son of an American-born father and Italian-born mother, both with origins in Picerno, in the Basilicata region of Southern Italy.

[1] After passing the New York bar examination in 1925, Marcatonio began practicing law, first for Foster, La Guardia, and Cutler.

[1] He clerked at the law firm of Swinburne Hale, Walter Nelles, and Isaac Shorr, known for its representation of politically radical individuals and organizations.

Marcantonio's district was centered in his native East Harlem, New York City, which had many residents and immigrants of Italian and Puerto Rican origin.

Fluent in Spanish as well as Italian, he was considered an ally of the Puerto Rican and Italian-American communities, and an advocate for the rights of the workers, immigrants, and the poor.

[5] In 1939, Marcantonio criticized the 1936 prosecution and conviction of Puerto Rican Nationalist Party president Pedro Albizu Campos on charges of sedition and other crimes against the United States.

"[22] He sponsored bills to prohibit the poll tax, used by the Southern United States to disenfranchise poor voters, and to make lynching a federal crime.

[22] In 1940, Marcantonio helped form the American Peace Mobilization (APM), a group whose aim was to keep the U.S. from participating in World War II.

Before the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact in Moscow August 23, 1939, the APM's precursor organization, the Comintern-directed American League for Peace and Democracy, had been anti-Nazi.

He appeared in a newsreel in 1940 denouncing "the imperialist war", a line taken by Joseph Stalin and his supporters in the Soviet Union (USSR) until Operation Barbarossa.

In 1942, Marcantonio worked to expand the U.S. military commitment to a second front in Europe against the Nazi German expansion, which became Operation Torch.

Marcantonio was also a vice president of the International Workers Order, a fraternal benefit society unofficially affiliated with the Communist Party.

[23] In 1947, when the U.S. Congress passed legislation to provide financial aid to fight communism in Turkey and Greece, such as during the Greek Civil War, Marcantonio was the only congressman to not applaud the action, symbolizing his disagreement with the Truman Doctrine.

[18] He died on August 9, 1954, from a heart attack after coming up the subway stairs on Broadway by City Hall Park in Lower Manhattan.

[26][27] Marcantonio's collection of speeches, I Vote My Conscience (1956), edited by Annette Rubinstein, influenced the next generation of young radicals.

[28] Tony Kushner's play The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures has a main character who is a fictional "cousin" of Vito Marcantonio.