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. These later invocations of the genocide charge spanned
the black left, including the Black Panther Party, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee,
James Baldwin and black feminists. This essay explores how the historical memory of racial violence,
including settler colonialism and the slave trade, inspired an ideologically diverse array of organizations
to each connect their experience to global histories of racial oppression. It stresses the internationalist
and anticolonial perspective of the genocide charge and its proponents’ economic and transnational
critique, thereby contributing to the historiographies of the long civil rights movement and black
radicalism. By invoking international law, these black radicals connected the civil rights movement in
the US to the struggle for human rights worldwide. Finally, the essay considers how integrating the local,
national and global scales of racialized violence and its response enables historians to transnationalize
the long civil rights movement paradigm
