The Right to Miscegenate

Charlotte Anita Whitney is not in prison. She would have been there had not the Supreme Court granted a rehearing of her case, for she had been convicted under the California Criminal Syndicalism Law and sentenced to 1 to 14 years in prison for belonging to the Communist Labor Party.

She had been a social worker, a supporter of woman's rights. She is a descendant of five immigrants who came over on the Mayflower. Yet some of the New England aristocracy, not to mention the aristocracy of the South, last week felt that her ancestors must have come over in the steerage from Leningrad.

Last week in a speech to a branch of the National Woman's Party in San Francisco she allowed herself thus to digress from her theme--Susan B. Anthony:

"Susan B. Anthony was great because she recognized a new human movement. Suffrage was such a new movement. . . . We should not rest until we have it. Now one-tenth of the women of our country [the Negresses] are not enfranchised. . . .

"It will be years before we have courage to declare for complete suffrage State by State. And the result is our present intermarriage law.

"If a full-grown man and woman wish to live together as man and wife it is only decent to allow them to do it, no matter what their color.

"Our laws forbidding intermarriage of Negroes and whites reduce the colored girl to the position of a dog, without the respect which should be accorded human beings, and without the redress of wrong accorded the white woman."

When she had done, 50 listening ladies laid down the teacups and applauded.