Black genocide in the United States

The decades of lynchings and long-term racial discrimination were first formally described as genocide by a now-defunct organization, the Civil Rights Congress, in a petition which it submitted to the United Nations in 1951.

To revisit the issue of intent already touched on: If an institution is deliberately maintained and expanded by discernible agents, though all are aware of the hecatombs of casualties it is inflicting on a definable human group, then why should this not qualify as genocide?

[13] Based on the "in part" definition, the Civil Rights Congress (CRC), a group composed of African Americans with Communist affiliations, presented to the UN in 1951 a petition called "We Charge Genocide."

[14] It described lynching, mistreatment, murder and oppression by whites against blacks, concluding that the US government was refusing to address "the persistent, widespread, institutionalized commission of the crime of genocide".

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) issued a statement saying that there was no black genocide even though serious matters of racial discrimination certainly did exist in America.

Walter Francis White, leader of the NAACP, wrote that the CRC petition contained "authentic" instances of discrimination, mostly taken from reliable sources.

In 1952, African-American author J. Saunders Redding traveling in India was repeatedly asked questions about specific instances of civil rights abuse in the US, and the CRC petition was used by Indians to rebut his assertions that US race relations were improving.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said in 1946 that negative international opinion about US racial policies helped to pressure the US into alleviating the mistreatment of ethnic minorities.

[13] In 1948, President Harry S. Truman signed an order desegregating the military, and black citizens increasingly challenged other forms of racial discrimination.

[17] Walter Johnson has written that the first lynching to occur in the United States was that of Francis McIntosh, a free man of black and white ancestry.

[18] Brandy Marie Langley argued, "The physical killing of black people in America, at this time period, was consistent with Lemkin's original idea of genocide.

[20] According to Christopher Waldrep, the media and racist whites, both inadvertently and not, exaggerated the presence of black crime as a method of appeasing their own guilt surrounding the lynchings African Americans.

Two girls of the Relf family in Mississippi, deemed mentally incompetent at ages 12 and 14, and also 18-year-old welfare recipient Nial Ruth Cox of North Carolina, were prominent cases of involuntary sterilization.

[27] According to Gregory Price, government policies led to higher rates of sterilization amongst black Americans than white on the basis of racist beliefs.

However, Selective Service System deferments, military assignments, and especially the recruits accepted through Project 100,000 resulted in a greater representation of blacks in combat in the Vietnam War in the second half of the 1960s.

[34] Author James Forman Jr. has called the War on Drugs "a misstep [that] is so damaging that future generations are left shaking their heads in disbelief.

"[35] According to Forman, the war on drugs has had widespread effects, including an increased punitory criminal justice system that disproportionately affected Black Americans, especially those in low-income neighborhoods.

Alexander argues that, despite many Americans wanting to believe that the election of President Obama ushered in a new age where race no longer mattered, or at least not as much, America is still deeply affected by its racial history.

[37] Alexander writes that there has been a "systemic breakdown of black and poor communities devastated by mass unemployment, social neglect, economic abandonment, and intense police surveillance.

"[37] President Lyndon B. Johnson, stated in a commencement speech delivered at Howard University that there is a stark contrast between black and white poverty.

"[41] Although black women had been practising forms of birth control since their arrival in America, certain African-American leaders also taught that political power came with greater population and so opposed contraception.

Guttmacher viewed the IUD as an effective method of contraception for individuals in "underdeveloped areas where two things are lacking: one, money and the other sustained motivation.

King emphasized the fact that birth control gave the black man better command of his personal economic situation, keeping the number of his children within his monetary means.

In December 1965, the Planned Parenthood Clinic of Pittsburgh (PPCP) applied for federal funding based on the War on Poverty legislation which Johnson had promoted.

[15] Other prominent black advocates for birth control included Carl Rowan, James Farmer, Bayard Rustin, Jerome H. Holland, Ron Dellums and Barbara Jordan.

[54] Slave women brought with them from Africa the knowledge of traditional folk birth control practices, and of abortion obtained through the use of herbs, blunt trauma, and other methods of killing the fetus or producing strong uterine cramps.

"[62] In the Tennessee General Assembly in 1967, Dorothy Lavinia Brown, MD, the first African-American woman surgeon and a state assemblywoman, sponsored a proposed bill to fully legalize abortion.

Mildred Fay Jefferson, a surgeon and an activist against legal abortion, wrote about black genocide in 1978, saying "abortionists have done more to get rid of generations and cripple others than all of the years of slavery and lynching.

[90] Critics of Horowitz, such as Seymour Drescher and Brandy Marie Langley, suggest there are contradictions in his analysis (e.g., he admits the KKK often had support from the police and state), and that his thesis fails because he uses only the Holocaust as a benchmark for genocide, which may be inappropriate or one-sided.

Today in the US, the blatant racial zoning of large cities and the penal system suggests that, once colonized people outlive their utility, settler societies can fall back on the repertoire of strategies (in this case, spatial sequestration) whereby they have also dealt with the native surplus.