Biography
Domenick Sallitto was an Italian-born anarchist in the San Francisco Bay Area who chaired anarchist meetings and, with Vincent Ferrero, was a defendant in one of the most prominent anarchist deportation cases of the 1930s. After sixteen years in the United States he was arrested on April 11, 1934 by immigration inspectors in Oakland, California and ordered deported to Fascist Italy, where anarchists faced imprisonment or death. A four-year defense campaign — backed by the ACLU (his attorney was Austin Lewis), the labor movement, and the anarchist press — followed, and in 1938 the Department of Labor canceled his deportation. After a long naturalization battle he was granted U.S. citizenship in January 1954, and he later volunteered for the ACLU.
