We Shall Be Free!: Black Communist Protests in Seven Voices

William L. Patterson

William L. Patterson Born in San Francisco on August 27, 1891,William L. Patterson was a Marxist attorney, writer, and civil-rights advocate. On his mother’s side of the family, he descended from Virginia slaves. Prior to the eruption of the American Civil War, Patterson’s mother was liberated and sent west to California, where she met William’s father. Rising from a povertystricken background, young William graduated from high school in 1911 and attended the University of California for a time without graduating. In 1915, Patterson enrolled at the Hastings College of Law (University of California, San Francisco).While attending law school, he began to read The Crisis, the organ of the NAACP. Subsequently, he cultivated an interest in several Marxist and leftist publications, such as The Masses and The Messenger. After earning a law degree in 1919, Patterson joined the NAACP. Patterson also traveled to London after he graduated from law school and briefly collaborated with Robert Lansbury of the London Daily Times (British Labor Party). Inspired by an internationalist perspective on race and class, Patterson returned to the United States, moved to New York City, and threw himself into the fight for racial justice and equal rights.As a crusading attorney for working-class African Americans and immigrants, he worked on behalf of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti and the Scottsboro defendants. 110 ■ William L. Patterson Soon after World War II and the Holocaust, during the depths of the Cold War, Patterson stepped onto the international stage with his landmark study “We Charge Genocide,” which he presented to the United Nations General Assembly in 1951. In the study, a remarkable historical document, the young black communist charged the U.S. government with the genocide of the African American people. His detailed analysis listed hundreds of instances of lynching, killing, bombing, and torture of African Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It also offered countless, mind-numbing details of white racial crimes against blacks in all regions of the United States. Patterson published other noteworthy works, including Ben Davis: Crusader for Negro Freedom and Socialism and The Man Who Cried Genocide. During the 1960s, he defended Angela Davis and leaders of the Black Panther Party who were subjected to arrest. Patterson also served as executive secretary of the International Labor Defense and as a leader of the Civil Rights Congress, organizations that fought for African American rights. He died in NewYork City in 1980. ■ ■ ■ Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University We Charge Genocide Excerpt from William L. Patterson, Civil Rights Congress (U.S.). We Charge Genocide; The Historic Petition to the United Nations for Relief from a Crime of the United States Government against the Negro People (NewYork: International Publishers, 1951; reprint 1970). Introduction Out of the inhuman black ghettos of American cities, out of the cotton plantations of the South, comes this record of mass slayings on the basis of race, of lives deliberately warped and distorted by the willful creation of conditions making for premature death, poverty and disease. It is a record that calls aloud for condemnation. For an end to these terrible injustices that constitute a daily and everincreasing violation of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. William L. Patterson ■ 111 It is sometimes incorrectly thought that genocide means the complete and definitive destruction of a race or people.The Genocide Convention, however, adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 9, 1948, defines genocide as any killings on the basis of race, or, in its specific words, as “killing members of the group.” Any intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national , racial, ethnic or religious group is genocide, according to the Convention.Thus, the Convention states, “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group” is genocide as well as “killing members of the group.” We maintain, therefore, 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 Civil Rights Congress has prepared and submits this petition to the General Assembly of the United Nations on behalf of the Negro people in the interest of peace and democracy, charging the Government of the United States of America with violation of the Charter of the United Nations and the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment...