ORIGIN STORY
We Charge Genocide was the incendiary report that put William Patterson and Paul Robeson at the flashpoint where international Cold War and US domestic racial politics converged.
Truth Transcends Age
We Charge Genocide
the historic campaign to the United Nations to hold the US accountable for the genocide of Black Lives.
In Remembrance of Our Ancestors
We Charge Genocide
For a time Paul Robeson was the most famous and respected African American in the U.S., and probably the world. But after 1949, he was the most vilified American alive, blacklisted, spied on, threatened, and tortured by MK ULTRA, NAZI ‘depatterning’, racist, US/CIA sponsored terror.
In December 1951, William L. Patterson traveled to Paris, France (while Paul Robeson traveled to New York, US) to present a document to United Nations officials on behalf of the Civil Rights Congress (CRC). A 200-page tome, We Charge Genocide accused the United States government of the crime of genocide for failing to prosecute persons responsible for lynching or pass legislation protective of its black citizens. The document was intended to shock, and it did. Eleanor Roosevelt (NAACP board member, American delegate to the U.N. and longtime advocate of anti-lynching legislation) called the petition “ridiculous.” Mainstream civil rights organizations such as the NAACP denounced it.
In the Spirit of Mandela International Tribunal | Oct 22-25, 2021
We Still Charge Genocide In the Spirit of Mandela International Tribunal 2021
Charge Five: Public Health Racism and Disparities Sunday, October 24, 2021
02:05 Dr. MaryLouise Patterson, daughter of Champion William Patterson, provides testimony. Retired pediatrician affiliated with Weill Cornell Medicine; board member of Physicians for a National Health Program – New York Metro chapter. Introduced by Corey Purnell, student attorney at Howard University School of Law Movement Lawyering Clinic.
COINTELPRO 101 documentary
By: Freedom Archives
COINTELPRO still operates today in the US, greenlighted for state-sanctioned ethnic cleansing & intimidation.
COINTELPRO may not be a well-understood acronym but its meaning and continuing impact are absolutely central to understanding the government’s wars and repression against progressive movements. COINTELPRO represents the state’s strategy to prevent movements and communities from overturning white supremacy and creating racial justice. COINTELPRO is both a formal program of the FBI and a term frequently used to describe a conspiracy among government agencies—local, state, and federal—to destroy movements for self-determination and liberation for Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous struggles, as well as mount an institutionalized attack against allies of these movements and other progressive organizations.
COINTELPRO 101 is an educational film that will open the door to understanding this history. This documentary will introduce viewers new to this history to the basics and direct them to other resources where they can learn more. The intended audiences are the generations that did not experience the social justice movements of the sixties and seventies.
Civil Rights Congress Denounces DC Police Raid on Progressives: 1948 (The Washington Daily News-Flickr)
| History of the Campaign |
| “We Charge Genocide” The 1951 Black Lives Matter Campaign by Susan A. Glenn Mapping American Social Movements@ University of Washington web site |
| In 1951, the Civil Rights Congress (affiliated with the Communist Party) engaged in a campaign to hold the United States accountable for genocide against African Americans. These killings of unarmed Black men and women by police and by lynch mobs took place between 1945 and 1951. |
| The Civil Rights Congress drafted the 237-page petition arguing that even after 1945, the United States had been responsible for hundreds of wrongful deaths, both legal and extra-legal, as well as numerous other genocidal abuses. Leaders from the Black community, including William Patterson, Paul Robeson, and W. E. B. DuBois presented this petition to the UN in December 1951. |
| We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to the United Nations for Relief from a Crime of The United States against the Negro People (1951) ‘We Charge Genocide’: Still, no justice |
