Radical Americas Article “We Charge Genocide”: Revisiting black radicals’ appeals to the world community1 David Helps University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA;
[email protected] How to Cite: Helps, D.“‘We Charge Genocide”: Revisiting black radicals’ appeals to the world community.’ Radical Americas 3, 1 (2018): 9. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.ra.2018.v3.1.009. Acceptance date: 26 June 2018; Publication date: 10 August 2018 Peer review: This article has been peer reviewed through the journal’s standard double blind peer-review, where both the reviewers and authors are anonymised during review. Copyright: c 2018, David Helps. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited • DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.444.ra.2018.v3.1.009. Open access: Radical Americas is a peer-reviewed open access journal. Abstract In 1951, black radical William Patterson presented the United Nations with a petition, emblazoned with the title We Charge Genocide. The document charged the US government with snuffing out tens of thousands of black lives each year, through police violence and the systemic neglect of black citizens’ well-being. While historians have tended to discuss We Charge Genocide as a remarkable but brief episode, the petition built on prior attempts to invoke international law on behalf of African Americans and resonated with later generations of black activists whose political activism transcended more limited and domestic notions of civil rights.