65th Anniversary of "We Charge Genocide!"
1951 American report to the United Nations
by Heather Gray
December 17, 2016
Sixty-five
years ago today, on December 17, 1951, Paul Robeson and William L.
Patterson presented to the United Nations a document entitled "We Charge
Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People". Below
please find 2 reports:
(1) "We Charge Genocide!" from Liberty and Justice for All,
that provides details about the document and it's presentation to the
United Nations in the United States and Paris on December 17, 1951; and
(2) The
beginning narrative of "We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to
the United Nations for Relief From a Crime of The United States
Government Against the Negro People (1951)" from Black Past. (The entire document is 237 pages that includes examples of genocide in the United States.)
At the end of
these 2 reports are also links to the entire 1951 "We Charge Genocide"
petition to the United Nations from the incredibly valuable and
resourceful website " Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement". This
historic document present issues that are relevant today and given the
ongoing atrocities in America, many are in agreement that an updated
contemporary version of "We Charge Genocide" should presented to the
United Nations. Below please find information about youth from Chicago
doing precisely that by presenting information about atrocities in
Chicago to the UN during its "Convention Against Torture Committee
Review of the U.S." in 2014.
I am
thankful to activists/journalists Marian Douglas-Ungaro and Ernest
Dunkley for their advice and support of this call for action regarding
presenting an update to the United Nations of "We Charge Genocide". If
you are also interested in this please send me an email at Heather Gray -
hmcgray@earthlink.net.
We Charge Genocide!
Liberty and Justice for All
"We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro
People" is a paper accusing the United States government of genocide
according to the UN Genocide Convention.
This work was written by the Civil Rights Congress (CRC) and presented
to the United Nations at meetings in Paris in December (17) 1951.
The
document pointed out that the United Nations Convention on the
Prevention and Punishment of Genocide defined genocide as any acts
committed with "intent to destroy" a group, "in whole or in part." To
build its case for black genocide, the document cited many instances of
lynching in the United States, as well as legal discrimination,
disenfranchisement of blacks in the South, a series of incidents of
police brutality dating to the present, and systematic inequalities in
health and quality of life. The central argument: the US government is
both complicit with and responsible for a genocidal situation based on
the UN's own definition of genocide.
The
document received international media attention and became caught up in
Cold War politics, as the CRC was supported by the American communist
party. Its many examples of shocking conditions for African Americans
shaped beliefs about the United States in countries across the world.
The American government and white press accused the CRC of exaggerating
racial inequality in order to advance the cause of Communism. The US
State Department forced CRC secretary William L. Patterson to surrender
his passport after he presented the petition to a UN meeting in Paris.
Soon
after the United Nations was created in 1945, it began to receive
requests for assistance from peoples across the world. These came from
the indigenous peoples of European colonies in Africa and Asia, but also
from African Americans. 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.
The next
appeal, from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People (NAACP) in 1947, was more than 100 pages in length. W. E. B. Du
Bois presented it to the UN on 23 October 1947, over the objections of
Eleanor Roosevelt, the widow of the late president and an American
delegate to the UN. Du Bois, frustrated with the State Department's
opposition to the petitions, criticized president Walter White of the
NAACP for accepting a position as consultant to the US delegation; White
in turn pushed Du Bois out of the NAACP.
The
petitions were praised by the international press and by Black press in
the United States. America's mainstream media, however, were ambivalent
or hostile. Some agreed that there was some truth to the petitions, but
suggested that 'tattling' to the UN would aid the cause of Communism.
The Soviet Union did cite these documents as evidence of poor conditions
in the United States.
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. The NNC joined forces with the
CRC in 1947.
On
17 December 1951, the petition was presented to the United Nations by
two separate venues: Paul Robeson, concert singer and activist, together
with people who signed the petition, handed the document to a UN
official in New York, while William L. Patterson, executive director of
the Civil Rights Congress, delivered copies of the petition to a UN
delegation in Paris. W. E. B. 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. Du Bois
had previously had an expensive legal battle against the Justice
Department.
The
125 copies Patterson mailed to Paris did not arrive, allegedly
intercepted by the US government. But Patterson distributed other
copies, which he had shipped separately in small packages to
individuals' homes.
The document was signed by many leading activists and family of blacks who had suffered in the system, including:
W. E. B. Du Bois, African-American sociologist, historian and Pan-Africanist activist
George W. Crockett, Jr., African-American lawyer and politician
Benjamin J. Davis, Jr., African-American lawyer and communist
Ferdinand Smith, New York councilman
Oakley C. Johnson, Communist activist
Aubrey Grossman, labor and civil rights lawyer
Claudia Jones, Communist and black nationalist activist
Rosalie McGee, the widow of Willie McGee, who in 1951 was executed after being controversially convicted of rape by an all-white jury
Josephine Grayson,
the widow of Francis Grayson, one of the "Martinsville Seven", who in
1951 were executed in Virginia after a much-publicized trial and
conviction by an all-white jury
Amy Mallard and Doris Mallard, remaining family of Robert Childs Mallard, lynched in 1948 for voting
Paul Washington, veteran on death row in Louisiana
Wesley R. Wells, prisoner in California facing execution for throwing a cuspidor (a spittoon) at a guard
Horace Wilson, James Thorpe, Collis English, and Ralph Cooper, four of the Trenton Six
Patterson
said he was ignored by US ambassador Ralph Bunche and delegate Channing
Tobias, but that Edith Sampson would talk to him.
Patterson
was ordered to surrender his passport at the United States embassy in
France. When he refused, US agents said they would seize it at his hotel
room. Patterson fled to Budapest, where through the newspaper Szabad
Nép, he accused the US government of attempting to stifle the charges.
The US government ordered Patterson to be detained when he passed
through Britain and seized his passport when he returned to the United
States. 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
American government of censorship.
Reception
"We
Charge Genocide" was ignored by much of the mainstream American press,
but the Chicago Tribune, which called it "shameful lies" (and evidence
against the value of the Genocide Convention itself). I. F. Stone was
the only white American journalist to write favorably of the document.
The CRC had communist affiliations, and the document attracted
international attention through the worldwide communist movement.
Raphael Lemkin, who invented the term "genocide" and advocated for the
Genocide Convention, disagreed with the petition because the
African-American population was increasing in size. He accused its
authors of wishing to distract attention from genocide in the Soviet
Union, which had resulted in millions of deaths, because of their
communist sympathies. Lemkin accused Patterson and Robeson of serving
foreign powers. He published an op-ed in the New York Times arguing that
Blacks did not experience the "destruction, death, annihilation" that
would qualify their treatment as genocide.
The
petition was particularly well received in Europe, where it received
abundant press coverage. "We Charge Genocide" was popular almost
everywhere in the world except in the United States. One American writer
traveling India in 1952 found that many people had become familiar with
the cases of the Martinsville Seven and Willie McGee through the
document.
The
American delegation heavily criticized the document. Eleanor Roosevelt
called it "ridiculous". Black delegates Edith Sampson and Channing
Tobias spoke to European audiences about how the situation of African
Americans was improving.
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. He and the board decided that the petition did reflect many
of the NAACP views; for instance, the organization had long been
publishing the toll of blacks who had been lynched. "How can we 'blast' a
book that uses our records as source material?", asked Roy Wilkins.
The CRC's power was already declining due to accusations of Communism during the Red Scare, and it disbanded in 1956.
The
United Nations did not acknowledge receiving the petition. Given the
strength of US influence, it was not really expected to do so.
Legacy
The
document has been credited with popularizing the term "genocide" among
Black people for their treatment in the US. After renewed interest
generated by Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party, We Charge Genocide
was republished in 1970 by International Publishers. Allegations of
genocide were renewed in relation to the disproportionate effects of
crack cocaine and HIV/AIDS in the black communities in the United
States. The National Black United Front petitioned the United Nations in
1996-1997, directly citing We Charge Genocide and using the same
slogan....
During
the UN 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. Their report addressed
police brutality toward blacks in Chicago, the lack of police
accountability, and the misuse of tasers by the Chicago Police
Department.
|
|
| On
December 11th, the We Charge Genocide youth delegation spoke at a
public report back on their experiences in Geneva, Switzerland to an
audience of over 200 in Chicago The entire event was live-streamed and
the video is available here. |
We
Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to the United Nations for Relief
From a Crime of The United States Government Against the Negro People
(1951)
Introduction:
Out
of the inhuman black ghettos of American cities, out of the cotton
plantations of the South, comes this record of mass slayings on the
basis of race, of lives deliberately warped and distorted by the willful
creation of conditions making for premature death, poverty and
disease., It is a record that calls aloud for condemnation, for an end
to these terrible injustices that constitute a daily and ever-increasing
violation of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
It
is sometimes incorrectly thought that genocide means the complete and
definitive destruction of a race or people. The Genocide Convention,
however, adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on
December 9, 1948, defines genocide as any killings on the basis of race,
or, in it specific words, as "killing members of the group." Any
intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, racial, ethnic or
religious group is genocide, according to the Convention. Thus, the
Convention states, "causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of
the group," is genocide as well as "killing members of the group."
We
maintain, therefore, 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.
The
Civil Rights Congress has prepared and submits this petition to the
General Assembly of the United Nations on behalf of the Negro people in
the interest of peace and democracy, charging the Government of the
United States of America with violation of the Charter of the United
Nations and the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime
of Genocide.
We
believe that in issuing this document we are discharging an historic
responsibility to the American people, as well as rendering a service of
inestimable value to progressive mankind. We speak of the American
people because millions of white Americans in the ranks of labor and the
middle class, and particularly those who live in the southern states
and are often contemptuously called poor whites, are themselves
suffering to an ever-greater degree from the consequences of the Jim
Crow segregation policy of government in its relations with Negro
citrines. We speak of progressive mankind because a policy of
discrimination at home must inevitably create racist commodities for
export abroad-must inevitably tend toward war.
We
have not dealt here with the cruel and inhuman policy of this
government toward the people of Puerto Rico. Impoverished and reduced
to a semi-literate state through the wanton exploitation and oppression
by gigantic American concerns, through the merciless frame-up and
imprisonment of hundred of its sons and daughter, this colony of the
rulers of the United States reveals in all its stark nakedness the moral
bankruptcy of this government and those who control its home and
foreign policies.
History
has shown that the racist theory of government of the U.S.A. is not the
private affair of Americans, but the concern of mankind everywhere.
It
is our hope, and we fervently believe that it was the hope and
aspiration of every black American whose voice was silenced forever
through premature death at the hands of racist-minded hooligans or Klan
terrorists, that the truth recorded here will be made known to the
world; that it will speak with a tongue of fire loosing an unquenchable
moral crusade, the universal response to which will sound the death
knell of all racist theories.
We
have scrupulously kept within the purview of the Convention on the
Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide which is held to
embrace those "acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part
a national, ethical, racial or religious group as such."
We
particularly pray for the most careful reading of this material by
those who have always regarded genocide as a term to be used only where
the acts of terror evinced an intent to destroy a whole nation. We
further submit that this Convention on Genocide is, by virtue of our
avowed acceptance of the Covenant of the United Nations, an inseparable
part of the law of the United States of America.
According
to international law, and according to our own law, the Genocide
Convention, as well as the provisions of the United Nations Charter,
supersedes, negates and displaces all discriminatory racist law on the
books of the United States and the several states.
The
Hitler crimes, of awful magnitude, beginning as they did against the
heroic Jewish people, finally drenched the world in blood, and left a
record of maimed and tortured bodies, and devastated areas such as
mankind had never seen before. Justice Robert H. Jackson, who now sits
upon the United States Supreme Court bench, described this holocaust to
the world in the powerful language with which he opened the Nuremberg
trials of the Nazi leaders. Every word he voiced against the monstrous
Nazi beast applies with equal weight, we believe, to those who are
guilty of the crimes herein set forth.
Here
we present the documented crimes of federal, state and municipal
governments in the United States of America, the dominant nation in the
United Nations, against 15,000,000 of its own nationals-the Negro people
of the United States. These crimes are of the gravest concern to
mankind. The General Assembly of the United Nations, by reason of the
United Nations Charter and the Genocide Convention, itself is invested
with power to receive this indictment and act on it.
The proof of this face is its action upon the similar complaint of the Government of India against South Africa.
We call upon the United Nations to act and to call the government of the United States to account.
We
believe that the test of the basic goals of a foreign policy is
inherent in the manner in which a government treats its own nationals
and is not to be found in the lofty platitudes that pervade so many
treaties or constitutions. The essence lies not in the form, but
rather, in the substance.
The
Civil Rights Congress is a defender of constitutional liberties, human
rights, and of peace. It is the implacable enemy of every creed,
philosophy, social system or way of life that denies democratic rights
or one iota of human dignity to any human being because of color, creed,
nationality or political belief.
We
ask all men and women of good will to unite to realize the objective
set forth in the summary and prayer concluding this petition. We
believe that this program can go far toward ending the threat of a third
world war. We believe it can contribute to the establishment of a
people's democracy on a universal scale.
But
may we add as a final note that the Negro people desire equality of
opportunity in this land where their contributions to the economic,
political and social developments have been of splendid proportions and
in quality second to none. They will accept nothing less, and continued
efforts to force them into the category of second-class citizens
through force and violence, through segregation, racist law and an
institutionalized oppression, can only end in disaster for those
responsible.
Respectfully
submitted by the Civil Rights Congress as a service to the peoples of
the world, and particularly to the lovers of peace and democracy in the
United States of America
William L. Patterson
National Executive Secretary Civil Rights Congress
To the General Assembly of the United Nations:
The
responsibility of being the first in history to charge the government
of the United States of America with the crime of genocide is not one
your petitioners take lightly. The responsibility is particularly grave
when citizens must charge their own government with mass murder of its
own nationals, with institutionalized oppression and persistent
slaughter of the Negro people in the United States on a basis of "race,"
a crime abhorred by mankind and prohibited by the conscience of the
world as expressed in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of
the Crime of Genocide adopted by the General Assembly of the United
Nations on December 9, 1948.
Genocide Leads to Fascism and to War
If
our duty is unpleasant it is historically necessary both for the
welfare of the American people and for the peace of the world. We
petition as American patriots, sufficiently anxious to save our
countrymen and all mankind from the horrors of war to shoulder a task as
painful as it is important. We cannot forget Hitler's demonstration
that genocide at home can become wider massacre abroad, that domestic
genocide develops into the larger genocide that is predatory war. The
wrongs of which we complain are so much the expression of predatory
American reaction and its government that civilization cannot ignore
them nor risk their continuance without courting its own destruction.
We agree with those members of the General Assembly who declared that
genocide is a matter of world concern because its practice imperils
world safety.
But
if the responsibility of your petitioners is great, it is dwarfed by
the responsibility of those guilty of the crime we charge. Seldom in
human annals has so iniquitous a conspiracy been so gilded with the
trappings of respectability. Seldom has mass murder on the score of
"race" been so sanctified by law, so justified by those who demand free
elections abroad even as they kill their fellow citizens who demand free
elections at home. Never have so many individuals been so ruthlessly
destroyed amid many tributes to the sacredness of the individual. The
distinctive trait of this genocide is a cant that mouths aphorisms of
Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence even as it kills.
The
genocide of which we complain is as much a fact as gravity. The whole
world knows of it. The proof is in every day's newspapers, in every
one's sight and hearing in these United States. In one form or another
it has been practiced for more than three hundred years although never
with such sinister implications for the welfare and peace of the world
as at present. Its very familiarity disguises its horror. It is a
crime so embedded in law, so explained away by specious rationale, so
hidden by talk of liberty, that even the conscience of the tender minded
is sometimes dulled. Yet the conscience of mankind cannot be beguiled
from its duty by the pious phrases and the deadly legal euphemisms with
which its perpetrators seek to transform their guilt into high moral
purpose.
Killing Members of the Group
Your
petitioners will prove that the crime of which we complain is in fact
genocide within the terms and meaning of the United Nations Convention
providing for the prevention and punishment of this crime. We shall
submit evidence, tragically voluminous, of "acts committed with intent
to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethical, racial or
religious group as such," - in this case the 15,000,000 Negro people of
the United States.
We
shall submit evidence proving "killing members of the group," in
violation of Article II of the Convention. We cite killings by police,
killings by incited gangs, killings at night by masked men, killings
always on the basis of "race," killings by the Ku Klux Klan, that
organization which is charted by the several states as a semi-official
arm of government and even granted the tax exemptions of a benevolent
society.
Our
evidence concerns the thousands of Negroes who over the years have been
beaten to death on chain gangs and in the back rooms of sheriff's
offices, in the cells of county jails, in precinct police stations and
on city streets, who have been framed and murdered by sham legal forms
and by a legal bureaucracy. It concerns those Negroes who have been
killed, allegedly for failure to say "sir" or tip their hats or move
aside quickly enough, or, more often, on trumped up charges of "rape,'"
but in reality for trying to vote or otherwise demanding the legal and
inalienable rights and privileges of United States citizenship formally
guaranteed them by the Constitution of the United States, rights denied
them on the basis of "race," in violation of the Constitution of the
United States, the United Nations Charter, and the Genocide Convention.
Economic Genocide
We
shall offer proof of economic genocide, or in the words of the
Convention, proof of "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of
life calculated to bring about its destruction in whole or in part."
We shall prove that such conditions so swell the infant and maternal
death rate and the death rate from disease, that the American Negro is
deprived, when compared with the remainder of the population of the
United States, of eight years of life on the average.
Further
we shall show a deliberate national oppression of these 15,000,000
Negro Americans on the basis of "race" to perpetuate these "conditions
of life." Negroes are the last hired and the first fired. They are
forced into city ghettos or their rural equivalents. They are
segregated legally or through sanctioned violence into filthy,
disease-bearing housing, and deprived by law of adequate medical care
and education. From birth to death, Negro Americans are humiliated and
persecuted, in violation of the Charter and Convention. They are forced
by threat of violence and imprisonment into inferior, segregated
accommodations, into jim crow busses, jim crow trains, jim crow
hospitals, jim crow schools, jim crow theaters, jim crow restaurants,
jim crow housing, and finally into jim crow cemeteries.
We
shall prove that the object of this genocide, as of all genocide, is
the perpetuation of economic and political power by the few through the
destruction of political protest by the many. Its method is to
demoralize and divide an entire nation; its end is to increase the
profits and unchallenged control by a reactionary clique. We shall show
that those responsible for this crime are not the humble but the
so-called great, not the American people but their misleaders, not the
convict but the robed judge, not the criminal but the police, not the
spontaneous mob but organized terrorists licensed and approved by the
state to incite to a Roman holiday.
We
shall offer evidence that this genocide is not plotted in the dark but
incited over the radio into the ears of millions, urged in the glare of
public forums by Senators and Governors. It is offered as an article of
faith by powerful political organizations, such as the Dixiecrats, and
defended by influential newspapers, all in violation of the Untied
Nations charter and the Convention forbidding genocide.
This
proof does not come from the enemies of the white supremacists but from
their own mouths, their own writings, their political resolutions,
their racist laws, and from photographs of their handiwork. Neither
Hitler nor Goebbels wrote obscurantist racial incitements more
voluminously or viciously than do their American counterparts, nor did
such incitements circulate in Nazi mails any more than they do in the
mails of the United States.
Through
this and other evidence we shall prove this crime of genocide is the
result of a massive conspiracy, more deadly in that it is sometimes
"understood" rather than expressed, a part of the mores of the ruling
class often concealed by euphemisms, but always directed to oppressing
the Negro people. Its members are so well-drilled, so rehearsed over
the generations, that they can carry out their parts automatically and
with a minimum of spoken direction. They have inherited their plot and
their business is but to implement it daily so that it works daily.
This implementation is sufficiently expressed in decision and statute,
in depressed wages, in robbing millions of the vote and millions more of
the land, and in countless other political and economic facts, as to
reveal definitively the existence of a conspiracy backed by reactionary
interests in which are meshed all the organs of the Executive,
Legislative and Judicial branches of government. It is manifest that a
people cannot be consistently killed over the years on the basis of
"race" - and more than 10,000 Negroes have so suffered death - cannot be
uniformly segregated, despoiled, impoverished, and denied equal
protection before the law, unless it is the result of the deliberate,
all-pervasive policy of government and those who control it.
Emasculation of Democracy
We
shall show, more particularly, how terror, how "killing members of the
group," in violation of Article II of the Genocide Convention, has been
used to prevent the Negro people from voting in huge and decisive areas
of the United States in which they are the preponderant population, thus
dividing the whole American people, emasculating mass movements for
democracy and securing the grip of predatory reaction on the federal,
state, county and city governments. We shall prove that the crimes of
genocide offered for your action and the world's attention have in fact
been incited, a punishable crime under Article III of the Convention,
often by such officials as Governors, Senators, Judges and peace
officers whose phrases about white supremacy and the necessity of
maintaining inviolate a white electorate resulted in bloodshed as surely
as more direct incitement.
We
shall submit evidence showing the existence of a mass of American law,
written as was Hitler's law solely on the basis of "race," providing for
segregation and otherwise penalizing the Negro people, in violation not
only of Articles II and III of the Convention but also in violation of
the Charter of the United Nations. Finally we shall offer proof that a
conspiracy exists in which the Government of the United States, its
Supreme Court, its Congress, it Executive branch, as well as the various
state, county and municipal governments, consciously effectuate
policies which result in the crime of genocide being consistently and
constantly practiced against the Negro people of the United States.
The Negro Petitioners
Many
of your petitioners are Negro citizens to whom the charges herein
described are not mere words. They are facts felt on our bodies, crimes
inflicted on our dignity. We struggle for deliverance, not without
pride in our valor, but we warn mankind that our fate is theirs. We
solemnly declare that continuance of this American crime against the
Negro people of the United States will strengthen those reactionary
American forces driving towards World War III as certainly as the
unrebuked Nazi genocide against the Jewish people strengthened Hitler in
his successful drive to World War II.
We,
Negro petitioners whose communities have been laid waste, whose homes
have been burned and looted, whose children have been killed, whose
women have been raped, have noted with peculiar horror that the
genocidal doctrines and actions of the American white supremacists have
already been exported to the colored peoples of Asia. We solemnly warn
that a nation which practices genocide against its own nationals may not
be long deterred, if it has the power, from genocide elsewhere. White
supremacy at home makes for colored massacres abroad. Both reveal
contempt for human life in a colored skin. Jellied gasoline in Korea
and the lynchers' faggot at home are connected in more ways than that
both result in death by fire. The lyncher and the atom bomber are
related. The first cannot murder unpunished and unrebuked without so
encouraging the latter that the peace of the world and the lives of
millions are endangered. Nor is this metaphysics. The tie binding both
is economic profit and political control. It was not without
significance that it was President Truman who spoke of the possibility
of using the atom bomb on the colored peoples of Asia, that it is
American statesmen who prate constantly of "Asiatic hordes."
"Our Humanity Denied and Mocked"
We
Negro petitioners protest this genocide as Negroes and we protest it as
Americans, as patriots. We know that no American can be truly free
while 15,000,000 other Americans are persecuted on the grounds of
"race," that few Americans can be prosperous while 15,000,000 are
deliberately pauperized. Our country can never know true democracy
while millions of its citizens are denied the vote on the basis of their
color.
But
above all we protest this genocide as human beings whose very humanity
is denied and mocked. We cannot forget that after Congressman Henderson
Lovelace Lanham, of Rome, Georgia, speaking in the halls of Congress,
called William L. Paterson, one of the leaders of the Negro people, "a
God-damned black son-of-bitch," he added, "We gotta keep the black apes
down." We cannot forget it because this is the animating sentiment of
the white supremacists, of a powerful segment of American life. We
cannot forget that in many American states it is a crime for a white
person to marry a Negro on the racist theory that Negroes are
"inherently inferior as an immutable fact of Nature." The whole
institution of segregation, which is training for killing, education for
genocide, is based on the Hitler-like theory of the "inherent
inferiority of the Negro." The tragic fact of segregation is the basis
for the statement, too often heard after murder, particularly in the
South, "Why I think no more of killing a n----r, than of killing a dog."
We
petition in the first instance because we are compelled to speak by the
unending slaughter of Negroes. The fact of our ethnic origin, of which
we are proud-our ancestors were building the world's first
civilizations 3,000 years before our oppressors emerged from barbarism
in the forests of western Europe-is daily made the signal for
segregation and murder. There is infinite variety in the cruelty we
will catalogue, but each case has the common denominator of racism.
This opening statement is not the place to present our evidence in
detail. Still, in this summary of what is to be proved, we believe it
necessary to show something of the crux of our case, something of the
pattern of genocidal murder, the technique of incitement to genocide,
and the methods of mass terror.
Our
evidence begins with 1945 and continues to the present. It gains in
deadliness and in number of cases almost in direct ratio to the surge
towards war. We are compelled to hold to this six years span if this
document is to be brought into manageable proportions.
The Evidence
There
was a time when racist violence had its center in the South. But as
the Negro people spread to the north, east and west seeking to escape
the southern hell, the violence, impelled in the first instance by
economic motives, followed them, its cause also economic. Once most of
the violence against Negroes occurred in the countryside, but that was
before the Negro emigrations of the twenties and thirties. Now there is
not a great American city from New York to Cleveland or Detroit, from
Washington, the nation's capital, to Chicago, from Memphis to Atlanta or
Birmingham, from New Orleans to Los Angeles, that is not disgraced by
the wanton killing of innocent Negroes. It is no longer a sectional
phenomenon.
Once
the classic method of lynching was the rope. Now it is the policeman's
bullet. To many an American the police are the government, certainly
its most visible representative. We submit that the evidence suggests
that the killing of Negroes has become police policy in the United
States and that police policy is the most practical expression of
government policy.
Our
evidence is admittedly incomplete. It is our hope that the United
Nations will complete it. Much of the evidence, particularly of
violence, was gained from the files of Negro newspapers, from the labor
press, from the annual reports of Negro societies and established Negro
year books. A list is appended.
But
by far the majority of Negro murders are never recorded, never known
except to the perpetrators and the bereaved survivors of the victim.
Negro men and women leave their homes and are never seen alive again.
Sometimes weeks later their bodies, or bodies thought to be theirs and
often horribly mutilated, are found in the woods or washed up on the
shore of a river or lake. This is a well known pattern of American
culture. In many sections of the country police do not even bother to
record the murder of Negroes. Most white newspapers have a policy of
not publishing anything concerning murders of Negroes or assaults upon
them. These unrecorded deaths are the rule rather than the
exception-thus our evidence, though voluminous, is scanty when compared
to the actuality.
Causes Celèbres
We
Negro petitioners are anxious that the General Assembly know of our
tragic causes celèbres, ignored by the American white press but known
nevertheless the world over, but we also wish to inform it of the
virtually unknown killed almost casually, as an almost incidental aspect
of institutionalized murder.
We
want the General Assembly to know of Willie McGee, framed on perjured
testimony and murdered in Mississippi because the Supreme Court of the
United States refused even to examine vital new evidence proving his
innocence. But we also want it to know of the two Negro children, James
Lewis, Jr., fourteen years old, and Charles Trudell, fifteen, of
Natchez, Mississippi who were electrocuted in 1947, after the Supreme
Court of the United States refused to intervene.
We
want the General Assembly to know of the martyred Martinsville Seven,
who died in Virginia's electric chair for a rape they never committed,
in a state that has never executed a white man for that offense. But we
want it to know, too, of the eight Negro prisoners who were shot down
and murdered on July 11, 1947 at Brunswick, Georgia, because they
refused to work in a snake-infested swamp without boots.
We
shall inform the Assembly of the Trenton Six, of Paul Washington, the
Daniels cousins, Jerry Newsom, Wesley Robert Wells, of Rosalee Ingram,
of John Derrick, of Lieutenant Gilbert, of the Columbia, Tennessee
destruction, the Freeport slaughter, the Monroe killings-all important
cases I which Negroes have been framed on capital charges or have
actually been killed. But we want it also to know of the typical and
less known-of William Brown, Louisiana farmer, shot in the back and
killed when he was out hunting on July 19, 1947 by a white game warden
who casually announced his unprovoked crime by saying, "I just shot a
n---r. Let his folks know." The game warden, one Charles Ventrill, was
not even charged with the crime.
Sources:
(1)
"Civil Rights Congress, We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to
the United Nations for Relief From a Crime of The United States
Government Against the Negro People (New York: Civil Rights Congress,
1951), pp xi-xiii, 3-10.
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