1934 - Human Rights, Social Justice

Human Rights, Social Justice

SS chief Heinrich Himmler is appointed head of German concentration camps July 13. He will have villagers build the camps in which they are to be incarcerated.

"The message of woman's emancipation is a message discovered solely by the Jewish intellect and its content is stamped with the same spirit," says Adolf Hitler in a speech at Nuremberg September 8. "When our opponents imply that we in Germany have instituted a tyrannical regimentation of women, I can only confess that without the endurance and really loving devotion of woman to the Movement, I could never have led the Party to victory."

Cuba gives women the right to vote on the same basis as men.

The Wheeler-Howard Act (Indian Reorganization Act) adopted by Congress June 18 curtails future allotment to individuals of tribal lands that have been owned on a communal basis and provides for the return of surplus lands to the tribes rather than to homesteaders (see Meriam Report, 1928). In an effort to reduce federal control of Native American affairs, it authorizes funding of a revolving credit program for tribal land purchases, educational assistance, and assistance of tribal organization, and encourages written constitutions and charters empowering the tribes to manage their internal affairs.

Washington, D.C.-born Howard University law professor Charles Hamilton Houston addresses the annual conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Now 38, Houston went from Amherst to Harvard Law School, served as an officer in France during the Great War, saw racism and segregation there and in America after his return, conducted a survey in the South 7 years ago, visited 17 cities from Savannah to New Orleans, and found only 487 black lawyers below the Mason-Dixon Line (in some states the ratio of white lawyers to black was more than 200,000 to one). He opposes the voluntary segregation favored by W. E. B. Du Bois, saying that if "the Negro is to make any further progress" against "private prejudice and public administration" he "must unite with the poor white." He recommends to the NAACP board in October that it concentrate its legal efforts on ending discrimination in education, demonstrate the inequalities that exist, provide clear evidence of teacher-salary differentials, and begin efforts to overturn the Supreme Court's Plessy decision of 1896. The board appoints him special counsel (see 1935).

Former Mississippi governor Theodore G. Bilbo wins election to the U.S. Senate with promises to "raise more hell than Huey Long." Now 57, Bilbo will support most New Deal measures but grow increasingly strident in his racism, advocating resettlement of U.S. blacks in Africa; denouncing a federal anti-lynching law; blasting a Washington, D.C., law that permits racial intermarriage by saying that children born to mixed couples will be a "motley melee of miscegenated mongrels"; and vilifying communists, labor unions, "dagoes," and "kikes."