Affiliation:
1. University of Southern Indiana, Evansville, Indiana, USA
Abstract
In 1951, the Civil Rights Congress (CRC), under the leadership of William Patterson, submitted a 200+-page petition to the United Nations charging the United States with genocide against Black Americans. The meticulously researched petition documented hundreds of cases of assault, legal lynching (the use of the legal system to deny Black Americans justice) and death that all amounted to a system in which the federal government failed to protect Black Americans against injustice. Sexual assault figured prominently in the petition. This article looks specifically at the case of Rosa Lee Ingram as exemplary of both legal lynching and gender violence that were essential to the argument that the United States was guilty of genocide. For Patterson and the CRC, sexual violence and the threat of sexual assault, as in the Ingram case, was symptomatic of a larger terror campaign that focused on Black Americans, circumscribing their rights, their lives and safety, and confirming a white supremacist system that punished Black male sexuality and claimed Black women’s sexuality for its own.
Reference51 articles.
1. ‘11 Year Battle Wins Freedom of Mrs. Ingram’;Daily Worker,1959
2. ‘A Call to Negro Women’
3. ‘A Petition to the Human Rights Commission of the Social and Economic Council of the United Nations; and to the General Assembly of the United Nations; and to the Several Delegations of the Member States of the United Nations’
4. ‘Why We’re Going to Washington’;Bass;Daily Worker,1951