Colored People, an organization of which Oswald Garrison Villard is chairman of the Board of Directors and W. E. B. DuBois, a brilliant mulatto, is Director of Publicity and Research. As this association represents a very large part of the more intelligent Negro public opinion, its attitude deserves careful consideration. It is set forth summarily in a letter25 which was addressed to legislators in various states, as follows:
"The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People earnestly protests against the bill forbidding intermarriage between the races, not because the Association advocates intermarriage, which it does not, but primarily because whenever such laws have been enacted they have become a menace to the whole institution of matrimony, leading directly to concubinage, bastardy, and the degradation of the Negro woman. No man-made law can stop the union of the races. If intermarriage be wrong, its prevention is best left to public opinion and to nature, which wreaks its own fearful punishments on those who transgress its laws and sin against it. We oppose the proposed statute in the language of William Lloyd Garrison in 1843, in his successful campaign for the repeal of a similar law in Massachusetts: 'Because it is not the province, and does not belong to the power of any legislative assembly, in a republican government, to decide on the complexional affinity of those who choose to be united together in wedlock; and it may as rationally decree that corpulent and lean, tall and short, strong and weak persons shall not be married to each other as that there must be an agreement in the complexion of the parties.'
"We oppose it for the physical reason that to prohibit such intermarriage would be publicly to acknowledge that black blood is a physical taint, something no self-respecting colored man and woman can