Civil Rights Congress Research Articles

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

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.

Afterword

Afterword

Strange Fruit at the United Nations

The UN was founded, in 1945, to rid the world of the scourge of war but also to recognize and to vindicate the rights of every human in virtue of their humanity. At the time of the organization’s founding, “Jim Crow” -- a scheme designed to repress African Americans -- reigned throughout the American South. Jim Crow was especially characterized by the act of lynching, the extrajudicial killing, often, of African American males. Frequently the lynching was committed by hanging its subject from a tree. Some came to know the persons hanged from the tree as “strange fruit.” During the UN’s early years, the civil rights organizations the National Negro Congress, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Civil Rights Congress sought UN assistance in vindicating African Americans’ fundamental rights. But even during some of the worst days of Jim Crow, the UN was largely silent on matters expressly related to African Americans. In 1946, four African Americans were shot execution-style by Caucasian men after one of the African Americans alleged rape against one of the soon-to-be executioners. This event received substantial international attention. In 1955, Emmett Till. This 14-year-old boy was shot, mutilated and drowned, after reportedly whistling at a Caucasian woman. This case, too, was broadcast internationally. The world was well-aware of events in the United States regarding its largest racial minority. This article explores and evaluates the opportunities taken -- and not -- by each relevant UN organ to address Jim Crow practices, during the period 1945 to 1965. Part I, “the United Nations,” discusses the UN’s founding. It also explores the reasons for creating this body and how the Charter reflects the interests of powerful stakeholders. Additionally, it discusses the functions, powers and limitations of each of its principal organs. Part II, “the United States,” discusses African American history and the laws designed to circumscribe African American life. Part III, “Strange Fruit at the United Nations,” considers the efforts within some UN entities to combat racial segregation and discrimination. It also considers the avenues that the UN might have taken to specifically address Jim Crow. This section especially focuses on the opportunities posed by the International Court of Justice.

Myrna Loy: Co‐Principal Investigator

Myrna Loy: Co‐Principal Investigator

The Liberation Imperative of Black Genocide: Blueprints from the African Diaspora in the Americas

In this article I analyze the theoretical and practical outcomes of the alliances between Black activists in South Central Los Angeles and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, organizing against the effects of white supremacy—police abuse and housing segregation among them. I develop an argument that locates state- and society-sanctioned manifestations of anti-Black genocide and posits the imperative of radical analysis, action, and liberation. To do so, I first describe the conditions under which the encounter between Black Brazilian and U.S. activists took place in 1993. Second, I draw on concepts of genocide developed by the Civil Rights Congress in the early 1950s, and by contemporary activist-intellectuals in the U.S. and Brazil. Third, I explore the applicability and the theoretical and practical importance of the concept of genocide for ongoing Black struggles. Finally, I reflect on the possibilities for liberation, and explain why, given the ubiquity and persistence of anti-Black genocide, liberation is a necessity we cannot afford not to fight for. Genocide creates the imperative of radical transformation and leaves us with no choice but to destroy the social conditions that generate it.

What you see before your eyes: documenting Raphael Lemkin's life by exploring his archival Papers, 1900–1959

There's a serious risk that a commemoration of Raphael Lemkin's work will not become an act of remembering, but an act of forgetting, obliterating what was so singular about his achievement. (Micha...

Civil Rights and Human Rights

In recent years, scholars have paid increasing attention to the African American struggle for equality and the international arena.1 Racial violence in America and de jure segregation and disfranchisement in the South, discriminatory treatment of nonwhite diplomats from newly independent countries, and the need to counter Soviet propaganda about American racism as the two superpowers competed during the Cold War for the allegiance of emerging nations exerted pressure on American presidents to address domestic civil rights. In the late 1940s and the early 1950s, the National Negro Congress (NNC), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the Civil Rights Congress (CRC) petitioned the United Nations (UN) on behalf of African Americans. International concerns encouraged the Truman administration to file supportive briefs in civil rights cases and establish the President's Committee on Civil Rights (PCCR). Scholars have also noted that foreign policy concerns led the federal government to utilize public relations exercises to challenge claims about American racism. Furthermore, the domestic Red Scare that gathered force in the late 1940s and early 1950s tarred any criticism of American inequalities with the brush of Communism, and anti-Communist attacks and investigations decimated the American left. Civil rights opponents, including the FBI, redbaited, investigated, and harassed civil rights organizations, destroying the CRC and encouraging the NAACP to adopt a strict anti-Communist policy. As Mary L. Dudziak explains: The narrow boundaries of Cold Warera civil rights politics kept discussions of broad-based social change, or a linking of race and class, off the agenda.2 In Eyes Off the Prize, Carol Anderson examines the attempts of American civil rights organizations to take their grievances before the UN and the failure of their efforts. She argues that the black left was too enamored with the Communist Party, U.S.A. and placed the party's interests before those of

"You Understand My Condition": The Civil Rights Congress in the Los Angeles African-American Community, 1946-1952

In 1946 Johnie J. Mullins wrote a frustrated letter to the editor of People's World, California's premier communist newspaper: have sold the [People's] Daily World at all the union meetings in Los Angeles.... I was one that helped get it started. Sold the Peoples' World on the WPA. But, he went on, it was no longer the same old paper: All I... read was of some Negro case.... It seems to me that you are putting the Negroes first.1 While the California Communist Party and its most important affiliate, the Civil Rights Congress (CRC), gave increasing attention in the late 1940s to defending their own civil rights in the face of virulent anticommunism, they nonetheless launched aggressive campaigns to defend the city's rapidly expanding black working-class population. Indeed, the CRC, which essentially operated as the civil rights wing of the Communist Party, did put Negroes first. Motivated by both a sincere belief in racial equality and the hope that the wartime in-migration of African Americans would provide a solid base for the Communist Party, the CRC launched a dramatic civil rights campaign in the Los Angeles black community. Though historians describe the 1930s as the heyday of communist ac-