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      “We Charge Genocide”: Revisiting black radicals’ appeals to the world community 1

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            Abstract

            In 1951, black radical William Patterson presented the United Nations with a petition, emblazoned with the title We Charge Genocide. The document charged the US government with snuffing out tens of thousands of black lives each year, through police violence and the systemic neglect of black citizens’ well-being. While historians have tended to discuss We Charge Genocide as a remarkable but brief episode, the petition built on prior attempts to invoke international law on behalf of African Americans and resonated with later generations of black activists whose political activism transcended more limited and domestic notions of civil rights. These later invocations of the genocide charge spanned the black left, including the Black Panther Party, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, James Baldwin and black feminists. This essay explores how the historical memory of racial violence, including settler colonialism and the slave trade, inspired an ideologically diverse array of organizations to each connect their experience to global histories of racial oppression. It stresses the internationalist and anticolonial perspective of the genocide charge and its proponents’ economic and transnational critique, thereby contributing to the historiographies of the long civil rights movement and black radicalism. By invoking international law, these black radicals connected the civil rights movement in the US to the struggle for human rights worldwide. Finally, the essay considers how integrating the local, national and global scales of racialized violence and its response enables historians to transnationalize the long civil rights movement paradigm.

            Author and article information

            Journal
            RA
            Radical Americas
            UCL Press
            2399-4606
            10 August 2018
            December 2018
            : 3
            : 1
            : 9
            Affiliations
            University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA; helps@ 123456umich.edu
            Article
            RA-3-9
            10.14324/111.444.ra.2018.v3.1.009
            6d79379a-c382-4b54-a923-58556bfcaaf4
            © 2018, David Helps.

            This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited • DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.ra.2018.v3.1.009.

            History
            : 26 June 2018
            Page count
            Pages: 23
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            Article
            Custom metadata
            Helps, D. ‘“We Charge Genocide”: Revisiting black radicals’ appeals to the world community.’ Radical Americas 3, 1 (2018): 9. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.ra.2018.v3.1.009.

            Sociology,Political science,Anglo-American studies,Americas,Cultural studies,History
            We Charge Genocide,William Patterson,Paul Robeson,transnationalism,African Americans,violence,anticolonialism,genocide,long civil rights movement,black internationalism

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