We Charge Genocide - Delivery

Delivery

On 17 December 1951, the petition was presented to the United Nations on two separate venues: Paul Robeson, concert singer and activist, together with people who signed the petition, handed the document to a UN official in New York, while William L. Patterson, executive director of the Civil Rights Congress, delivered copies of the drafted petition to a UN delegation in Paris. W. E. B. Du Bois, also slated to deliver the petition in Paris, had been designated an "unregistered foreign agent" and was deterred from traveling.

The 125 copies Patterson mailed to Paris did not arrive, allegedly intercepted by the US government. However Patterson was able to distribute other copies, which he had shipped in small packages to individuals' homes.

The document was signed by many people, including:

• W. E. B. Du Bois, African American sociologist, historian and Pan-Africanist activist
• George W. Crockett, Jr., African American lawyer and politician
• Benjamin J. Davis, Jr., African-American lawyer and communist New York councilman
• Ferdinand Smith
• Oakley C. Johnson, Communist activist
• Aubrey Grossman, labor and civil rights lawyer
• Claudia Jones, Communist and black nationalist activists
• Rosalie McGee, the widow of Willie McGee, who in 1951 was executed after being controversially convicted of rape
• Josephine Grayson, the widow of Francis Grayson, one of the "Martinsville Seven", who in 1951 were executed in Virginia after a much-publicized trial
• Amy Mallard and Dorris Mallard, remaining family of George Mallard, lynched in 1948 for voting
• Paul Washington, veteran on death row in Louisiana
• Wesley R. Wells, prisoner in California facing execution for throwing a cuspidor at a guard
• Horace Wilson, James Thorpe, Collis English, and Ralph Cooper, four of the Trenton Six

Patterson said he was ignored by Ralph Bunche and Channing Tobias, but that Edith Sampson would talk to him.

Patterson was ordered to surrender his passport at the United States embassy in France. Having refused, US agents said they would seize it at his hotel room. Patterson fled to Budapest, where through the newspaper Szabad Nép he accused the US government of attempting to stifle the charges. The US government ordered Patterson detained in Britain and seized his passport when he returned to America. Robeson had been unable to obtain a passport, and the difficulty these two men faced in traveling led some to accuse the American government of censorship.