We Charge Genocide

"We Charge Genocide" was a document presented to the United Nations in 1951 by William L. Patterson of the Civil Rights Congress, arguing that the U.S. federal government, by its failure to act against lynching in the United States, was guilty of genocide under Article II of the UN Genocide Convention.

We Charge Genocide

In December 1951, two African-Americans, Paul Robeson and William L. Patterson brought to the United Nations a petition titled by the name "We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People". People who signed the petition on December 17, 1951 attended with Robeson when he addressed the document to a UN official in New York and on the same day, Patterson who is an executive director of the Civil Rights Congress delivered copies of the drafted petition to the UN delegates that are meeting in Paris.

There were a handful of people signing the document including family members of victims of lynching. Some of those who signed the petition are listed below:
* W.E.B. DuBois
* George Crockett Jr
* New York City Communist councilman Benjamin J. Davis, Jr.
* Ferdinand Smith
* Dr. Oakley C. Johnson of Louisiana,
* Aubrey Grossman, the labor and civil rights lawyer
* Claudia Jones
* Rosalee McGee, wife of the Willie McGee who was executed in 1951 on the false rape charges of a white woman
* Josephine Grayson, whose husband, Francis Grayson, was one of the Martinsville Seven, executed in Virginia after a much-publicized trial in 1951

Hundreds of executions were documented in the petition in the section Evidence, although the petition states that there were at least 10,000 African Americans who had been executed. The real number will never be known because these incidents were never reported. The petition also describes conspiracy against African Americans by inhibiting their ability to vote through poll taxes and literacy tests.

Also in the petition is the UN’s definition of genocide: “Any intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, racial, or religious group is genocide." The petition concludes that "..the oppressed Negro citizens of the United States, segregated, discriminated against, and long the target of violence, suffer from genocide as the result of the consistent, conscious, unified policies of every branch of government. If the General Assembly acts as the conscience of mankind and therefore acts favorably on our petition, it will have served the cause of peace."

Following the petition was the emerging of the Red Scare and the Cold War, which led the US government to stop the United Nations from pressing the charges discussed in the petition, and thus were able to prevent any argument by the UN commission on Human Rights. Robeson and Patterson were persecuted by the FBI and State Department all through the 1950s.

External links

* [http://users.accesscomm.ca/ediversity/genocide.html The cry rings true 57 years later]
* [http://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis51.htm Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement -- Timeline]
* [http://www.crmvet.org/biblio.htm#bibwcg Civil Rights Movement Bibliography]
* [http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=9685712 We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to the United Nations for Relief from a Crime of the United States Government against the Negro People]