We Charge Genocide: Reckoning with Racial Violence in the United States

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By Nikki Bambauer

In the week since four officers of the Minneapolis Police Department murdered George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, protests have erupted across the United States. George Floyd is one of the most recent victims of police violence, but he isn’t alone. Each year, police in the U.S. kill more than 1,000 people. Victims of police murder are disproportionately Black, Indigenous, and people of color; despite making up 13 percent of the country’s population, Black people are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white people.

On May 31, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) tweeted:

“The NAACP is calling on the United Nations to step up and classify the mistreatment of Black people in the U.S. by the police as a human rights violation, aggressively calling out the U.S. government in the process, and impose sanctions if necessary.”

The NAACP is not the first to call on the UN. In December 1951, a Detroit-based civil rights organization, the Civil Rights Congress, delivered a petition to the United Nations: We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People. [1]

The goal of the petition was to demonstrate that the U.S. government was in violation of the UN Charter and the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. According to the United Nations,

“Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” [2]

 
Collage with three images: Paul Robeson submits We Charge Genocide to the Un secretariat in new york; two images of protestors in minnesota, each featuring a young person holding a sign reading “I Can’t breathe.” Text above reads “we charge genocide…

Collage with three images: Paul Robeson submits We Charge Genocide to the Un secretariat in new york; two images of protestors in minnesota, each featuring a young person holding a sign reading “I Can’t breathe.” Text above reads “we charge genocide.”

 

The authors of We Charge Genocide argue 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 petition refers to 152 documented killings and hundreds of other human rights abuses from 1945-1951, while also acknowledging that thousands of others certainly went undocumented. It describes incidents of police brutality and violence at the hands of lynch mobs. It also outlines the profound structural and institutional violence against the Black community: inequities in health care, environmental conditions, housing, employment, and education – all means to deliberately inflict conditions of life calculated to bring about its destruction.

In the petition’s introduction, the Civil Rights Congress highlights the prevalence of police violence and its connection to the U.S. government:

“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.”

Nearly seventy years have passed since the Civil Rights Congress submitted its petition to the United Nations and the U.S. has made such little progress toward racial justice.

As educators, we are in a position to move the needle forward. We must teach through the lens of human rights. We must lift up the voices of the most impacted, marginalized, and oppressed communities. We must create a space where students can process, grieve, express their anger, discuss, and work for a more just future. None of us can afford to be silent on issues of injustice ­– our students’ lives are on the line.

NOTES

[1] Civil Rights Congress, William L. Patterson, ed. 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, 1953). Full text available via Hathi Trust Digital Library, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015074197859.

Note: This book contains graphic images. Preview materials before sharing with students.

[2] UN General Assembly, Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, United Nations, General Assembly, Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, A/RES/3/260 (9 December 1948), available from http://un-documents.net/a3r260.htm