Peace in Syria: A Syrian Response to the UNAC Attack on Terry Burke

Say "Peace in Syria:" A Syrian Response to the UNAC Attack on Terry Burke  by Mohja Kahf

Mohja Kahf is Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Arkansas (mentioned by us for identification only)


August 27, 2016


[Terry Burke's In These Times' article is here. - Stanley Heller.]

Two wrongs don't make a right. Being against U.S. military intervention in Syria is no excuse for supporting the brutal Assad regime.

Want to be for peace? Be for peace. Say, "Stop the killing in Syria." Say it to all parties.

Oppose bombing? Say, "Stop the bombing in Syria." Say it to Assad. Say it to the rebels and to the Kurds. Say it to ISIS and the Nusra Front. Say it to the U.S. Say it to the Russians and the Iranians. Say it to the Saudis and the Turks. Say it to everyone responsible for bombings. But don't exclude Assad when you say it. Don't exclude anyone. Stand against all the killing in Syria, and you will have found a way to stand for peace in Syria.

U.S. peace activist, be for peace. Say "break the starvation sieges in Syria." Say it to Assad, who is the besieger of dozens of Syrian towns. Say it to the rebels, who have besieged at least two towns. Say it to anyone and everyone who is starving civilians in my country of origin.

Peace activist, do you know that the Syrian regime's constitution gives police immunity and the president unchecked power? Do you know that Syrians lived under martial law from 1963 to 2011, when it was replaced by the same law with a new name? Do you know that Bashar and his ruling elite plundered the country for over a decade with neoliberal "social market reform" that lined their pockets and caused poverty to skyrocket? Surely you cannot in good conscience go on junkets sponsored by Assad and paid for by the sweat of the Syrian people, peace activist.

Do you know that in the spring and summer of 2011, hundreds of thousands of Syrians marched peacefully in over 400 towns in Syria to demand the release of prisoners of conscience, their sons and daughters? Peace activist, at least support the release of all prisoners of conscience in Syria, no matter who holds them. Surely, peace activist, you do not defend authoritarianism, whether Assadist or Islamist.

Peace activist, do you understand that masses of Syrians protested in those marches because they want the fall of this regime and their human rights back, independently of any U.S. agenda? Do you know that Hama's square was full of hundreds of thousands of Syrians who were nonviolent and nonsectarian and loudly against the regime, week after week, through July 2011? Call those hundreds of thousands of Syrians proxies of imperialist agendas. Or deny their existence; maybe Syrians imagined it all, those heady days, the hope, the camaraderie. But don't support a dictator, peace activist.

Deny that Syrians chanted "the people want the fall of the regime" from their hearts. Maybe, in your view, Syrians have no hearts. They have no heads. They have no will. Maybe Syrian crowds can only have roared "the people want the fall of the regime" because they are pawns in a war started by the CIA. Perhaps all over Syria, in the villages, in the cities, among Sunnis, Christians, Alawites, Druze, and Shia, anyone in my country of origin who hates the authoritarian regime is an agent of imperialism. Salamiya, a predominantly Ismailia Shia town, was among the first to protest, led by women; deny those women, call them foreign agitators all-but don't support Assad.

Deny the live ammunition Assad troops fired, killing hundreds of unarmed protesters month after month throughout 2011, beginning with young Husam Ayash in Dara on March 18, 2011. Deny the bombs Assad dropped from helicopters on crowded civilian quarters for nearly a year before the horrors of ISIS surfaced. Deny that barrel bombs are used by the regime to kill civilians indiscriminately. Deny that the same Syrians who protested Assad are also protesting ISIS, now squashed under two layers of authoritarianism. Surely you stand against all authoritarianism, peace activist.

Let actual Syrians with agency and voice be utterly absent from your gaze, U.S. peace activist. Ignore the activism of four Syrian women, including Catherine Altalli, a Christian Syrian, who organized the peaceful march for the families of prisoners of conscience on March 16, 2011, only to witness those gathered get electrocuted and clubbed by Assad's police. Ignore the minority women's activism which created Syria's Stop the Killing movement that sought to restore nonviolent protest throughout 2012. Ignore this part of our recent history and transform all Syrian protesters into deluded proxies or silent victims for your use, as you put on rallies in the U.S. saying displaying Assad's picture and saying "Hands Off Syria" but not to the main killer in Syria, not to all parties killing in Syria.

Deny my friend Tayseer Elkarim, who was one of the Syrians protesting. He was 31 years old. He had just struggled to finish a medical degree. He ran to his balcony in Damsacus. He heard the chant "the people want the fall of the regime." He made the decision to join the marchers. He ran into the crowd. He later treated wounded protesters in secret-unarmed protesters wounded by Assad's brutal troops. He belongs to the Syrian Nonviolence Movement, a group that Syrians formed inside Syria which I later joined from diaspora as a Syrian-born woman who holds U.S. citizenship.

Go ahead, deny that Tayseer was imprisoned by Assad from December 2011 to March 2012. Tayseer was tortured for four months. His teeth were broken in torture. He was tortured for protesting. He was tortured for treating wounded protesters. He later escaped from Syria. My American dentist saw his teeth and gave him a free root canal. "Because I can see what's been deliberately done to his teeth. He's been through enough." Tayseer is not just a Syrian victim; Tayseer is a physician. Now he treats patients in refugee camps. Meanwhile, U.S. activists go on junkets arranged by Assad to come back and deny what Tayseer, and thousands of other Syrians, have experienced.

Deny Tayseer's pain, then. Deny his broken teeth. Deny every broken tooth of every Syrian tortured by Assad. Maybe it was all a sleight of hand produced by those who want to prop the U.S. war machine. Accuse Tayseer and his fellow protesters of feeding the U.S. war machine, because that's what was on their minds, standing on their balconies in Syria. Just don't support Assad.

Deny my fellow poet Khawla Dunia, journalist from an Alawite background, who went out to protest with the first protesters. Deny the testimonials she posted from under regime bombing. Deny that our beloved Syrian television star Fadwa Suleiman, who is Alawite, marched and sang with the protesters time and again, sending out her testimonial videos from Homs' mass peaceful protests. Perhaps it was all an illusion produced in a Qatari studio, the masses of Syrians of different sect backgrounds who went out in civic unity against the regime, chanting "Sunnis and Alawites, we all want freedom!"

Deny the existence of my first cousin, Hanan Lahham, longtime nonviolence teacher. She led protest marchers in Daraya on25 April 2011. Do you know that her small Damascus school teaching children by the principles of nonviolence was closed by the regime for joining the Dignity Strike of December 2011, a strike organized by the peace activists of Syria in a collective called Freedom Days Syria?

Deny all the lived experiences of Syrians under a brutal police state, and deny the vicious suppression of their peaceful protest movement of 2011, if you must. You can only do this if you stay far away from Syrians-because all Syrians, whether for or against the Syrian protest movement, at least know it happened. All Syrians see other Syrians in their range of vision, but you don't seem to see or know any Syrians close up, U.S. peace activist.

So, U.S. peace activist, stay in your viewpoint whose beginning and end is a debate over militarism and imperialism in your own society. What we say as Syrians only seems to confuse you, in your dogged focus on your particular pro-war/anti-war debate, so don't notice that our unique struggle does not simply fill a convenient slot in that debate. If we disagree with your position in that debate, you think it means we must want the opposite of what you want. We want for Syria: an end to the killing by all parties and an end to authoritarianism of all kinds. That takes creative thinking. We wish you would join us in creative thinking. But you're adamant about not listening to Syrian peace activists.

So don't listen to a single Syrian. Don't seek out Syrian peace activists. We forgive you. Only, in your single-mindedness to be anti-war, do not support Assad.

Peace activist? Be for peace. Say "stop the killing in Syria" to everyone. And then you will have found a way.

--------------------------------------------------------------

1. Fadwa Suleiman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZT1PdiQVNI;https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT329nbsVXs
2. Women of Salamiya: http://www.newsyrian.net/ar/content/%D8%AF%D8%AC%D9%84%D8%A7%D9%84-%D9%86%D9%88%D9%81%D9%84-%D9%86%D8%B9%D9%85-%D9%83%D9%86%D8%A7-%D9%82%D8%A7%D8%AF%D8%B1%D9%8A%D9%86-%D8%B9%D9%84%D9%89-%D8%A7%D8%B3%D9%82%D8%A7%D8%B7-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A3%D8%B3%D8%AF-%D8%B3%D9%84%D9%85%D9%8A%D8%A7%D9%8B-%D9%84%D9%88-%D8%AA%D8%B1%D9%83-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A7%D9%85%D8%B1-%D9%84%D8%AA%D9%88%D8%A7%D8%B2%D9%86-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%82%D9%88%D9%89-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AF%D8%A7%D8%AE%D9%84%D9%8A
And: https://budourhassan.wordpress.com/2013/02/10/the-forgotten-revolution-in-salamiyah/
3. Husam Ayash: https://suic2011.wordpress.com/our-martyrs/
4. Hundreds of thousands protest in Syria: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/jul/22/mass-syrian-protest-assad-deaths
5. On Taysir Alkarim's imprisonment: http://www.freeweekly.com/2014/08/28/displaced-syrian-citizen-overcomes-adversity/
6. Khawla Dunia: https://www.englishpen.org/translation/books-writing-revolution-the-voices-from-tunis-to-damascus/
7. Catherine Altalli: http://www.cnn.com/…/07/world/meast/syrian-revolution-women/
8. My first cousin Hanan Lahham leading a protest in Daraya:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1U_wr1LY-PE
9. Freedom Days Syria and the Dignity Strike: https://tahriricn.wordpress.com/2013/09/16/syria-the-struggle-continues-syrias-grass-roots-civil-opposition/
10. Stop the Killing movement of Syria: http://anarchismenonviolence2.org/spip.php?article174 

Syrian poet, novelist, professor Mohja Kahf and poet Marvin X at the  University of Arkansas, Fayettevile where she teaches English and Islamic literature. She considers Marvin X the father of Muslim American literature. 

Saturday, September 7, 2013

Two Poems for Syria 

by Marvin X and Mohja Kahf

Oh, Mohja
how much water can run from rivers to sea
how much blood can soak the earth
the guns of tyrants know no end
a people awakened are bigger than bullets
there is no sleep in their eyes
no more stunted backs and fear of broken limbs
even men, women and children are humble with sacrifice
the old the young play their roles
with smiles they endure torture chambers
with laughs they submit to rape and mutilations
there is no victory for oppressors
whose days are numbered
as the clock ticks as the sun rises
let the people continue til victory
surely they smell it on their hands
taste it on lips
believe it in their hearts
know it in their minds
no more backwardness no fear
let there be resistance til victory.
--Marvin X/El Muhajir

Syrian poet/professor Dr. Mohja Kahf

Oh Marvin, how much blood can soak the earth?

The angels asked, “will you create a species who will shed blood

and overrun the earth with evil?” 

And it turns out “rivers of blood” is no metaphor: 

 

see the stones of narrow alleys in Duma

shiny with blood hissing from humans? Dark

and dazzling, it keeps pouring and pumping

from the inexhaustible soft flesh of Syrians,

and neither regime cluster bombs from the air,

nor rebel car bombs on the ground,

ask them their names before they die. 

They are mowed down like wheat harvested by machine,

and every stalk has seven ears, and every ear a hundred grains.

They bleed like irrigation canals into the earth.

Even one little girl in Idlib with a carotid artery cut

becomes a river of blood. Who knew she could be a river 

running all the way over the ocean, to you,

draining me of my heart? And God said to the angels, 

“I know what you know not.” But right now,

the angels seem right. Cut the coyness, God;

learn the names of all the Syrians.

See what your species has done.

--Mohja Kahf    

     
Marvin X on Sectarianism 

 

Marvin X

Black Arts Movement poet

photo

Gene Hazzard

 

Sectarianism has been known to spark religious violence throughout history. For many years we saw the ugly head of sectarianism in the struggle between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland, the constant bombings and killings.

In Africa violence between Muslims and Christians in Nigeria has approached genocide. Iraq is the latest hot spot of sectarian violence between Sunni and Shia Muslims. For decades the Shia had been oppressed by the Sunni minority, especially during the regime of Saddam Hussein. When he was overthrown by the US and the Shia majority took political power, naturally the Sunnis were resentful, no one likes to lose power and privilege. Because many Sunnis look upon Shia as heretics, this justifies their sectarian cleansing, even though there has been Sunni/Shia harmony, including marriages throughout the years, but presently there is migration of Shias from Sunni neighborhoods and towns and visa versa. Very little of the refugee plight has made news.

Of course the US is the cause when she installed the Shia majority, even though majority should rule, we are taught in American Democracy 101. But the resulting violence was predictable and much of it could have been prevented if the Americans had not been the "peacemakers."

Now the violence is being instigated by the insurgents who are directing their wrath against the Shia as well as the Americans. And naturally the Shia are taking revenge since they have political and military power, including their own militias integrated into the army and police but loyal to their sect leaders and imams.

We must see the Sunni violence against the Shia in the broader picture of regional politics. The Sunni regimes in Saudia Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Sudan, the Gulf States and elsewhere have no desire to see a Shia government in Iraq, however loosely allied it may be with Shia Iran. The Sunni governments have stated their opposition to a Shia expansion from the Tigris/Euphrates to the Mediterranean, uniting with the populations of Shia in Syria and Lebanon where the Hezbollah fighters are a political and military force supported by Iran.

Have no doubt that the regional Sunni regimes support the insurgency in Iraq. These regimes would rather have their young men leaving their nations to commit suicide in Iraq rather than be part of the opposition within their authoritarian regimes. Better their sons fight the infidel Americans and heretic Shia.

Of course the historical dispute between the Sunni and Shia began in 632AD upon the death of prophet Muhammad (PBUH). Thus this Sunni/Shia conflict is much more outstanding than colonialism, including the neo-colonial Americans. There is no hatred like religious hatred. We can see that violence between Sunnis and Shia has surpassed that between Sunnis and the Christian Americans, supposedly the enemy of all Muslims. For sure, Americans were the catalyst, but the roots of the present sectarian violence began over succession to the prophet Muhammad (PBUH).

The Sunnis said the successor should be selected from among the people, Abu Bakr. The Shia said it should be from the prophet's bloodline, Ali. The Sunnis won out and labeled the Shia heretics, especially when they elevated the status of Imam Ali and future Shia Imams to the level of the Caliphs or rulers after the prophet, including veneration of their tombs in various Shia holy cities such as Qum in Iran, Najaf and Karbala in Iraq. Several Shia imams were assassinated, including Ali and Hussein.

There are major Shia rituals that celebrate the martyrdom of their imams. The Shia feeling of lost is similar to the feeling of lost among Sunni Muslims in America about Malcolm X allegedly being assassinated by the Nation of Islam. This feeling of lost is shared by much of the African American community. 

Malcolm's death caused a great division that has yet to heal and may never heal, despite the unifying efforts of Farakhan with his Million Man Marches and other efforts.

Perhaps we can understand the Sunni/Shia struggle from this perspective. There are some Blacks who hate other Blacks as a result of the Malcolm X affair more than they hate the white man for all his centuries of evil and wickedness against Blacks. For the US government's role in the Malcolm affair—and have no doubt about their involvement, they benefited by divide and conquer, that classic Willie Lynch slave master tricknology.

Sectarian violence in Iraq may continue unabated, for it is beyond civil war, beyond American occupation, but deeply rooted in religiosity, myth and ritual. Even Sunni fear of Shia regional expansion is rooted in Shia eschatology or end time. This is evident in pronouncements from the Shia regime in Iran, boldly determined to pursue a nuclear weapons future and calling for the destruction of Israel, motivated by their belief the time has arrived for Shia geo-political and spiritual domination, and certainly Iraq will play a role in this Shia myth-ritual drama.

This drama has implications far beyond any American notion of installing democracy in Iraq or anywhere else in the region, for people are motivated by mythology and prophecy, political aspirations being secondary. It is their spiritual aspirations that are primary. Shia Iran appears prepared to commit mass suicide challenging the Americans and Europeans over nuclear technology, even though the Iranians have every right to posses the Islamic bomb, just as we have the Jewish bomb and the Christian bomb. I say get rid of all the nuclear weapons or level the playing field as in the wild wild west: let everybody pack.

As per Iraq, it doesn't matter whether the Americans stay or go, they have opened Pandora's box and mean spirits are blowing in the desert winds. Only Allah knows how these issues will be resolved. Perhaps the Sunnis and Shias shall fight until they tire of killing, then reconcile in the manner of Isaiah, "Let us reason together."

Source: Beyond Religion, Toward Spirituality, Black Bird Press, 2007  (c) 2006 by Marvin X (El Muhajir)

*   *   *   *   *

Marvin X has given permission to Harvard University to publish his poem "For El Haji Rasul Taifa" from Love and War: Poems by Marvin X (1995). The poem will appear in The Encyclopedia of Islam in America Volume II, Greenwood Press, edited by Dr. Jocelyne Cesari of Harvard's Islam in the West Program. Mr. X is co-editor of the forthcoming anthology Muslim American Literature, University of Arkansas Press, edited by Dr. Mojah Khaf. He is also in the forthcoming Muslim American Drama, Temple University.

from Chickenbones, posted 19 June 2006

Long history of the US interfering with elections elsewhere

World Views analysis

The long history of the U.S. interfering with elections elsewhere

By Ishaan Tharoor October 13, 2016

 The most infamous episodes include the ousting of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 — whose government was replaced by an authoritarian monarchy favorable to Washington — the removal and assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba in 1961, and the violent toppling of socialist Chilean President Salvador Allende, whose government was swept aside in 1973 by a military coup led by the ruthless Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

Marvin X recruited Nadar Ali for the Nation of Islam. He became Director of Imports
and traveled the world importing fish, especially Whiting, for the NOI. He happened to
be in Chile on business when the US instigated the overthrow of the democratically elected President Allende. Nadar watched the coup from the balcony of his hotel room. 

Marvin X interviewing Guyanese Prime Minister Forbes Burnham at his Georgetown residence. The US allowed his Black Power government to reign as the alternative to the opposition Communist leader Cheddi Jagen. The US did not want a Cuban style government in South America. Burnham and the US are implicated in the assassination of Black scholar Dr. Walter Rodney. Of  course the Jonestown massacre occurred on PM Burnham's watch. Marvin X's interview appeared in Muhammad Speaks and The Black Scholar Magazine, February, 1973.

U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger shakes hands with Chilean Foreign Minister Ismale Huerta Diaz during break in the Latin Foreign Ministers Conference in Mexico City, Feb. 22, 1974. (Ed Kolenovsky?AP)

 

One of the more alarming narratives of the 2016 U.S. election campaign is that of the Kremlin's apparent meddling. Last week, the United States formally accused the Russian government of stealing and disclosing emails from the Democratic National Committee and the individual accounts of prominent Washington insiders.

The hacks, in part leaked by WikiLeaks, have led to loud declarations that Moscow is eager for the victory of Republican nominee Donald Trump, whose rhetoric has unsettled Washington's traditional European allies and even thrown the future of NATO — Russia's bête noire — into doubt.

Leading Russian officials have balked at the Obama administration's claim. In an interview with CNN on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov dismissed the suggestion of interference as “ridiculous,” though he said it was “flattering” that Washington would point the finger at Moscow. At a time of pronounced regional tensions in the Middle East and elsewhere, there's no love lost between Kremlin officials and their American counterparts.

To be sure, there's a much larger context behind today's bluster. As my colleague Andrew Roth notes, whatever their government's alleged actions in 2016, Russia's leaders enjoy casting aspersions on the American democratic process. And, in recent years, they have also bristled at perceived U.S. meddling in the politics of countries on Russia's borders, most notably in Ukraine.

While the days of its worst behavior are long behind it, the United States does have a well-documented history of interfering and sometimes interrupting the workings of democracies elsewhere. It has occupied and intervened militarily in a whole swath of countries in the Caribbean and Latin America and fomented coups against democratically elected populists.

The most infamous episodes include the ousting of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 — whose government was replaced by an authoritarian monarchy favorable to Washington — the removal and assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba in 1961, and the violent toppling of socialist Chilean President Salvador Allende, whose government was swept aside in 1973 by a military coup led by the ruthless Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

For decades, these actions were considered imperatives of the Cold War, part of a global struggle against the Soviet Union and its supposed leftist proxies. Its key participants included scheming diplomats like John Foster Dulles and Henry Kissinger, who advocated aggressive, covert policies to stanch the supposedly expanding threat of communism. Sometimes that agenda also explicitly converged with the interests of U.S. business: In 1954, Washington unseated Guatemala's left-wing president, Jacobo Arbenz, who had had the temerity to challenge the vast control of the United Fruit Co., a U.S. corporation, with agrarian laws that would be fairer to Guatemalan farmers. The CIA went on to install and back a series of right-wing dictatorships that brutalized the impoverished nation for almost half a century.

A young Che Guevara, who happened to be traveling through Guatemala in 1954, was deeply affected by Arbenz's overthrow. He later wrote to his mother that the events prompted him to leave “the path of reason” and would ground his conviction in the need for radical revolution over gradual political reform.

Aside from its instigation of coups and alliances with right-wing juntas, Washington sought to more subtly influence elections in all corners of the world. And so did Moscow. Political scientist Dov Levin calculates that the “two powers intervened in 117 elections around the world from 1946 to 2000 — an average of once in every nine competitive elections.”

In the late 1940s, the newly established CIA cut its teeth in Western Europe, pushing back against some of the continent's most influential leftist parties and labor unions. In 1948, the United States propped up Italy's centrist Christian Democrats and helped ensure their electoral victory against a leftist coalition, anchored by one of the most powerful communist parties in Europe. CIA operatives gave millions of dollars to their Italian allies and helped orchestrate what was then an unprecedented, clandestine propaganda campaign: This included forging documents to besmirch communist leaders via fabricated sex scandals, starting a mass letter-writing campaign from Italian Americans to their compatriots, and spreading hysteria about a Russian takeover and the undermining of the Catholic Church.

“We had bags of money that we delivered to selected politicians, to defray their political expenses, their campaign expenses, for posters, for pamphlets,” recounted F. Mark Wyatt, the CIA officer who handled the mission and later participated in more than 2½ decades of direct support to the Christian Democrats.
This template spread everywhere: CIA operative Edward G. Lansdale, notorious for his efforts to bring down the North Vietnamese government, is said to have run the successful 1953 campaign of Philippines President Ramon Magsaysay. Japan's center-right Liberal Democratic Party was backed with secret American funds through the 1950s and the 1960s. The U.S. government and American oil corporations helped Christian parties in Lebanon win crucial elections in 1957 with briefcases full of cash.

In Chile, the United States prevented Allende from winning an election in 1964. “A total of nearly four million dollars was spent on some fifteen covert action projects, ranging from organizing slum dwellers to passing funds to political parties,” detailed a Senate inquiry in the mid-1970s that started to expose the role of the CIA in overseas elections. When it couldn't defeat Allende at the ballot box in 1970, Washington decided to remove him anyway.

“I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people,” Kissinger is said to have quipped. Pinochet's regime presided over years of torture, disappearances and targeted assassinations. (In a recent op-ed, Chilean-American novelist Ariel Dorfman called on Hillary Clinton to repudiate Kissinger if she wins the presidential election.)

After the end of the Cold War, the United States has largely brought its covert actions into the open with organizations like the more benign National Endowment for Democracy, which seeks to bolster civil society and democratic institutions around the world through grants and other assistance. Still, U.S. critics see the American hand in a range of more recent elections, from Honduras to Venezuela to Ukraine.

Meanwhile, the threat of foreign meddling in U.S. elections is not restricted to fears of Russian plots. In the late 1990s, the specter of illicit Chinese funds dominated concerns about Democratic campaign financing. But some observers cautioned others not to be too indignant.

“If the Chinese indeed tried to influence the election here . . . the United States is only getting a taste of its own medicine,” Peter Kornbluh, director of the National Security Archive, which is affiliated with George Washington University, said in a 1997 interview with the New York Times. “China has done little more than emulate a long pattern of U.S. manipulation, bribery and covert operations to influence the political trajectory of countless countries around the world.”
Read more:
100 years ago, the U.S. invaded and occupied this country. Can you name it?
'This was not an accident. This was a bomb.'
The story of one of the Cold War's greatest unsolved mysteries

65th Anniversary of "We Charge Genocide!"

65th Anniversary of "We Charge Genocide!" 1951 American report to the United Nations  by Heather Gray December 17, 2016  URL: Justice Initiative International hmcgray@earthlink.net          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) Black Past 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. - See more at: http://www.blackpast.org/we-charge-genocide-historic-petition-united-nations-relief-crime-united-states-government-against#sthash.vSeM5EOr.dpuf (2) Full text of "We Charge Genocide" petition from the Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement website listed below: Copyright © Civil Rights Congress, 1951 Full Text (note that some of these PDF files are large): We Charge Genocide: Cover & front matter We Charge Genocide: Introduction We Charge Genocide: The Opening Statement We Charge Genocide: The Law and the Indictment We Charge Genocide: The Evidence We Charge Genocide: The Evidence (Continued)