In the United States, black genocide refers
to the genocide of African Americans both
in the past and in the present.
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 to
the United Nations in 1951.
In the 1960s, Malcolm X accused the US government
of engaging in genocide against black people,
citing long-term injustice, cruelty, and violence
by whites against blacks.Some accusations
of genocide have been described as conspiracy
theories.
After President Lyndon B. Johnson pushed through
his War on Poverty legislation including public
funding of the Pill for the poor in the mid
1960s, family planning (birth control) was
said to be "black genocide" at the first Black
Power Conference held in July 1967.
In 1970 after abortion was more widely legalized,
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, in 1973, media revelations about
decades of government-sponsored compulsory
sterilization led some to say that this was
part of a plan for black genocide.During the
Vietnam War the increasing use of black soldiers
in combat provided a basis for the accusation
of a government supported "black genocide".
In recent decades the disproportionately high
black prison population has been cited in
support of the theory.
== Slavery as genocide ==
== Jim Crow as genocide ==
=== 
Petition to the United Nations ===
After World War II and following many years
of mistreatment of African Americans by white
Americans, the US government's official policies
regarding the matter shifted significantly.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
said in 1946 that negative international opinion
about US racial policies brought pressure
to bear on the US and that this was helping
to alleviate the mistreatment "of racial and
national minorities".
In 1948 President Harry S. Truman signed an
order desegregating the military.
Black citizens increasingly challenged existing
ways of racial discrimination.
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 to
conclude that the US government was conducting
a genocide of African Americans, by 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 its 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".
=== 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.
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 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.
== Systemic racism as genocide ==
=== 
Vietnam War ===
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.
=== 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.
== Conspiracy theories ==
=== 
Birth control ===
A falling birth rate has been identified by
some observers as 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 US markets in
1957 as a medicine, and in 1961 for birth
control.
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.
The Pill was considered expensive by working
class women; the first users were upper- and
middle-class women.
After President Lyndon B. Johnson, as part
of his War on Poverty, obtained legislation
in 1964 for government funding of birth control,
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 program which was to establish
a stronger presence in northern Philadelphia;
the population in the targeted neighborhoods
was 70% black.
Moore said it would be "race suicide" for
blacks to embrace birth control.
From 1965 to 1970, black militant males, especially
younger men from poverty-stricken areas, spoke
out against birth control as black genocide.
The Black Panther Party and the Nation of
Islam were the strongest voices.
The Black Panther Party identified a number
of injustices as contributing to black genocide,
including social ills that were more serious
in black populations, such as drug abuse,
prostitution and sexually transmitted disease.
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 in population
and avoid genocidal family planning measures.
H. Rap Brown of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC) held that black genocide
consisted of four elements: more blacks executed
than whites, malnutrition in impoverished
areas affected blacks more than 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, and that the role of women in
Muslim society was to produce children.
In this context, the Black Muslims felt that
birth control was a genocidal attack by whites.
The Muslim weekly journal, Muhammad Speaks,
carried many articles demonizing birth control.In
Newark, New Jersey, in July 1967, the Black
Power movement held its first convention:
the National Conference on Black Power.
The convention identified several means by
which whites were attempting the annihilation
of blacks.
Injustices in housing practices, reductions
in welfare benefits, and government-subsidized
family planning were named as elements of
"black genocide".
Ebony magazine printed a story in March 1968
which revealed that black genocide was believed
by poor blacks to be the impetus behind government-funded
birth control.Reverend Martin Luther King,
Jr., was a strong proponent of birth control
for blacks.
In 1966, he was honored with the Margaret
Sanger Award in Human Rights, an award based
on the tireless birth control activism of
Margaret Sanger, a co-founder of Planned Parenthood.
King emphasized that birth control gave the
black man better command over his personal
economic situation, keeping the number of
his children within his monetary means.
In April 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., was
shot and killed.
Charles V. Willie wrote in 1971 that this
event marked the beginning of serious reflection
among African Americans "about the possibility
of [black] genocide in America.
There were lynchings, murders, and manslaughters
in the past.
But the assassination of Dr. King was too
much.
Many blacks believed that Dr. King had represented
their best...
If America could not accept Dr. King, then
many felt that no black person in America
was safe."
Black women were generally critical of the
Black Power rejection of birth control.
In 1968, a group of black radical feminists
in Mt. Vernon, New York issued "The Sisters
Reply"; a rebuttal which said that birth control
gave black women the "freedom to fight the
genocide of black women and children," referring
to the greater death rate among children and
mothers in poor families.
Frances M. Beal, co-founder of the Black Women's
Liberation Committee of the SNCC, refused
to believe that the black woman must be subservient
to the black man's wishes.
Angela Davis and Linda LaRue reacted against
the Black Power limitations directing women
to serve as mothers producing "warriors for
the revolution."
Toni Cade said that indiscriminate births
would not bring the liberation of blacks closer
to realization; she advocated the Pill as
a tool to help space out the births of black
children, to make it easier for families to
raise them.
The Black Women's Liberation Group accused
"poor black men" of failing to support the
babies they helped produce, therefore supplying
young black women with reason to use contraceptives.
Dara Abubakari, a black separatist, wrote
that "women should be free to decide if and
when they want children".
A 1970 study found that 80% of black women
in Chicago approved of birth control, and
that 75% of women in their child-bearing years
were using it.
A 1971 study found that a majority of black
men and women were in favor of government-subsidized
birth control.In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,
a community struggle for and against a birth
control clinic in the Homewood area of east
Pittsburgh made national news.
Women in Pittsburgh had lobbied for a birth
control clinic in the 1920s and were relieved
in 1931 when the American Birth Control League
(ABCL) established one.
The ABCL changed its name in 1942 to Planned
Parenthood.
The Pittsburgh clinic initiated an educational
outreach program to poor families in the Lower
Hill District in 1956.
This program was twinned into the poverty-stricken
Homewood-Brushton area in 1958.
Planned Parenthood considered opening another
clinic there, and conducted meetings with
community leaders.
In 1963 a mobile clinic was moved around the
area.
In December 1965, the Planned Parenthood Clinic
of Pittsburgh (PPCP) applied for federal funding
based on the War on Poverty legislation Johnson
had promoted.
In May 1966 the application was approved,
and PPCP began to establish clinics throughout
Pittsburgh, a total of 18 by 1967, 11 of these
subsidized by the federal government and placed
in poor districts.
In mid-1966 the Pennsylvania state legislature
held up family planning funds in committee.
Catholic bishops gained media exposure for
their assertion that Pittsburgh birth control
efforts were a form of covert black genocide.
In November 1966 the bishops said that the
government was coercing poor people to have
smaller families.
Some black leaders such as local NAACP member
Dr. Charles Greenlee agreed with the bishops
that birth control was black genocide.
Greenlee said Planned Parenthood was "an honorable
and good organization" but that the federal
Office of Economic Opportunity was sponsoring
genocidal programs.
Greenlee said "the Negro's birth rate is the
only weapon he has.
When he reaches 21 he can vote."
Greenlee targeted the Homewood clinic for
closure; in doing so he allied with black
militant William "Bouie" Haden and Catholic
prelate Charles Owen Rice to speak out against
black genocide, and against PPCP's educational
outreach program.
Planned Parenthood's Director of Community
Relations Dr. Douglas Stewart said that the
false charge of black genocide was harming
the national advancement of blacks.
In July 1968, Haden announced he was willing
to blow up the clinic to keep it from operating.
The Catholic church paid him a salary of $10,000,
igniting an outcry in Pittsburgh media.
Bishop John Wright was called a "puppet of
Bouie Haden".
The PPCP closed the Homewood clinic in July
1968 and stopped its educational program because
of concerns about violence.
The black congregation of the Bethesda United
Presbyterian Church issued a statement saying
that accusations of black genocide were "patently
false".
A meeting was scheduled for March 1969 to
discuss the issue.
About 200 women, mostly black, appeared in
support of the clinic, and it was reopened.
This was seen as a major defeat for the black
militant notion that government-funded birth
control was black genocide.Other prominent
black advocates for birth control included
Carl Rowan, James L. Farmer, Jr., Bayard Rustin,
Jerome H. Holland, Ron Dellums and Barbara
Jordan.In the US in the 21st century, black
people are most likely to be at risk of unintended
pregnancy: 84% of black women of reproductive
age use birth control, in contrast to 91%
of Caucasian and Hispanic women, and 92% of
Asian Americans.
This results in black women having the highest
rate of unintended pregnancy—in 2001, almost
10% of black women giving birth between the
ages of 15 to 44 had unintended pregnancies,
which was more than twice the rate of white
women.
Poverty affects these statistics, as low-income
women are more likely to experience disruption
in their lives; disruption which affects the
steady use of birth control.
People in poor areas are more suspicious of
the health care system, and they may refuse
medical treatment and advice, especially for
less-critical wellness treatments such as
birth control.
=== Abortion ===
Slave women brought with them from Africa
the knowledge of traditional folk birth control
practices, and of abortion obtained through
the use of herbs, blunt trauma, and other
methods of killing the fetus or producing
strong uterine cramps.
Slave women were often expected to breed more
slave children to enrich their owners, but
some quietly rebelled.
In 1856 a white doctor reported that a number
of slave owners were upset that their slaves
appeared to hold a "secret by which they destroy
the foetus at an early age of gestation".
However, this folk knowledge was suppressed
in the new American culture, especially by
the nascent American Medical Association,
and its practice fell away.After slavery ended,
black women formed social groups and clubs
in the 1890s to "uplift their race."
The revolutionary idea that a black woman
might enjoy a full life without ever being
a mother was presented in Josephine St. Pierre
Ruffin's magazine The Woman's Era.
Knowledge was secretly shared among clubwomen
regarding how to find practitioners offering
illegal medical or traditional abortion services.
Working-class black women, forced more often
into sex with white men, continued to find
a need for birth control and abortion.
Black women who earned less than $10 per day
paid $50 to $75 for an illegal and dangerous
abortion.
Throughout the 20th century, "backstreet"
abortion providers in black neighborhoods
were also sought out by poor white women who
wanted to rid themselves of a pregnancy.
Abortion providers who were black were prosecuted
much more often than white ones.In the Tennessee
General Assembly in 1967, Dorothy Lavinia
Brown, MD, the first African-American woman
surgeon and a state assemblywoman, was the
first American to sponsor a proposed bill
to fully legalize abortion.
Though this early effort failed, abortion
was made legal in various US states from 1967
to 1972.
During this time the Black Panthers printed
pamphlets describing abortion as black genocide,
expanding on their earlier stance regarding
family planning.
However, most minority groups stood in favor
of the decriminalization of abortion; the
New York Times reported in 1970 that more
non-white women than white women died as a
result of "crude, illegal abortions".
Legalized abortion was expected to produce
fewer deaths of the mother.
A poll in Buffalo, New York, conducted by
the National Organization for Women (NOW),
found that 75% of blacks supported the decriminalization
of abortion.
After the January 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme
Court decision made abortion legal in the
US, Jet magazine publisher Robert E. Johnson
authored an article called "Legal Abortion:
Is It Genocide Or Blessing In Disguise?"
Johnson cast the issue as one which polarized
the black community along gender lines: black
women generally viewed abortion as a "blessing
in disguise" but black men such as Reverend
Jesse Jackson viewed it as black genocide.
Jackson said he was in favor of birth control
but not abortion.
The next year, Senator Mark Hatfield, an activist
against legal abortion, emphasized to Congress
that Jackson "regards abortion as a form of
genocide practiced against blacks."In Jet,
Johnson quoted Lu Palmer, a radio journalist
in Chicago, who said that there was inequity
between the sexes: a young black man who helped
create an unwanted pregnancy could go his
"merry way" while the young woman involved
was stigmatized by society and saddled with
a financial and emotional burden, often without
a safety net of caregivers to sustain her.
Civil rights lawyer Florynce Kennedy criticized
the idea that black women were needed to populate
the Black Power revolution.
She said that black majorities in the Deep
South were not known to be hotbeds of revolution,
and that limiting black women to the role
of mothers was "not too far removed from a
cultural past where Black women were encouraged
to be breeding machines for their slave masters."
Tennessee Assemblywoman Dorothy Brown said
black women "should dispense quickly the notion
that abortion is genocide", rather, they should
look to the earliest Atlantic slave traders
as the root of genocide.
Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm wrote in 1970
that the linking of abortion and genocide
"is male rhetoric, for male ears."However,
a link between abortion and black genocide
has been claimed by later observers.
Mildred Fay Jefferson, a surgeon and an activist
against legal abortion, wrote about black
genocide in 1978, saying "abortionists have
done more to get rid of generations and cripple
others than all of the years of slavery and
lynching."In 2009, American pro-life activists
in Georgia revived the idea that a black genocide
was in progress.
A strong response from this strategy was observed
among blacks, and in 2010 more focus was placed
on describing abortion as black genocide.
White pro-life activist Mark Crutcher produced
a documentary called Maafa 21 which criticizes
Planned Parenthood and its founder Margaret
Sanger, and describes various historic aspects
of eugenics, birth control and abortion with
the aim of convincing the viewer that abortion
is black genocide.
Pro-life activists showed the documentary
to black audiences across the US.
The film was criticized as propaganda and
a false representation of Sanger's work.
In March 2011, a series of abortion-as-genocide
billboard advertisements were shown in South
Chicago, an area with a large population of
African Americans.
From May to November 2011, presidential candidate
Herman Cain criticized Planned Parenthood,
calling abortion "planned genocide" and "black
genocide".
== Analysis ==
In 1976, sociologist Irving Louis Horowitz
published an analysis of black genocide and
concluded that racist vigilantism and sporadic
action by individual whites was to blame for
the various statistics that show blacks suffering
from higher death rates.
Horowitz concluded that the US government
could not be implicated as a conspirator,
that there was no conspiracy to engage in
concerted black genocide.Political scientist
Joy A. James wrote in 2013 that the "logical
conclusion" of American racism is genocide,
and that members of the black elite are complicit,
along with white Americans, in carrying out
black genocide.
== See also ==
Black Supremacy
Civil Rights Movement
Harry R. Jackson, Jr., The Truth in Black
& White
List of conspiracy theories
Mass racial violence in the United States
Political positions of Herman Cain
Title X
Tuskegee syphilis experiment
White genocide conspiracy theory
