ABHM Book Club: We Charge Genocide
We are pleased to announce ABHM’s December Book of the Month: We Charge Genocide edited by William L. Patterson. We invite you to join us on December 19th at 1:30 p.m. for a discussion of the book at America’s Black Holocaust Museum (ABHM) or virtually via Zoom.
History Toward Tomorrow: Why This Matters
In the year 2026 the United States is celebrating its semiquincentennial. At ABHM, we are using this as an opportunity to create programs where we can collectively reflect on our country’s history honestly to build a better, more equitable future. The selections for the ABHM Book Club in 2026 will emphasize historical truth-telling, compelling storytelling, and diverse perspectives on our collective past. We invite participants to consider what they want the country to look like over the next 250 years. What can we learn from visionaries, historians, and thought leaders from the past in how we envision the United States of the future? In the spirit of Dr. Cameron, we invite you to join us on this journey of reflection, healing, and dreaming.
ABOUT THE BOOK
We Charge Genocide, published in 1951, is the historic petition submitted to the United Nations by the Civil Rights Congress charging the U.S. government with genocide against Black people. Drawing on documented cases of lynching, police violence, racial discrimination, segregation, disenfranchisement, and conditions that contributed to premature death, poverty, and disease, the petition placed racial injustice in the United States within the framework of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
The book presents its evidence as a case for international action, arguing that government policies and practices had subjected millions of Black Americans to systematic racial violence and oppression. Delivered to the United Nations in December 1951, the petition became an important document in the history of the Black freedom struggle and an early effort to bring U.S. racial injustice before an international body. We Charge Genocide invites readers to examine the relationship between law, government power, racial violence, and human rights-and to consider how the language of genocide was used to confront the realities of racial oppression in mid-20th-century America.
ABOUT THE EDITOR
William L. Patterson (1891-1980) was a Black lawyer, civil rights activist, and international advocate for racial justice. Born in San Francisco, California, he earned his law degree from the University of California’s Hastings College of Law in 1919. Patterson became involved in campaigns challenging racial injustice and political repression, including the defense of the Scottsboro Boys, nine Black youths whose cases became an international symbol of racial injustice in the American legal system. He later became a leader of the International Labor Defense and served as national executive secretary of the Civil Rights Congress, organizations that provided legal and political support to people facing racial and political persecution. Patterson was also a member and national leader of the Communist Party USA.
In 1951, Patterson helped bring the struggle against racial injustice in the United States before the international community. As national executive secretary of the Civil Rights Congress, he edited We Charge Genocide and traveled to Paris to present the petition to the United Nations, while Paul Robeson presented it in New York. The petition documented lynching, police violence, racial discrimination, disenfranchisement, and other forms of oppression against Black Americans and called upon the United Nations to address what the Civil Rights Congress charged was genocide. Patterson continued his activism throughout his life, publishing his autobiography, The Man Who Cried Genocide, in 1971 and remaining engaged in struggles for racial and economic justice. He died in New York in 1980.