William L. Patterson, Tam 1911 - Attorney & Civil Rights Pioneer
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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...
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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. 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. Jarvis Tyner, executive vice chair of the Communist Party USA, says the power of the petition was its expose of culpability in genocide by the ruling circles in the U.S. The federal government claimed it had nothing to do with the lynchings. But this petition said: ‘You knew about it and you did nothing. You knew about the super-exploitation and inhuman hardships inflicted upon the Black people and you did nothing. Your inaction, your indifference in the face of oppression means that it was policy.’ 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. In the section titled Evidence, hundreds of cases of lynching were documented. The petition charged that since the abolition of slavery at least 10,000 Black people had been lynched. The full number, it stated, will never be known because the murders were often unreported. The petition exposed a conspiracy to deny Black people the right to vote through poll taxes, literacy tests and outright terrorism. It brings to mind the vote scrubbing of 87,000 Black voters in Florida that enabled George W. Bush to steal the 2000 election. Strom Thurmond, then South Carolina governor, was listed in the rogues’ gallery. He had run for president on the segregationist Dixiecrat Party ticket in 1948. The petition quoted Thurmond denouncing the Fair Employment Practices Act requiring equal pay for equal work as patterned after a Russian law written by Joseph Stalin. Thurmond scorned a proposed law against lynching as tyranny. What could be more un-American? George W. Bush and Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) toasted Thurmond at his 100th birthday bash in Washington a few weeks ago. Lott told the crowd the country would have been better off if Thurmond had been elected president. This racist remark touched off a furor that forced Lott to step down as Senate Majority Leader, but it also laid bare the poisonous racism of the Republican Party. Patterson, a leader of the Communist Party USA, was an eminent civil rights attorney who had defended Sacco and Vanzetti. He spearheaded defense of the Scottsboro Nine, Black youth in Alabama framed up on phony rape charges in 1932. Patterson wrote in his autobiography, The Man Who Cried Genocide, that he had just returned from Richmond, Va., where he had struggled without success to save the Martinsville Seven, also falsely accused of raping a white woman. To me, it seemed clear that the Charter and Conventions of the UN had to be made the property of the American people as far as possible
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Highlights:
The courageous act of Robeson and Patterson ignited a firestorm with Cold Warriors slurring them as traitors in the service of the Soviet Union. The attempts to silence Patterson began while he was in Paris. Packages with copies...
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