Charlotte Anita Whitney

Charlotte Anita Whitney
Charlotte Anita Whitney in the 1910s
Born	1867 San Francisco, California, U.S.
Died	February, 1955 San Francisco, California, U.S.
Resting place	Mountain View Cemetery (Oakland, California)
Education	Wellesley College

Charlotte Anita Whitney (July 7, 1867 – February 4, 1955), best known as "Anita Whitney," was an American women's rights activist, political activist, suffragist, and early Communist Labor Party of America and Communist Party USA organizer in California.

She is best remembered as the defendant in a landmark 1920 California criminal syndicalism trial, Whitney v. California, which featured a landmark U.S. Supreme Court concurring opinion by Justice Louis Brandeis that only a "clear and present danger" would be sufficient for the legislative restriction of the right of free speech. This standard would ultimately be employed against the Communists again during the Second Red Scare of the 1950s.

She was born in San Francisco, California on July 7, 1867, the daughter of a pre-eminent family whose members included the American Supreme Court Justice Stephen Johnson Field and the multi-millionaire speculator and magnate Cyrus W. Field. Her father was a lawyer.

Whitney attended both private and public school growing up in Oakland, California, across the Bay from San Francisco. When her education in Oakland was complete, she attended a normal school in San Jose, California before leaving for the East Coast to attend Wellesley College from which she graduated in 1889.