ON DECEMBER 17 1951, the renowned black activist and performing artist Paul Robeson walked into the United Nations in New York and handed in a document entitled: We Charge Genocide. The Crime of Government Against the Negro People.

The book-length indictment charged the US government with genocide against its black citizens, documenting more than 10,000 cases of lynching, along with other forms of brutality, over the 85 years since the abolition of slavery.

The petition was signed by almost 100 activists and intellectuals. It was simultaneously delivered to UN officials in Paris by William L Patterson, executive director of the Civil Rights Congress.

Using the UN’s own definition of genocide as “Any intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, racial, or religious group,” the signatories charged that the US government, through a clear pattern of inaction and complicity, was guilty of genocide as a result of its “consistent, conscious, unified policies of every branch of government.”

The US media either ignored or disparaged the petition as “communist propaganda.” US officials at the UN ensured it never came up for debate or even discussion by the UN Commission on Human Rights.

Patterson’s passport was seized when he returned from Paris. Robeson was banned from leaving the country.

On May 14, Taxpayers Against Genocide (TAG), the National Lawyers Guild International Committee and the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, delivered their own legal complaint to the offices of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in Washington, DC.

The 54-page document presents what the groups describe as “overwhelming evidence of complicity” in the Gaza genocide “by the US government, including both the Biden and Trump administrations, as well as Congress.”

It lays out the argument that “in committing residents’ tax dollars — including those of Palestinian-Americans whose families have been decimated in Gaza — to support genocide,” the US government “makes US taxpayers complicit in supporting Israeli war crimes in Gaza.”

The complaint contains numerous affidavits from Palestinian-American plaintiffs who have already lost countless family members in the Gaza genocide. One of the plaintiffs, Tariq Ra’ouf, said in his statement: “I did not consent to paying for the bullets and bombs that have killed 43 of my family members.”

The submission of the report was another significant moment that black Americans recognise only too well, said Jackie Luqman, co-ordinating committee chair of Black Alliance for Peace, who spoke at a press conference announcing the TAG lawsuit.

“Because of the We Charge Genocide petition, we Africans in America who were stolen from our own lands, from our homes and from our people, understand this country’s complicity in genocide,” said Luqman, referring to Robeson’s historic action.

“The entire history of this country, its existence, rests on the bloody foundation of the genocide of our Indigenous people and the enslavement of us.”

The Gaza genocide petition is important, Luqman said, because it presents crucial evidence “to people who have been misled, who have been told that Israel has a right to defend itself. You don’t defend yourself by starving people, that’s not self-defence. And no state has a right to exist. Human beings have a right to exist.”

While African-Americans must continue their own fight for equality on US soil, Luqman sees the role of Black Alliance for Peace as educating her community “to help people understand how our struggles are not separate. They are all connected.”

The struggle against racism and oppression in the US, “is connected with the liberation struggle of people in Palestine,” Luqman said. It is also connected “with the struggle against settler colonialism and neocolonialism in Haiti,” and “with the people in Sudan struggling against continued US imperialism.”

And, most importantly, Luqman said, we must understand “how that struggle is connected with the people in Yemen, the poorest country in the world doing the only thing that any country in the world should be doing, standing up for the Palestinians.”

After the press conference, Luqman and other organisers and activists marched in protest past the White House, en route to the IACHR offices where the petition was handed in by its lead author, Palestinian-American lawyer Huwaida Arraf, a founder of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM).

Arraf was a participant in the 2010 Gaza Freedom Flotilla that was attacked in international waters by Israeli forces, killing 10 citizen volunteers on one of the boats, the Mavi Marmara.

Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old US peace activist, who was run over and killed in 2003 by an Israeli bulldozer while trying to protect Palestinians and their homes in Rafah, was a member of ISM. So, too, was American-Turkish 26-year-old, Aysenur Eygi, who was shot last September by an Israeli sniper while standing on the sidelines of a Palestinian protest in the West Bank.

TAG had previously filed a federal class action lawsuit, shortly after the group was formed in the autumn of 2024, arguing that it is illegal to use tax dollars for genocide. The case was dismissed in February.

It was a predictable outcome, said Arraf, noting that such cases against Israel are invariably dismissed on the grounds of political content or foreign sovereign immunity. “It’s clear the United States has immunised itself in the courts here against being held accountable for federal war crimes,” she said. “So we had to go international.”

But, Arraf cautioned, “as with all international law and international legal fora, there is no enforcement mechanism. Enforcement comes down to people, enforcement comes down to political will.”

That means continuing to speak up, to protest and to educate people. “We cannot appeal to their morality,” said Luqman of the US government. “What we can do, what we did do with the We Charge Genocide petition, and what will be done with this petition, is that we will raise the consciousness of people who think this is not their fight.”

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland.