Last week a UN-NGO decided to pick up the historical torch of diplomatic freedom fighters by appealing to the world community to intervene in the treatment of Indigenous and African and descendants of colonialism and enslavement. “This request is to urge the Human Rights Council to conduct a thorough and impartial investigation into law enforcement practices that may undermine the human rights of African and Indigenous descendants of colonialism and enslavement in the United States.” It also referenced what the “Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent” called an “epidemic of racial violence by the police.”
The NGO is taking international organizing efforts of the last century into the digital age. As the letter of urgent appeal is a formal process of going through proper UN channels and following certain protocol, the organization wanted ensure that the Indigenous and African descendant population also have the opportunity to personally participate in the initiative. It composed a complimentary petition on change.org to top UN officials. To reach Indigenous and African descendant community, the organization launched a social media campaign on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. The effort has already reached tens of thousands and the petition which is just a few days old is growing by about two dozen signatures a day and gaining momentum.
The effort to address the treatment of Indigenous and African descendants of colonialism and enslavement in the United States has been domestic and international strategy since the founding of the United Nations in 1945. When Walter F. White became the Secretary of the NAACP in 1930, he had already played a vital role in the most comprehensive body of research on lynchings in America. His work sparked a public debate and top notch legal campaign that resulted in the most significant reduction in the number of lynchings that the United States had seen until that time. But he was also involved in the effort to bring global attention to the plight of his community. In its inaugural year, White; W. E. B. Du Bois, the NAACP’s director of special research; and Mary McLeod Bethune, of the National Council of Negro Women, were present as observers at the United Nations Conference on International Organization in San Francisco, largely as a result of extensive organizing campaigns intent on establishing an international activist agenda. White was succeeded by Charles Hamilton Houston, the first Harvard Law Review editor of African descent who went on to recruit the man who would become the first US Supreme Court Justice of African descent, Thurgood Marshall.
Following a UN censure against South Africa for its treatment of its East Indian population, the National Negro Congress, submitted the first appeal on behalf of Indigenous and African descendants of colonialism and enslavement to the United Nations In 1946. The NAACP followed in 1947 by submitting a letter of urgent appeal to the now defunct UN Human Rights Commission entitled, “Appeal to the World.” “Therefore, Peoples of the World, we American Negroes appeal to you; our treatment in America is not merely an internal question of the United States. It is a basic problem of humanity; of democracy; of discrimination because of race and color; and as such it demands your attention and action.” The effort was met with widespread support around the world, but did not survive the Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, due to pressure from the United States, the influence of Eleanor Roosevelt, who was at the time a UNESCO Commissioner and the concerns of NAACP leadership about the appeal’s state sponsorship by the Soviet Union. Four years later, on behalf of the Civil Rights Congress, artist and activist Paul Robeson submitted a letter of allegation entitled, “We Charge Genocide.” “We maintain, therefore, that the oppressed Negro citizens of the United States, segregated, discriminated against and long the target of violence, suffer from genocide as the result of the consistent, conscious, unified policies of every branch of government.” The allegation charged that the U.S. was in violation of Article II of the U.N. Genocide Convention by failing to intervene in the lynching of Americans of Indigenous and African descent. The U.N. General Assembly adopted the Genocide Convention on December 9, 1948. It later became effective in January 1951. The United States did not ratify it until November 4, 1988. Robeson’s effort with international activism was largely used to destroy his career as an artist and sully his reputation as a patriotic American.
In 1950, Ralph Bunche received Nobel Peace Prize for his work as a United Nations mediator in the Palestine conflict of 1948. A self-described “incurable optimist,” Bunche was the first African American and person of color to be so honored in the history of the prize. Yet, it was the another recipient of the prize with whom Bunche shook hands at the United Nations in 1964 that introduced the masses of Indigenous and African descendants in the United States to the significance of global representation. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. received the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in Civil and Human Rights in October 1964 and just four days before his assassination, he emphasized the necessity of diplomacy as the most effective strategy for making permanent change. “It is no longer a choice, my friends, between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence. And the alternative to disarmament, the alternative to a greater suspension of nuclear tests, the alternative to strengthening the United Nations and thereby disarming the whole world, may well be a civilization plunged into the abyss of annihilation, and our earthly habitat would be transformed into an inferno that even the mind of Dante could not imagine,” King said in his address “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution” at the National Cathedral in March 1968. The landmark address in which he spoke against the Vietnam War and made the famous announcement of a “Poor People’s Campaign” that would soon return to the District of Columbia to demand that America meet “its obligations and its responsibilities to the poor” marked a day that he would not live to see. The burgeoning relationship between Indigenous and African descendants of colonialism and enslavement and the United Nations largely went to its rest as well.
As the United States is one of the founding permanent members and major financial contributor of the United Nations, it has rarely been on the receiving end of United Nation’s diplomatic critique until recent years. In the last decade, the five permanent members have found themselves on the critical side of the world opinion on matters of human rights, particularly China, Russia and the United States. The US has been particularly challenged on its treatment of the Indigenous and African descendants of colonialism and enslavement within its borders.
Returning to the United Nations has quite possibly not been more important for Indigenous and African descendants in the United States in the last forty years than it is right now. In the time since Thurgood Marshall’s departure from the NAACP Legal Defense which he founded, the political sentiment has shifted and the laws that once were so clear in their segregationist definition, now are not as obvious in their discriminatory effect. Policies from housing to criminal justice do not specifically say “no blacks,” but are more often drafted around the empirical data that emphasizes the residual weaknesses among the population. Research that ties those weaknesses to the legacy of colonialism, enslavement and Jim Crow is becoming progressively more marginalized in the mainstream discourse.
Yet, the effects of that legacy continue to lay waste to many communities around the country whether in the high rates of under-education and unemployment, people of indigenous and African descent dying at the hands of other people of color and law enforcement or the disproportionate representation on the prison rolls. Malcolm X is often cited as saying, “when (white) America catches a cold, (black) America catches pneumonia.” The gap between the haves and have nots is only widening in America, it is becoming an ever expanding gulf in the indigenous and African community. In his final address to the United Nations, President Barack Obama said, “It starts with making the global economy work better for all people and not just for those at the top.” That has been the urgent demand of Indigenous and African descendants of colonialism and enslavement since the first “Appeal to the World in 1947.”