. We charge genocide;: The historic petition to the United Nations for relief from a crime of the United States Government against the Negro people by Civil Rights Congress (U.S.)
Just over half a century ago, Paul Robeson and William L. Patterson, two giants of the struggle for African-American equality, delivered to the United Nations a petition titled, We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People.
Robeson was accompanied by signers of the petition Dec. 17, 1951, when he presented the document to a UN official in New York. The same day, Patterson, executive director of the Civil Rights Congress (CRC), which had drafted the petition, delivered copies to the UN delegates meeting in Paris.
Robeson and Patterson were attorneys and based their petition on the UN Anti-genocide Convention.
Out of the inhuman Black ghettos of American cities, the introduction began, 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.
Among the signers were the eminent African-American historian and freedom fighter Dr. W.E.B. DuBois, George Crockett Jr., later a distinguished judge in Detroit who went on to serve many terms in the U.S. Congress, New York City Communist councilman Benjamin J. Davis, Jr., Ferdinand Smith, Black leader of the National Maritime Union, Dr. Oakley C. Johnson of Louisiana, Aubrey Grossman, the labor and civil rights lawyer, and Claudia Jones, a Communist leader in Harlem later deported under the witch-hunt Walter-McCarran Act. Also signing were family members of the victims of legal lynching: Rosalee McGee, mother of Willie McGee, framed up on rape charges, and Josephine Grayson, whose husband, Francis Grayson, was one of the Martinsville Seven, framed and executed on false rape charges in Virginia
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Bio-sketch of William L. Patterson
Wm. Patterson Ben Davis William L. Patterson, the author of Ben Davis: Crusader for Negro Freedom & Socialism, has achieved world-wide renown for his militant leadership in the fight to preserve constitutional liberties and to win full civil rights for all Americans--and for the Negro people in particular.
He was responsible for the production of the Petition, We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People, and its presentation to the United Nations in Paris in 1951. In the late twenties he was National Executive Secretary of the International Labor Defense which played a leading role in the defense of the nine innocent Scottsboro Boys. In the fifties he occupied the same position in the Civil Rights Congress and led many fierce civil rights battles.
He also led the international struggle to save the life of the martyred Willie McGee of Mississippi and the Martinsville Seven of Virginia, all charged falsely with rape by racists and framed by the highest courts. In the thirties he organized the Marxist Abraham Lincoln School, in Chicago. He was twice tried for contempt of Congress for his vigorous condemnation of the racist policies of the government of the U.S.A.
He graduated from Hastings Law College of the University of California and for a period practiced law in New York City. he is presently chairman of the National Negro Commission of the Communist Party, U.S.A.
Louise Patterson dies at 97 In the People's Weekly World 7 September 1999 NEW YORK - Louise Patterson, who worked side by side with Paul Robeson, Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, her husband William L. Patterson and other great leaders during a lifetime of struggle for African American equality and socialism died in New York Aug. 27. She was 97.
At a gala birthday party for her in New York in 1980, Frank Chapman, then the Executive Director of the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression said, "She has seen the trials and tribulations of our century not as an observer but as a participant."
She was born Louise Thompson in Chicago in 1902 but her family moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in her childhood. She graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1923 with a degree in economics, among the first African-American women to graduate there.
Her future husband, William L. Patterson, a leader of the Communist Party USA, wrote in his autobiography, "The Man Who Cried Genocide," that he first met Louise at an NAACP meeting in the Oakland Auditorium in 1919. They were both students at the time. After graduating, she taught school in Arkansas and later found a teaching assignment at Hampton Institute in Virginia.
She was a delegate to the World Conference Against Racism and Anti-Semitism in Paris in 1930, as was her husband.
She had moved to New York, joining in the "Harlem Renaissance" with her apartment serving as the gathering spot for a group she called "The Vanguard."
They held discussions of Marxism and organized theater and dance performances and concerts. Among the participants were Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, for both of whom she served as a literary secretary. She also became friends with Adam Clayton Powell later elected to Congress, and Benjamin Davis, later to serve as the first "Communist Councilman from Harlem."
Her talents as an organizer and public speaker drew her into the battle in 1932 to save the Scottsboro Nine, African American youths framed up on rape charges in Alabama. She worked as an organizer of the mass movement which succeeded in blocking their execution.
When William L. Patterson took up an assignment in Chicago, Louise went there on vacation and they were married and settled in the city. Paul Robeson was a guest at the wedding.
She was elected Illinois State President of the International Workers Order (IWO), a fraternal organization that worked in defense of workers' rights.
She served with the IWO for 15 years, delivering fiery speeches to large street rallies in Chicago and New York against the rising menace of Hitler fascism. During those years, she made trips to the Soviet Union and to Spain to help build solidarity with the Spanish Republic in its civil war against Franco fascism. She also served with Robeson and Du Bois in the leadership of the Council of African Affairs.
Her husband, who served many years on the Political Bureau of the CPUSA writes warmly of Louise Patterson's abilities as an organizer. He was struggling in Chicago to set up the Abraham Lincoln School, a "broad, nonpartisan school for workers, writers, and their sympathizers," aimed at the thousands of Black workers who had migrated to Chicago from the south.
Louise had met the Black singer-actress Lena Horne. Patterson urged his wife to ask Horne to perform at a fundraiser for the school. "She came back jubilant. Lena had agreed to appear...we engaged the Chicago Opera House for the affair," Patterson wrote.
Paul Robeson introduced Lena Horne to a capacity crowd. The school opened and operated for three years.
After World War II, she worked with the Civil Rights Congress headed by her husband and was a signer of the massively documented "We Charge Genocide" petition accusing the U.S. government of crimes of genocide against the African American people. Robeson delivered the petition to the United Nations in New York and William L. Patterson delivered it to the U.N. then meeting in Paris in 1951.
She helped organize the 1949 Peekskill concerts for Paul Robeson attacked by fascist-like goons. She also organized Robeson's nationwide concert tour of Black communities after he was blacklisted.
In 1970, she served as chair of the New York Committee to Free Angela Davis.
After the victory in freeing Davis from frame-up charges, she continued to work with the National Alliance until her retirement. She is survived by her daughter, Dr. Mary Louise Patterson, two grandchildren and a great grandson.
A memorial is planned in New York, the time and place to be announced.