An Appeal to the World: National Injustices, International Dimensions

As governments in a subcommittee of the United Nations’ General Assembly were beginning to debate the content for what was to become The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in 1947, the NAACP submitted a memorial to the UN, titled “An Appeal to the World: A Statement on the Denial of Human Rights to Minorities in the Case of Citizens of Negro Descent in the United States of America and an Appeal to the United Nations for Redress”. Supervised by W.E.B. Dubois, the “Appeal" traces a thread of U.S. legal history from 1787 to 1947 that evidences the systematic discrimination against, to use the Appeal’s language, “American Negroes.” In 2016, CMU's Center for International Ethics focused its annual commemoration of Global Ethics Day on the Appeal, and also discussed how the the parents of Michael Brown (who was killed in Ferguson, MO in 2014) were trying to use UN Human Rights Machinery in Geneva, Switzerland to seek justice. This episode contains the audio of that 2016 discussion. We hope to introduce the audience to the 1947 Appeal by focusing on select passages, but also to have the listener think about the international dimensions of domestic injustices. W.E.B. Dubois wrote “[the treatment of the American Negro] is not merely an internal question of the United States. It is a basic problem of humanity... and therefore demands the attention of “the People’s of the World.” Our aim is to have the listener think hard about how “internal questions” should inform “universal values” such as human dignity and human rights, and also to refresh the listener’s memory regarding the 2016 tragedy which laid the groundwork for the international response in 2020 to the murder of George Floyd.