We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to the United Nations for Relief From a Crime of the Unite

We Claim Genocide is a powerful reckoning with history, memory, and justice. Through the voices of survivors, descendants, and activists, this book challenges official silence and denial, reclaiming the truth of atrocities that have long been overlooked or erased. With fierce clarity and moral urgency, We Claim Genocide explores what it means to name the unnameable-and why doing so is a vital step toward healing, accountability, and resistance. A bold declaration and a call to action, this work insists: recognition is the beginning of justice.

This reprint edition contains the historic petition first presented to the United Nations in 1951 by its author, William L. Patterson and Paul Robeson in support of the charge that the racism of Government and its agencies was a crime punishable under the UN Genocide Convention. The petition presented specific, documented evidence of inhuman and racist practices in the United States. The innumerable beatings, frame-ups, arrests and murders of black Americans continued unabated but no adequate remedial measures were taken by government authorities.