Gender violence as genocide: the Rosa Lee Ingram case and We Charge Genocide petition

Denise Lynn

doi:10.14324/111.444.ra.2022.v7.1.001

Abstract

In 1951, the Civil Rights Congress (CRC), under the leadership of William Patterson, submitted a 200+-page petition to the United Nations charging the United States with genocide against Black Americans. The meticulously researched petition documented hundreds of cases of assault, legal lynching (the use of the legal system to deny Black Americans justice) and death that all amounted to a system in which the federal government failed to protect Black Americans against injustice. Sexual assault figured prominently in the petition. This article looks specifically at the case of Rosa Lee Ingram as exemplary of both legal lynching and gender violence that were essential to the argument that the United States was guilty of genocide. For Patterson and the CRC, sexual violence and the threat of sexual assault, as in the Ingram case, was symptomatic of a larger terror campaign that focused on Black Americans, circumscribing their rights, their lives and safety, and confirming a white supremacist system that punished Black male sexuality and claimed Black women’s sexuality for its own.

Highlights

On 4 November 1947, widowed sharecropper Rosa Lee Ingram was nearly assaulted by white sharecropper and neighbour John Stratford
William Patterson participated in the campaign to bring the National Committee to Free the Ingram Family (NCFIF) petition to UN member nations; when that failed, he included the Ingram case in the We Charge Genocide petition, which formally charged the United States government with its failure to guarantee Black Americans the rights of citizenship
As American domestic and foreign policy sought to secure the white family as a bulwark against communist revolution, it ignored that Black families were afforded neither the same respect nor protection

Summary

Introduction

On 4 November 1947, widowed sharecropper Rosa Lee Ingram was nearly assaulted by white sharecropper and neighbour John Stratford. In 1951, the Civil Rights Congress (CRC), under the leadership of William Patterson, submitted a 200+-page petition to the United Nations charging the United States with genocide against Black Americans.

Results

Conclusion