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`We Charge Genocide!' - 50 years later
While the NAACP was laying the foundation for a frontal assault on Jim Crow in 1951, William L. Patterson and Paul Robeson, both of whom had formal legal training, filed a petition before the recently formed United Nations, charging the United States with not only engaging in genocidal acts against descendants of enslaved Africans in this country, but also with sponsoring and promoting a genocidal program against this historically oppressed group.
Genocide is more pernicious than either racism or prejudice. Before 1944, the term failed to appear in any generally used dictionary, encyclopedia or textbook in this country. According to the United Nations, genocide means not only acts which are intended or have the effect of causing physical destruction of a group, but it is also the establishment of conditions which are intended to or have the effect of physically destroying a group. Menticide is also a form of genocide. Genocide is, perforce, omnicide. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide became effective on Jan. 12, 1951, with the United States as a dissenter in the United Nations.
The acts and conditions of...