ISSUE III : Note from the Editor
black history month
By Sean Jacobs
In November 2014, Lesley McSpadden and Michael Brown Sr. traveled to Geneva, Switzerland, to testify before the United Nations Committee Against Torture about police violence in the United States. They were the parents of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old Black teenager from Ferguson, Missouri, who had been shot and killed by police three months earlier. His death was one of the catalysts for the Black Lives Matter movement. Between Trayvon Martin’s death on February 26, 2012, and Michael Brown's death on August 9, 2014, at least 19 unarmed Black individuals were killed by law enforcement officers, in police custody or whites claiming self-defense.
The UN Convention Against Torture, to which the U.S. has been a signatory since 1994, includes specific guidelines to prevent governments from engaging in torture or cruel, inhumane, or degrading punishment against its citizens.
McSpadden and Brown Sr. brought a 13-page report, arguing that the police in Ferguson were "systematically targeting and harassing" Black people. They described the police as acting in a “predatory and degrading manner” and stated that their son had been treated "less than human." They urged the UN to recommend that the U.S. federal government fire the police chief and take control of the police department, similar to the actions taken during the Civil Rights era in the South.
This may have seemed unusual for those unfamiliar with the history of the Black struggle in the U.S.. However, making political claims to international institutions (known as “Black Internationalism”) is part of a long tradition. Engaging with and by framing these issues as human rights—rather than civil rights—issues draws global attention to racial injustice in the United States and allows Black individuals and communities to speak directly to world leaders about their experiences and demands for justice.
Black History Month – every February in the US – has been stripped of its substantive political roots in recent decades, increasingly co-opted by corporations, marketers and rightwing political projects, and more recently under assault by President Donald Trump. Nevertheless, it is worth emphasizing aspects of this history.
Though there is a longer history of Black Internationalism, dating back to how slave revolts in the US were influenced by the Haitain Revolution, Frederick Douglass’s connections to Irish Republicans, or Marcus Garvey’s UNIA, the establishment of the United Nations became a particular focus for African-Americans after World War II. The earliest organized postwar effort was the 1946 National Negro Congress petition to the UN, which outlined the political and economic oppression faced by African Americans. In 1947, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which advocated for Black people’s rights, submitted a petition titled “An Appeal to the World,” to the UN, updating the demands from the previous year. The appeal detailed a series of human rights violations, including lynchings, housing and residential segregation, inequalities in education and healthcare, and, crucially, voting rights. At the time, the NAACP was led by W.E.B. Du Bois, who had organized a series of Pan-African Congresses in the first half of the twentieth century, bringing together people of African descent from the Caribbean, North America, Western Europe, and Africa.
Four years later, in 1951, actor and singer Paul Robeson used his celebrity status to front a petition, “We Charge Genocide,” on behalf of the more left-wing Civil Rights Congress (CRC). The petition charged the U.S. with violating the UN Genocide Convention, citing the deaths of at least 152 Black people at the hands of police or white civilians.
Later, in 1968, Black American athletes used the Olympic stage to protest racism and link their plight with that of Black South Africans, who were fighting for the expulsion of their white government and white athletes from international sports.
We also see this international engagement in the politics of leading Civil Rights movement figures. Malcolm X, for example, led a very public campaign to have the U.S. tried before the UN. Martin Luther King Jr. agitated on behalf of liberation movements in Southern Africa, as well as for the Vietnamese defending themselves against U.S. imperialism. James Baldwin famously drew parallels between the conditions of black Americans and Algerians and Palestinians in his writing and public activism. “Black Internatiolism” survived well into the age of Structural Adjustment, neoliberalism, globalization, the fallout from the War on Terror, Black Lives Matter, and now the connections between Blacks and Palestinians over Gaza and the tentative emergence of new Global South politics on the back of South Africa’s ICJ case against Israel.
This issue includes an appreciation of the life of Audre Lorde, who emerged as one of the leaders of the Black International in the 1980s. But the internationalist impulse and to find ways for oppressed and marginalized commnities to combine for a more humane global politics, is perhaps best captured by Baldwin, who once wrote: “Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.”
A big shoutout to all the contributors to this issue: faculty (Peter Hoffman), students (Atash Nowroozian, Monice Valente da Silva, Ingrid Nielsen, Mara Levi, Eunce Offei), and alumni (Nader Rahman and Mala Kumar). Finally, a word of gratitude to our designer, Nirkhunan Kuppuram.