We Charge Genocide

You know, so they would liquidate the fact that in 1952, I think it was, African people did go to the United Nations shortly after the passage of the adoption of this convention.

And there's a really near famous, infamous document, We Charge Genocide, that was presented to the United Nations.

And so...

They would ignore that, and they would ignore the fact that we held a tribune in New York City on November 13, 1982, a tribune on international...

at the National Conference of Black Lawyers convening a couple of weeks ago that we are on the 75th anniversary of another petition before the UN that they launched after the one that I'm going to read from in a moment, after this appeal to the world in 1947.

Four years later, Mary Louise Patterson, who's still with us, still fighting with Bo Fiz, her parents, along with the Du Boises and the Robesons and others, presented in 1951 a petition called We Charge Genocide.

I'm going to fight the urge to get up and go over there and get that book off the shelf because we've talked about it before.

You can look at that in our compendium when we talked about We Charge Genocide.

That was the third major petition because the Civil Rights Congress had delivered a petition to the United Nations before the one that we're going to talk about in a moment, this appeal to the world.

And all of these are in the context of Africans in the United States.

Yeah, tell me about that because that whole thing was fascinating to me.

Yeah, I mean this comes back to what I mentioned with China, right? And actually I think one useful comparison that I also use is this We Charge Genocide campaign that was filed by this African-American communist named William Patterson who argued that there was this – a structural genocide against the black population in the US.

And this was in 51 or 52 that he filed that at the UN.

And, you know, this is a time where we still had like open apartheid in the south.