We Charge Genocide
This paper was written by the Civil Rights Congress (CRC) and presented to the United Nations at meetings in Paris in December 1951.
The document received international media attention and became caught up in Cold War politics, as the CRC was supported by the American Communist Party.
The United States government and press accused the CRC of exaggerating racial inequality in order to advance the cause of Communism.
The U.S. State Department forced CRC secretary William L. Patterson to surrender his passport after he presented the petition to a UN meeting in Paris.
The first group to petition the UN regarding African Americans was the National Negro Congress (NNC), which in 1946 delivered a statement on racial discrimination to the Secretary General.
[4] The Civil Rights Congress (CRC), the successor to the International Labor Defense group and affiliated with the communist party, had begun to gain momentum domestically by defending Blacks sentenced to execution, such as Rosa Lee Ingram and the Trenton Six.
It 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.
It lists hundreds of wrongful executions and lynchings, refers to at least 10,000 undocumented cases, and also charges that Southern states in the U.S. had engaged in a conspiracy against African Americans' ability to vote through poll taxes and literacy tests.
Du Bois, also slated to deliver the petition in Paris, had been classified by the US State Department as an "unregistered foreign agent" and was deterred from traveling.
[13] The document was signed by many leading activists and family of Blacks who had suffered in the system, including:[7] Patterson said he was ignored by US ambassador Ralph Bunche and delegate Channing Tobias, but that Edith Sampson would talk to him.
[16] As Paul Robeson had been unable to obtain a passport at all, the difficulty these two men faced in traveling led some to accuse the United States government of censorship.
He accused its authors of wishing to distract attention from the alleged "genocide" in the Soviet Union, which had resulted in millions of deaths, because of their communist sympathies.
He published an op-ed in The New York Times arguing that African-Americans did not experience the "destruction, death, annihilation" that would qualify their treatment as genocide.
Black delegates Edith Sampson and Channing Tobias spoke to European audiences about how the situation of African Americans was improving.
[11][24] At the request of the State Department, the NAACP drafted a press release repudiating We Charge Genocide, calling it "a gross and subversive conspiracy".
However, upon hearing initial press reports of the petition and the expected NAACP response, Walter White decided against issuing the release.
[30] During the United Nations Convention against Torture Committee Review of the U.S. in November 2014, a group of eight young activists from Chicago, Illinois, (Breanna Champion, Page May, Monica Trinidad, Ethan Viets-VanLear, Asha Rosa, Ric Wilson, Todd St. Hill, and Malcolm London) submitted a shadow report using the name We Charge Genocide.
