During the national NAWSA convention held in New Orleans in 1903, Catt and Anthony were attacked by the press for allowing black membership in NAWSA and, in the case of Anthony, for permitting a letter she had written to be read before an all-black audience in New York City. Southern delegates made speeches calling for only white women to have the vote. Catt's reply: "We are all of us apt to be arrogant on the score of our Anglo-Saxon blood but we must remember that ages ago the ancestors of the Anglo-Saxons were regarded as so low and embruted that the Romans refused to have them for slaves. The Anglo-Saxon is the dominant race today but things may change. The race that will be dominant through the ages will be the one that proves itself the most worthy... Miss Kearney is right in saying that the race problem is the problem of the whole country and not that of the South alone. The responsibility for it is partly ours but if the North shipped slaves to the South and sold them, remember that the North has sent some money since then into the South to help undo part of the wrong that it did to you and to them. Let us try to get nearer together and to understand each other's ideas on the race question and solve it together."