Black genocide

In the United States, black genocide is the notion that the mistreatment of African Americans by both the United States government and white Americans, both in the past and the present, amounts to genocide. 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 a genocide against black people, citing long-term injustice, cruelty, and violence against blacks by whites. Some accusations of genocide have been described as conspiracy theories. In response to the War on Poverty legislation which was proposed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in the mid-1960s, legislation which included the public funding of the Pill for the poor, at the first Black Power Conference, which was held in July 1967, family planning (birth control) was said to be "black genocide." After abortion was more widely legalized in 1970, some black militants named abortion specifically as part of the conspiracy theory. Most African-American women were not convinced of a conspiracy, and rhetoric about race genocide faded. However, 1973 media revelations about decades of government-sponsored compulsory sterilization led some to say that this was part of a plan for black genocide. Other events around this time period were also declared to be methods of black genocide, such as the war on drugs, war on crime, and war on poverty, which had detrimental effects on the black community. During the Vietnam War, the increasing use of black soldiers in combat provided another basis for the accusation that the government was engaging in a "black genocide." In recent decades, the disproportionately high black prison population has also been cited in support of the claim that a black genocide is being committed. 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.