Read on Twitter
In recent weeks, IR scholars have reckoned publicly with the central position of White supremacy in the theory and practice of international affairs.
As he's laid to rest, I wanted to highlight a brief excerpt from my research about John Lewis's early role in combating this.
As he's laid to rest, I wanted to highlight a brief excerpt from my research about John Lewis's early role in combating this.
In his great FP piece on race and IR, @RobbieShilliam highlights the official red-baiting campaign against William Patterson and the Civil Rights Congress, who waged a public campaign in 1951 to charge the United States of genocide against Black Americans: https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/06/23/racism-ir-international-relations-domestic/
Although the NAACP shied away from endorsing the campaign because of its anti-Communism, We Charge Genocide had broad support from Black activists including W.E.B. Du Bois, Shirley Graham Du Bois, and Paul Robeson. @ProfCAnderson's work on this is tops: https://books.google.com/books/about/Eyes_Off_the_Prize.html?id=XxAFCS5kWd0C
Fearing both the loss of global legitimacy and responding to a vocal segregationist lobby concerned about lynching prosecutions, the State Department encouraged severe sanctions against Patterson and the CRC. Most scholarship treats this as the end of the genocide campaign.
Not so! A combination of McCarthyist repression and financial challenges led the CRC to shut down before the end of the decade, but Patterson had a long career throughout the 1960s as a godfather of Black radicalism. Gerald Horne documents this well: https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/36cnb3xd9780252037924.html
I wasn't able to find evidence of a relationship between Patterson and then-SNCC activist John Lewis, but Lewis was quick to pick up the "genocide" mantle as the organization's Mississippi campaign got underway.
In the spring of 1964, just before the much-better-known Freedom Summer, SNCC campaigned to charge the Mississippi state government of genocide for a planned forced sterilization bill that would have disproportionately targeted Black Mississippians. https://www.crmvet.org/docs/sncc_gen.pdf
Leading the charge: John Lewis. Discussions of SNCC's vision tend to focus on the radical internationalism of Lewis's late-1960s successors. But the use of "genocide" has always had a global bent to it--for SNCC, it was a call for global solidarity with Black freedom.
Since the 1960s, Lewis has been a central champion for global human rights--e.g., against apartheid and the Darfur genocide. SNCC's genocide campaign shows that, for Lewis, the Black freedom struggle was a part of this global movement, and that movement a part of the struggle.
Lewis's example is, as always, a clarion call to those who seek to separate domestic struggles for racial justice from advocacy for international human rights. If you're working to advance the latter without similar commitment to the former, you're advancing neither.
