In the 1950s, the U.S. federal government’s decision to back desegregation was motivated in part by its global image, as historian Mary Dudziak revealed in her book Cold War Civil Rights. In 2021, the State Department no longer worries about Soviet propaganda about lynchings. But since Floyd’s murder, China has worked to exploit U.S. racism while fighting for influence in Africa and Latin America. As one of the independent commission’s coordinator pointed out, “The United States does not want to be condemned before the United Nations, or before the international community.”
Black activists in the U.S. have long understood this. Since World War II, civil rights formations as ideologically different as the NAACP and Black Panther Party have leaned on international opinion to serve their causes. In the Civil Rights era, this meant overthrowing Jim Crow—which enshrined Black people’s status as second-class citizens under U.S. law. The country had defeated Nazi Germany and global fascism, while refusing to protect the rights of its own minorities. As Howard University professor Rayford Logan once remarked, if the nation intended to spread democracy, “it might not be a bad idea to have some democracy to defend.”
Nothing made this hypocrisy clearer than the United States’ rampant disregard for Black life. On Dec. 17, 1951, the Black American activist William Patterson arrived at the United Nations General Assembly, which was then located in Paris. Under his arm he held a volume bearing the title “We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to the United Nations for Relief From a Crime of the United States Government Against the Negro People.” To call it a petition was perhaps misleading: The almost 250-page document was an extensive catalogue of human rights abuses, documented in devastating detail. In the preceding five years, Patterson estimated, some 32,000 Black Americans died each year due to being denied the jobs, health care, education, and housing afforded to white people. The petition also exposed inequality in the U.S. criminal justice system, including “police murders of Black men.” By subjecting its own citizens to “premature death,” the United States was committing genocide, according to the petition. If Patterson’s own government wouldn’t act, perhaps the U.N. would.
The case of “We Charge Genocide” holds an important lesson for human rights advocates today. When Patterson landed in Paris, the United States had not yet ratified the Genocide Convention (it did so only in 1988). This was not an oversight on the part of the petition’s supporters, however. Its signatories were some of the country’s most brilliant thinkers of the period, including writer, sociologist, and activist W. E. B. Du Bois; legendary actor, singer, and activist Paul Robeson; and Charlotta Bass, the first Black woman to run for the vice presidency, which she did in 1952. Robeson was set to deliver the petition until the State Department confiscated his passport.