In the United States, black genocide is a historiographical framework and rhetorical term used to analyze the past and present impact of systemic racism on African Americans by both the United States government and white Americans. 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 which it submitted to the United Nations in 1951. In the 1960s, Malcolm X accused the US government of engaging in human rights abuses, including genocide, against black people, citing long-term injustice, cruelty, and violence against blacks by whites.

The black genocide analogy has historically been applied to the war on drugs, war on crime, and War on Poverty for their detrimental effects on the black community. During the Vietnam War, the increasing use of black soldiers was criticized as an expression of black genocide. In recent decades, the disproportionately high black prison population has also been described as black genocide.

Some critics of the black genocide framework describe it as a conspiracy theory, while many of its proponents argue for its usefulness as a framework for analyzing systemic racism. Arguments against birth control, in particular, have been criticized as conspiratorial or exaggerated, although attempts at black population control and government-sponsored compulsory sterilization did occur into the 20th century.

Slavery as genocide

Slavery in general and the Atlantic slave trade in particular was an archetypal example of a crime against humanity in the 19th century, a larger category of crimes that was expanded when genocide was included in it in the 20th century. George Washington Williams popularized the concept of crimes against humanity with regard to the history of slavery in the United States and during the Congo Free State propaganda war of the 1890s, the "laws of humanity" were included in the Martens Clause of the Hague Conventions and as a result, they were legally enshrined in international law.

Canadian scholar Adam Jones characterizes the mass death of millions of Africans during the Atlantic slave trade as a genocide, calling it "one of the worst holocausts in human history" due to the fact that it resulted in 15 to 20 million deaths according to one estimate, and he has also stated that arguments to the contrary, such as the argument that "it was in slave owners' interest to keep slaves alive, not exterminate them", is "mostly sophistry" since "the killing and destruction were intentional, whatever the incentives to preserve survivors of the Atlantic passage for labor exploitation. To revisit the issue of intent already touched on: If an institution is deliberately maintained and expanded by discernible agents, though all are aware of the hecatombs of casualties it is inflicting on a definable human group, then why should this not qualify as genocide?"

In his book, The Broken Heart of America, Harvard professor Walter Johnson wrote that on many occasions throughout the history of the enslavement of Africans in the US, many instances of genocide occurred, instances which included the separation of men from their wives, effectively reducing the size of the African-American population. For a black American who lived during the era of U.S. slavery, no rights were guaranteed, whether they were personally enslaved or not. In the United States a slave's life expectancy was 21 to 22 years, and a black child through the age of 1 to 14 had twice the risk of dying of a white child of the same age.

A 2021 paper published by the International Association of Genocide Scholars stated the slavery of African-Americans was genocide. As reasoning, the paper stated that Africans were stripped of their ethnic identities, murdered, tortured, raped, starved, removed from their parents, and prevented from forming families. The paper states these conditions satisfy Lemkin's conditions of genocide, and intent to harm on the part of slavers was well-documented.

Jim Crow as genocide

Petition to the United Nations

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, concluding that the US government was 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 their 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".

After World War II and following many years of mistreatment of African Americans by white Americans, the US government's official policies regarding this mistreatment shifted significantly. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said in 1946 that negative international opinion about US racial policies helped to pressure the US into alleviating the mistreatment of ethnic minorities. In 1948, President Harry S. Truman signed an order desegregating the military, and black citizens increasingly challenged other forms of racial discrimination. In 1948, even if African Americans worked side by side with their white counterparts, they were often segregated into separate neighborhoods due to redlining.

Lynching and other racial killings

Walter Johnson has written that the first lynching to occur in the United States was that of Francis McIntosh, a free man of black and white ancestry. He argued that this lynching ignited a series of them, all with the goal of "ethnic cleansing" and that Abraham Lincoln, who was not yet president, was more concerned by the vigilantism of the lynching than the murder itself. Lincoln referred to McIntosh as "obnoxious" in his 1838 speech later dubbed the Lyceum Address. According to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice 4,400 black people killed in lynchings and other racial killings between 1877 and 1950.

Brandy Marie Langley argued, "The physical killing of black people in America, at this time period, was consistent with Lemkin's original idea of genocide." Famous literary and social activist figures such as Mark Twain and Ida B. Wells were compelled to speak out about lynchings. Twain's essay about lynchings titled "The United States of Lyncherdom", a remark on widespread occurrence of lynchings in the US. According to Christopher Waldrep, the media and racist whites, both inadvertently and not, exaggerated the presence of black crime as a method of appeasing their own guilt surrounding the lynchings African Americans.

Sterilization

Beginning in 1907, some US state legislatures passed laws allowing for the compulsory sterilization of criminals, intellectually disabled 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. College course study guide 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 in North Carolina 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. According to Gregory Price, government policies led to higher rates of sterilization amongst black Americans than white on the basis of racist beliefs. He writes that in the early 1900s, the goal of eugenicists was to create a "biologically fit" population, and that these standards deliberately excluded black people, who were claimed to not be capable of making legitimate contributions to the national economy.

Systemic racism as genocide We Charge Genocide estimated 30,000 more black people died each year due to various racist policies and that black people had an 8-year shorter life span than white Americans. In this vein, Historian Matthew White estimates that 3.3 million more non-white people died from 1900 up to the 1960s than they would have if they had died at the same rate as white people.

Effects of wars on black communities