“We Charge Genocide”

This chapter explores Patterson's genocide petition, which was a devastating indictment of the U.S. authorities' complicity and dereliction in lynching, murder, deprivation of voting rights, and all manner of crimes. Ominously for Washington, the petition virtually invited the international community to intervene forcefully in what had been seen traditionally as an internal U.S. affair. By early 1952, Patterson claimed that as a result of this petition, “the international offensive against racist terror” in his homeland had “reached unprecedented heights.” When Eleanor Roosevelt felt compelled to disparage the petition, it suggested that the campaign could not be ignored easily. Even in Seattle, which had been thought to be a liberal citadel, the public library banned the genocide book, while the public-school system sought to bar the CRC from renting an auditorium.