1935 - Human Rights, Social Justice

Human Rights, Social Justice

Josef Stalin decrees that Soviet children above age 12 are subject to the same punitive laws that apply to adults—8 years in a labor camp for stealing corn or potatoes, for example, or 5 years for stealing cucumbers.

Iran's Reza Shah Pahlevi orders women to discard their veils as he moves to emancipate women despite opposition from Shiite clerics.

Mexican women organized the United Front for the Rights of Woman (Frente Unica Pro Derechos de La Mujer) to campaign for female suffrage (see 1946).

Civil-rights lawyer Charles Hamilton Houston arrives by train at New York July 11, registers at Harlem's 135th Street YMCA, and reports later in the morning to the offices of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) at 69 Fifth Avenue to begin work on overturning the Supreme Court's Plessy decision of 1896 (see 1934). "Education is preparation for the competition of life," he declares; if blacks are to compete successfully there must be equality in educational opportunity, and since the system of "separate but equal" is too costly for most states to maintain there must ultimately be an end to discrimination. He hears from his former student Thurgood Marshall, now 27, of a black Amherst graduate who wants to enter the University of Maryland Law School, petitions a district court to order that the university accept Donald Murray's application, wins approval from the district court, sees the order upheld in the court of appeals in November, but warns that the decision applies only to the state of Maryland (see Gaines, 1936).

The Nuremberg Laws enacted by the Nazi Party Congress meeting at Nuremberg September 15 deprive Jews of German citizenship, forbid intermarriage with Jews, and make intercourse between "Aryans" and Jews punishable by death to prevent "racial pollution." Crude and vicious anti-Semitic invective published since 1923 by Nazi gauleiter Julius Streicher in his paper Der Sturmer has led to passage of the laws. The basic definition of a Jew, published November 14, delineates the categories of mixed offspring, or mischlinge. The first degree includes anyone with two Jewish grandparents, the second degree anyone with one Jewish grandparent (see Torquemada, 1487; concentration camps, 1937).