Black genocide
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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In the United States, black genocide is a conspiracy theory which holds that African Americans are the victims of genocide instituted by white Americans. 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 to the United Nations in 1951. Malcolm X talked about "black genocide" in the early 1960s, citing long term injustice and cruelty by whites against blacks. After President Lyndon B. Johnson pushed through his War on Poverty legislation including public funding of the Pill for the poor in the mid 1960s, family planning (birth control) was said to be "black genocide" at the first Black Power Conference held in July 1967. In 1970 after abortion was more widely legalized, 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, in 1973, media revelations about decades of government-sponsored compulsory sterilization led some to say that this was part of a plan for black genocide.
During the Vietnam War the increasing use of black soldiers in combat provided a basis for the accusation of a government supported "black genocide". In recent decades the disproportionately high black prison population has been cited in support of the theory.
See also
- Civil Rights Movement
- Harry R. Jackson, Jr., The Truth in Black & White
- List of conspiracy theories
- Mass racial violence in the United States
- Political positions of Herman Cain
- Title X
- Tuskegee syphilis experiment
