The movement to bring the US government and establishment to justice for genocide is decades old. These efforts have been built on the infamous assassinations of American civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr, who despite advocating non-violence, was gunned down on 4 April, 1968, and the fiery Malcolm X, who at 39 was shot 21 times on 21 February, 1965.
As the year 2025 rolls to a close, there are citizens of the United States planning, in the new year, to charge their country with genocide against its “Black, Brown and Indigenous Peoples.” The Peoples’ Senate, one of the movements engaged in the “National Mobilisation Against Genocides”, declared that to mark the 250th Commemoration of the US Declaration of Independence on 4 July, 2026, the charge will be laid against the US of “years of genocidal policies and practices.” It declared: “The truth is, this country had replaced the British Empire with another even more genocidal one.”
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The Spirit of Mandela (SofM) coalition said the international tribunal to be convened on 4 July, 2026 in Atlanta, Georgia, is “continuing the work of the 2021 international tribunal that found the US government guilty of genocide.”
The 2026 plan includes laying charges of genocide for the practical wiping out of the American Indian population, which from being 100 per cent of the population, is now reduced to less than two per cent, not necessarily because of the influx of other peoples, but due to the deliberate extermination of the populace. Just in February, the leading American Indian liberation fighter, Leonard Peltier, was released from prison after 50 years.
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Also, charges are to be laid on behalf of the Puerto Ricans for the continuous genocide and colonialism they face. The face of the Puerto Rican resistance, Oscar Lopez Rivera, who had two life sentences for seditious conspiracy, was released from prison in 2017 after 39 years of confinement. This was after the United Nations Committee on Decolonisation had threatened to visit Lopez in prison, if he is not freed in line with global calls, and allowed to visit the world body. The following year, when the Committee reconvened, the newly released Oscar Lopez appeared within the hallowed walls of the UN to address the world.
The African American Liberation Movement, quoting the 19th Century Abolitionist, Frederick Douglas, who famously asked: “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?” is a major component of the Tribunal charging the USA with genocide. Centred around the Black Panther and Black Liberation legacy, the movement said it would be an integral part of the Atlanta International Tribunal where it would proclaim: “No to Genocide Anywhere!”
The proposed tribunal is actually a continuation of the 22-25 October, 2021, ‘We Still Charge Genocide: 2021 International Tribunal’. That itself was built on the historic International Tribunal on US Political Prisoners and Prisoners of War which held in 1990 at New York’s Hunter College.
It had eight judges from Germany, Japan/Australia, Ghana, Palestine, Peru, Puerto Rico, US and the United Kingdom – including a Nobel laureate and a member of the House of Lords. A 33-point indictment was made against the US President, Attorney General, and the heads of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Bureau of Prisons.
The movement to bring the US government and establishment to justice for genocide is decades old. These efforts have been built on the infamous assassinations of American civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr, who despite advocating non-violence, was gunned down on 4 April, 1968, and the fiery Malcolm X, who at 39 was shot 21 times on 21 February, 1965.
Malcom X, who had decided to drag the US to the UN for genocide, had previously argued that left to itself, the US will not move away from its legacy of genocide. He famously posited: “If you stick a knife nine inches into my back and pull it out three inches, that is not progress. Even if you pull it all the way out, that is not progress. Progress is healing the wound, and America hasn’t even begun to pull out the knife.”
One of the earliest efforts to charge the US for genocide arose from the 17 December, 1951 submission of a petition to the UN signed by almost 100 US activists and intellectuals. Titled, “We Charge Genocide: The Crime of Government Against the Negro People.” It was submitted to the world body headquarters by a team led by famous athlete, actor and vocalist, Paul Robeson.
Also, William Lorenzo Patterson, the Secretary of the Civil Rights Congress, CRC which had authored the petition, delivered the petition to a UN meeting in Paris. Patterson’s advocacy was so effective that Congressman Henderson Lovelace Lanham, of Rome, Georgia, speaking in the halls of Congress, called him “a God-damned black son-of-bitch.” Adding: “We gotta keep the black apes down.” Patterson’s 1971 autobiography was titled “The Man Who Cried Genocide.”
Professor WEB Dubois, co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was scheduled to accompany Patterson to the Paris UN meeting, but was barred by the US State Department from leaving America.
The historic indictment began with the introduction: “Out of the inhuman black ghettos of American cities, out of the cotton plantations of the South, comes this record of mass slayings on the basis of race, of lives deliberately warped and distorted by the willful creation of conditions making for premature death, poverty and disease. It is a record that calls aloud for condemnation, for an end to these terrible injustices that constitute a daily and ever-increasing violation of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.”
It emphasised: “We speak of progressive mankind because a policy of discrimination at home must inevitably create racist commodities for export abroad-must inevitably tend toward war.”
Clarifying that the petition was not just about African Americans, the 1951 indictment stated: “We have not dealt here with the cruel and inhuman policy of this government toward the people of Puerto Rico. Impoverished and reduced to a semi-literate state through the wanton exploitation and oppression by gigantic American concerns, through the merciless frame-up and imprisonment of hundreds of its sons and daughters, this colony of the rulers of the United States reveals in all its stark nakedness, the moral bankruptcy of this government and those who control its home and foreign policies. History has shown that the racist theory of government of the U.S.A. is not the private affair of Americans, but the concern of mankind everywhere.”
It highlighted the Hitlerite genocide against the Jewish people and argued why African Americans must be saved from such genocide. It cited killings by the police, incited gangs, masked men, and the Ku Klux Klan, a genocidal organisation granted the tax exemptions of a benevolent society.
Also citing “economic genocide” the petitioners submitted: “We solemnly warn that a nation which practises genocide against its own nationals may not be long deterred, if it has the power, from genocide elsewhere.”
I submit, genocide anywhere, is genocide everywhere.
Owei Lakemfa, a former secretary general of African workers, is a human rights activist, journalist and author.
