Black genocide conspiracy theory

In the United States, black genocide is the notion that the mistreatment of African Americans by both the United States government and white Americans, both in the past and the present, amounts to genocide. The decades of lynchings and long-term racial discrimination were first formally described as genocide by a now-defunct organization, the Civil Rights Congress, in a petition which it submitted to the United Nations in 1951. In the 1960s, Malcolm X accused the US government of engaging in a genocide against black people, citing long-term injustice, cruelty, and violence against blacks by whites.

Some accusations of genocide have been described as conspiracy theories. In response to the War on Poverty legislation which was proposed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in the mid-1960s, legislation which included the public funding of the Pill for the poor, at the first Black Power Conference, which was held in July 1967, family planning ( birth control) was said to be "black genocide." After abortion was more widely legalized in 1970, some black militants named abortion specifically as part of the conspiracy theory. Most African-American women were not convinced of a conspiracy, and rhetoric about race genocide faded. However, 1973 media revelations about decades of government-sponsored compulsory sterilization led some to say that this was part of a plan for black genocide. Other events around this time period were also declared methods of black genocide, such as the War on Drugs, War on Crime, and War on Poverty, which had detrimental effects on the black community.

During the Vietnam War, the increasing use of black soldiers in combat provided another basis for the accusation that the government was engaging in a "black genocide." In recent decades, the disproportionately high black prison population has also been cited in support of the claim that a black genocide is being committed.

Slavery as genocide

Slavery in general and the Atlantic slave trade in particular was an archetypal example of a crime against humanity in the 19th century, a larger category of crimes that was expanded when genocide was included in it in the 20th century. George Washington Williams popularized the concept of crimes against humanity with regard to the history of slavery in the United States and during the Congo Free State propaganda war of the 1890s, the "laws of humanity" were included in the Martens Clause of the Hague Conventions and as a result, they were legally enshrined in international law.

Canadian scholar Adam Jones characterizes the mass death of millions of Africans during the Atlantic slave trade as a genocide due to the fact that it was " one of the worst holocausts in human history" because it resulted in 15 to 20 million deaths according to one estimate, and he has also stated that arguments to the contrary, such as the argument that "it was in slave owners' interest to keep slaves alive, not exterminate them", is "mostly sophistry", due to the fact that "the killing and destruction were intentional, whatever the incentives to preserve survivors of the Atlantic passage for labor exploitation. To revisit the issue of intent already touched on: If an institution is deliberately maintained and expanded by discernible agents, though all are aware of the hecatombs of casualties it is inflicting on a definable human group, then why should this not qualify as genocide?"

In his book, ''The Broken Heart of America'', Harvard professor Walter Johnson wrote that on many occasions throughout the history of the enslavement of Africans in the US, many instances of genocide occurred, instances which included the separation of men from their wives, effectively reducing the size of the African-American population. For a black American who lived during the era of U.S. slavery, no rights were guaranteed, whether they were personally enslaved or not.

According to author Khalil Gibran Muhammad, the majority of white people who envisioned the coming of a day when black people would be deemed legally equal to white people were abolitionists. When enslaved African Americans were emancipated, many of their white fellow Americans were uncomfortable with the idea of these two races living amongst each other, coexisting in the same nation with the equal rights. Many white Americans began advocating for the colonization of African nations with black Americans.

Jim Crow as genocide

Petition to the United Nations

The United Nations (UN) was formed in 1945. The UN debated and adopted a Genocide Convention in late 1948, holding that genocide was the " intent to destroy, in whole or in part", a racial group. Based on the "in part" definition, the Civil Rights Congress (CRC), a group composed of African Americans with Communist affiliations, presented to the UN in 1951 a petition called "We Charge Genocide." The petition listed 10,000 unjust deaths of African Americans in the nine decades since the American Civil War. It described lynching, mistreatment, murder and oppression by whites against blacks, concluding that the US government was refusing to address "the persistent, widespread, institutionalized commission of the crime of genocide". The petition was presented to the UN convention in Paris by CRC leader William L. Patterson, and in New York City by the singer and actor Paul Robeson who was a civil rights activist and a Communist member of CRC.

The Cold War raised American concerns about Communist expansionism. The CRC petition was viewed by the US government as being against America's best interests with regard to fighting Communism. The petition was ignored by the UN; many of the charter countries looked to the US for guidance and were not willing to arm the enemies of the US with more propaganda about its failures in domestic racial policy. American responses to the petition were various: Radio journalist Drew Pearson spoke out against the supposed "Communist propaganda" before it was presented to the UN.

Professor Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer who had helped draft the UN Genocide Convention, said that the CRC petition was a misguided effort which drew attention away from the Soviet Union's genocide of Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) issued a statement saying that there was no black genocide even though serious matters of racial discrimination certainly did exist in America. Walter Francis White, leader of the NAACP, wrote that the CRC petition contained "authentic" instances of discrimination, mostly taken from reliable sources. He said, "Whatever the sins of the nation against the Negro—and they are many and gruesome—genocide is not among them." UN Delegate Eleanor Roosevelt said that it was "ridiculous" to characterize long term discrimination as genocide.

The "We Charge Genocide" petition received more notice in international news than in domestic US media. French and Czech media carried the story prominently, as did newspapers in India. In 1952, African-American author J. Saunders Redding traveling in India was repeatedly asked questions about specific instances of civil rights abuse in the US, and the CRC petition was used by Indians to rebut his assertions that US race relations were improving. In the US, the petition faded from public awareness by the late 1950s. In 1964, Malcolm X and his Organization of Afro-American Unity, citing the same lynchings and oppression described in the CRC petition, began to prepare their own petition to the UN asserting that the US government was engaging in genocide against black people. The 1964 Malcolm X speech " The Ballot or the Bullet" also draws from "We Charge Genocide".

After World War II and following many years of mistreatment of African Americans by white Americans, the US government's official policies regarding this mistreatment shifted significantly. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said in 1946 that negative international opinion about US racial policies helped to pressure the US into alleviating the mistreatment of ethnic minorities. In 1948, President Harry S. Truman signed an order desegregating the military, and black citizens increasingly challenged other forms of racial discrimination. In 1948, even if African Americans worked side by side with their white counterparts, they were often segregated into separate neighborhoods due to redlining.

Lynching and other racial killings

Walter Johnson has written that the first lynching to occur in the United States was that of Francis McIntosh, a free man of black and white ancestry. He argued that this lynching ignited a series of them, all with the goal of " ethnic cleansing" and that Abraham Lincoln, who was not yet president, was more concerned by the vigilantism of the lynching than the murder itself. Lincoln referred to McIntosh as "obnoxious" in his 1838 speech later dubbed the Lyceum Address. According to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice 4,400 black people killed in lynchings and other racial killings between 1877 and 1950.

Brandy Marie Langley argued, "The physical killing of black people in America, at this time period, was consistent with Lemkin's original idea of genocide." Famous literary and social activist figures such as Mark Twain and Ida B. Wells were compelled to speak out about lynchings. Twain's essay about lynchings titled "The United States of Lyncherdom," a remark on widespread occurrence of lynchings in the US. According to Christopher Waldrep, the media and racist whites, both inadvertently and not, exaggerated the presence of black crime as a method of appeasing their own guilt surrounding the lynchings African Americans.

Sterilization

Beginning in 1907, some US state legislatures passed laws allowing for the compulsory sterilization of criminals, mentally retarded people, and institutionalized mentally ill patients. At first, African Americans and white Americans suffered sterilization in roughly equal ratio. By 1945, some 70,000 Americans had been sterilized in these programs. In the 1950s, the federal welfare program Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) was criticized by some whites who did not want to subsidize poor black families. College course study guide States such as North and South Carolina performed sterilization procedures on low-income black mothers who were giving birth to their second child. The mothers were told that they would have to agree to have their tubes tied or their welfare benefits would be cancelled, along with the benefits of the families they were born into. Because of such policies, especially prevalent in Southern states, sterilization of African Americans in North Carolina increased from 23% of the total in the 1930s and 1940s to 59% at the end of the 1950s, and rose further to 64% in the mid-1960s.

In mid-1973 news stories revealed the forced sterilization of poor black women and children, paid for by federal funds. Two girls of the Relf family in Mississippi, deemed mentally incompetent at ages 12 and 14, and also 18-year-old welfare recipient Nial Ruth Cox of North Carolina, were prominent cases of involuntary sterilization. ''Jet'' magazine presented the story under the headline "Genocide". Critics said these stories were publicized by activists against legal abortion. According to Gregory Price, government policies led to higher rates of sterilization amongst black Americans than white on the basis of racist beliefs. He writes that in the early 1900s, the goal of eugenicists was to create a biologically fit population, but and that these standards of biological fitness deliberately excluded black people, who were claimed to not be capable of making legitimate contributions to the national economy.

Systemic racism as genocide

We Charge Genocide estimated 30,000 more black people died each year due to various racist policies and that black people had an 8-year shorter life span than white Americans. In this vein, Historian Matthew White estimates that 3.3 million more non-white people died from 1900 up to the 1960s than they would have if they had died at the same rate as white people.

War's effects on black communities

African Americans pushed for equal participation in US military service in the first part of the 20th century and especially during World War II. Finally, President Harry S. Truman signed legislation to integrate the US military in 1948. However, Selective Service System deferments, military assignments, and especially the recruits accepted through Project 100,000 resulted in a greater representation of blacks in combat in the Vietnam War in the second half of the 1960s. African Americans represented 11% of the US population but 12.6% of troops sent to Vietnam. Cleveland Sellers said that the drafting of poor black men into war was "a plan to commit calculated genocide". Former SNCC chairman Stokely Carmichael, black congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and SNCC member Rap Brown agreed. In October 1969, King's widow Coretta Scott King spoke at an anti-war protest held at the primarily black Morgan State College in Baltimore. Campus leaders published a statement against what they termed "black genocide" in Vietnam, blaming President Richard Nixon in the US as well as President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu and Vice President Nguyễn Cao Kỳ from South Vietnam.

Author James Forman Jr. has called the War on Drugs "a misstep hatis so damaging that future generations are left shaking their heads in disbelief." According to Forman, the war on drugs has had widespread effects, including an increased punitory criminal justice system that disproportionately affected Black Americans, especially those in low-income neighborhoods. Forman further writes that one consequence is that, even though black and white people have similar rates of drug use, black people are more likely to be punished for it by the judicial system.

Elizabeth Hinton writes that two other "wars" that have had detrimental effects on the black community - the War on Poverty and War on Crime. According to Hinton black men are imprisoned at a rate of 1 in 11. This topic is also explored in Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. Alexander argues that, despite many Americans wanting to believe that the election of President Obama ushered in a new age where race no longer mattered, or at least not as much, America is still deeply affected by its racial history. Alexander writes that there has been a "systemic breakdown of black and poor communities devastated by mass unemployment, social neglect, economic abandonment, and intense police surveillance." President Lyndon B. Johnson, stated in a commencement speech delivered at Howard University that there is a stark contrast between black and white poverty. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes that the contrast is a result of systemic injustices carried out over the course of centuries against the black community.

Prison

In 1969, H. Rap Brown wrote in his autobiography, '' Die Nigger Die!'', that American courts "conspire to commit genocide" against blacks by putting a disproportionate number of them in prison. Political scientist Joy A. James wrote that "antiblack genocide" is the motivating force which explains the way that US prisons are filled largely with black prisoners. Author and former prisoner Mansfield B. Frazier contends that the rumor in American ghettos "that whites are secretly engaged in a program of genocide against the black race" is given "a measure of validity" by the number of "black men of child-producing age who are imprisoned for crimes for which men of other races are not.

The book New Directions for Youth Development describes the school-to-prison pipeline along with ways to end it. It states that "The public school system in the United States, like the country as a whole, is plagued by vast inequalities—that all too frequently are defined along lines of race and class." Over time, as schools have become harsher in enforcing their policies and disciplining students, the criminal justice system has also become harsher in dealing with children. The book states that "Since 1992, fortyfive states have passed laws making it easier to try juveniles as adults, and thirty-one have stiffened sanctions against youths for a variety of offenses".

The way in which certain drugs are criminalized also factors into the large disparities in involvement in the prison system between black and white communities. For instance "conviction for crack selling (more heavily sold and used by people of color) esultsin a sentence 100 times more severe than for selling the same amount of powder cocaine (more heavily sold and used by whites)."

Conspiracy theories

Birth control

Some observers have identified a falling birth rate as a situation which is harmful to a race of people; for instance, in 1905, Teddy Roosevelt said that it was "race suicide" for white Americans if educated white women continued to have fewer children. Certain African-American leaders also taught that political power came with greater population. In 1934, Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association resolved that birth control constituted black genocide.

The combined oral contraceptive pill, popularly known as "the Pill", was approved for sale as a medicine in US markets in 1957, and in 1961, the use of it for birth control was also approved. In 1962, civil rights activist Whitney Young told the National Urban League not to support birth control for blacks. Marvin Davies, leader of the Florida chapter of the NAACP, said that black women should reject birth control and produce more babies so that black political influence would increase in the future.

Ideas of reproductive fitness were still at the center of American family planning in the 1960s. Physicians preferred to prescribe the Pill to white middle-class women and the IUD to poor women, especially poor women of color, because the IUD granted them greater control over "unfit" women's behavior. Guttmacher viewed the IUD as an effective method of contraception for individuals in "underdeveloped areas where two things are lacking: one, money and the other sustained motivation.

Once the method was approved for use in the United States, the majority of Pill users were white and middle class women. In part, this trend reflects doctors' preference to prescribe the Pill to members of this population, and it also reflects the cost of the drug. Until the late 1960s, the Pill was prohibitively expensive for working-class and poor women.

After President Lyndon B. Johnson passed legislation for government funding of birth control as a part of his War on Poverty in 1964, Black militants became more concerned about a possible government-sponsored black genocide. Cecil B. Moore, head of the NAACP chapter in Philadelphia, spoke out against a Planned Parenthood effort to establish a stronger presence in northern Philadelphia; the population in the targeted neighborhoods was 70% black. Moore said that it would be "race suicide" if blacks embraced birth control.

From 1965 to 1970, black militant males, especially younger men from poverty-stricken areas, spoke out against birth control by denouncing it as part of a plot to commit a genocide against black people. The Black Panther Party and the Nation of Islam were the strongest critics of birth control. The Black Panther Party identified a number of injustices as factors which contributed to black genocide, including social ills that were more serious in black populations than they were in white populations, such as drug abuse, prostitution and sexually transmitted diseases. Other injustices included unsafe housing, malnutrition and the over-representation of young black men on the front lines of the Vietnam War. Influential black activists such as singer/author Julius Lester and comedian Dick Gregory said that blacks should increase the size of their population by avoiding genocidal family planning measures. H. Rap Brown of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) held the view that black genocide consisted of four elements: more blacks executed than whites, malnutrition in impoverished areas affected blacks more than it affected whites, the Vietnam War killed more blacks than whites, and birth control programs in black neighborhoods were trying to end the black race. A birth control clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, was torched by black militants who said it contributed to black genocide.

Black Muslims said that birth control was against the teachings of the Koran, because in Muslim societies, the primary role of women is the production of children. In this context, the black Muslims believed that birth control was part of a genocidal attack which was being launched against them by whites. The Muslim weekly journal, '' Muhammad Speaks'', contained many articles which demonized birth control.

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