TWO TREATIES, AND GLOBAL INFLUENCES OF THE AMERICAN CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT, THROUGH THE BLACK INTERNATIONAL TRADITION

Henry J. Richardson, III* CONTENTS Introduction ......................................... I. Identifying the Black International Tradition ............ ..... A. Influences of "Outside" Mass Struggles by Peoples of Color ....... B. Examples of the global impact of the American Civil Rights Movement ...................................... II. The Impact of Two Key Treaties on African-American Collective Debates on the Best Route Towards Liberation .. ............. A. The Berlin Conference and the Treaty of Berlin . ............. B. The United Nations Charter .................. ........... III. Conclusion .................................. .....
INTRODUCTION

59 61 62 66 67 68 74 80

The Black International Tradition is essential for understanding the necessity of critical scholarship in law and other disciplines, as we remember the modem birth of the Civil Rights Movement a half-century ago. In that regard, this article seeks to help us understand the present meaning of rededicating ourselves to the ideals of that movement. This article will open by briefly sketching the Black (AfricanAmerican) International Tradition. The sketch will confirm the reality of that Tradition, laid down over more than 400 years, as an integral part of Black people's history on American soil. African Americans have not just bumped into, nor been episodically surprised by, international issues. In the last 150 years, Blacks in North America have been heavily influenced by the news of mass organized Black struggle elsewhere in the world, and the Tradition includes Black claims and demands around that news. The news of resistance elsewhere, for example, has long been influential by encouraging greater fortitude and dedication against domestic slavery as well as supporting the general Black historic struggle against racism. This article will also briefly discuss examples of the American Civil Rights Movement's own impact on the global level. While not discussed in this paper, arguably this impact was recently recognized in a special way by the award of the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama, his Professor of Law, Temple University Law School. I greatly appreciate the support of the Clifford Scott Green Research Fund, and the excellent research
assistance of Ms. Smruti Govan, J.D. 2010, along with Steven Cobb, J.D. (expected) 2011. All errors remain my own.

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election as the United States' first African-American President standing on the shoulders of the Civil Rights Movement. More generally, this impact has unfolded through a variety of cultural, political, and diasporic routes, including through strategies of comparative constitutional law, for example, with respect to the United States and South Africa.' Following this all too brief survey of pertinent indications of the authority of the Black International Tradition, the remainder of this article will explore, as examples of that authority, two major treaties of global significance: the 1885 Conference of Berlin and the United Nations Charter of 1945. Each treaty has played a notable role in that Tradition by serving as a fulcrum for contemporary African collective debates on liberation-related issues at the local level. Each treaty served as a focus for African-American claims (that is, normative demands) about the content of their international interests and how they related to the correct route towards liberation. Such interests included, importantly, African Americans' interests in international law. Black leaders framed the national debate on the best routes to Black liberation, framed Black international interests around these two treaties, and linked those interests back to the national liberation debates. These historical processes were notable in evolving the past century of the Black International Tradition. The article reflects, in sum, that Blacks, notwithstanding much official opposition and lack of academic recognition, have always been involved in international affairs and had interests in international law, since before they were brought in chains to this territory, and before America was a nation. African Americans have their own International Tradition, which arose without the permission of either federal authority in Washington or controlling white interests. The Haitian and Ghandian revolutions, as well as the decolonization movement of the midtwentieth century, indicate within this Tradition the borrowing by African Americans of example and inspiration from mass struggle abroad by peoples of color. The recent global anti-war movement against the invasion of Iraq and the internationalization of the success of the
1 See, e.g., STEINER, ALSTON & GOODMAN, INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS IN

CONTEXT 23-42 (3d ed. 2007). The authors discuss the South African case State
v. Makwanye, 1995 (3) SA 391 (CC) and the U.S. case Roper v. Simmons, 543

U.S. 551 (2005), regarding issues in the comparative constitutionality of the death penalty. Discussions such as these impacted the drafting of the South African Constitution. South African-ANC fact-finding groups came to the U.S.
in the early 1990's, liaising with progressive constitutional, civil rights, and

international lawyers, including myself, to learn what doctrines, structure, interpretations, and text of the U.S. Constitution not to incorporate as they drafted their own. Also, see generally George Fredrickson's comparative work on race in South Africa and the U.S. and the racial synergies between these two countries.

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African National Congress in liberating South Africa in 1994 are examples of the impact that the American Civil Rights Movement continues to have in the world community. Finally, treaties and other instruments of international law can help African-American leaders and the rank and file focus and shape major local and international demands and strategies towards the most promising path to liberation in America. I. IDENTIFYING THE BLACK INTERNATIONAL TRADITION The Black International Tradition is a documented historical pathway of Black claims and demands to "outside law" often focused on international events. It comprises claims and demands to be governed by better, more liberation-promising normative authority "outside" of local American law and policy, which upheld slavery and national racism. The Tradition antedates the founding of the United States in 1776 but continues to unfold during the present and into the future. It is an historical process of all groups and genders of Blacks in America who identify and act on their international interests. They do so by making demands to international law and other outside law (sources of normative rejection of slavery and racism) for better prescription and enforcement of their rights to be free of racism and treated with dignity. Further discussion herein and the other Symposium articles on AfricanAmerican international questions and actions are part of the current chronicles of this Tradition. For instance, the War of 1812 confirms early evidence of Blacks in the United States asserting claims to a right of general equality and freedom under outside law in return for their military service.2 Blacks who aligned with the British during the War in British Canada fought to secure their freedom once they crossed the border into Canada, and secure their land rights-a separate struggle-by reaching beyond the British law that was applied to them in Canada. Additionally, Blacks in that period fighting in a militia led by British adventurer William Augustus Bowles claimed the right, under outside law, to choose among international (white) contenders to fight for the side promising the greatest prospects for Black freedom. Earlier, during the American Revolution, Blacks had made the same general claim in a more numerous and emphatic set of actions. But here Blacks claimed the right, as Blacks, to fight to defend the then foreign-held territory of Florida as a refuge for escaped American slaves. 3 This, and other examples of African-heritage people in the Americas accepting (white, colonial) military service in return for guarantees of freedom and land, helped form the only contemporaneous principle of customary international law

2 HENRY J. RICHARDSON

III,

THE ORIGINS OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN INTERESTS IN

INTERNATIONAL LAW 416 (2008).

3 Id. at

403.

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that created a right for slaves to be freed, although only subsequent to such a bargain. The principle can be said to have evolved by the outbreak of the War of 1812, and was incorporated by Blacks into their own domestic equation about land, freedom, and military service.
A. INFLUENCES OF "OUTSIDE" MASS STRUGGLES BY PEOPLES OF COLOR

Beginning in the early seventeenth century, and possibly even before, outside events were feeding inspiration into resistance efforts of American slaves and free Black persons. Indeed the first eleven Africans brought to New Amsterdam (New York) in 1625 made implicit claims to "outside" law (Dutch law) regarding the right to be free from slavery and indentured servitude.s Later many Blacks made implicit claims to freedom by rejecting the Dutch system by either seeking refuge in Canada or aligning with two potential invaders, the Native Americans and the British, because of the belief that these groups had a better system of laws guaranteeing their right to escape from slavery and their right to freedom from slavery. 6 News of various slave rebellions spread and further inspired slaves, including those of the Black Maroon movements (communities in the Caribbean and Central American territories). News may also have spread from the Republic of Palmares in Brazil, the seventeenth-century African independent community that was possibly the greatest Maroon community to exist, lasting a century. In fact almost every Caribbean island has a record of revolts against the plantation system, including Jamaica, which by 1730 was so plagued by attacks from Maroons that England had to send extra forces to the island.' The Republic of Palmares was perhaps the most successful Maroon community, as it withstood numerous attacks by Portuguese forces. It was established by runaway slaves as an African state in Alagoas, northeastern Brazil, between 1630 and 1697.8 By creating an independent Republic, the leaders of Palmares essentially asserted a claim to establish sovereign authority and control over a defined territory.9 While it remains unclear if the leaders intended to assert a claim for independent statehood under international law vis-iA-vis European states, the leaders were in essence claiming a collective right to emigrate from a territory of enslavement to another jurisdiction that lacked direct legal endorsement of slavery.' 0

4 Id. at 416.
6 Id.

Id. at 57.

"Escap[ing]" is a narrower issue than "freedom," as it presupposes the

continuation of slavery, and each has a separate historiography.

7 8

Id. at 77. Id. at 82.

9 Id. 'o Id. at 82, 83.

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Other examples of outside inspirational events include the Haitian Revolution, of which the impact on America should not be underestimated. This impact includes its direct impact on slave revolts. The Haitian Revolution was a significant source of outside law in establishing the invalidity of all slavery norms and power assumptions, and American slave revolts invoked and incorporated such law, such as Prosser's Rebellion in Virginia in 1800. As early as the 1620s, Haiti had established its own Maroon communities, which were responsible for the Haitian uprisings of 1679, 1691, and 1704.11 The Haitian rebel leader Macandal rose to power and led a coup d'6tat in 1758, which later spurred the Haitian Revolution in 1791. News of the Haitian Revolution spread among white colonists through commercial intercourse and, concurrently, through the Black community within the United States.' 2 The influx of Frenchmen fleeing the Revolution into the United States, along with as many as 12,000 Haitian slaves, may also have contributed to the increased awareness of Black participants in American slave revolts.13 The Haitian Revolution also raised alarm among Southern plantation owners, prompting the passage of legislation within Southern states prohibiting the importation of Black slaves from the Caribbean.14 Moving forward through the nineteenth century, such outside inspiration included news and growing Black understanding of the treatment and struggles of Africans and other peoples of color by and against European empires. They struggled first simply for decent overseas colonial treatment, and later for justice and liberation, and this news became increasingly influential among Blacks in America. The former was framed in law by the late nineteenth-century public international legal briefs of George Washington Williams regarding the Belgian atrocities inflicted on the people of the Congo, which I will discuss later.' 5 These global struggles were further framed by the early work of W.E.B. Du Bois in his first Pan-African Conferences. He particularly made an historic claim with his petition to the Versailles Peace Conference at the end of World War I, in which he demanded that the right of self-determination of colonized peoples of color be recognized as equal to the analogous rights of Southern European peoples under President Wilson's 14 Points.' Du Bois' demand was
"Id. at 77 12Id. at 78-79. ' Id. at 367, 368.

Id. at 231. 15See George Washington Williams to King Leopold II,An Open Letter to his Serene Majesty Leopold II, King of the Belgians and Sovereign of the Independent State of Congo, in JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN, GEORGE WASHINGTON WILLIAMS: A BIOGRAPHY 243-54 (1985) [hereinafter WILLIAMS BIOGRAPHY]. 16 DAVID LEVERING LEWIS, W.E.B. Du Bois: BIOGRAPHY OF A RACE 576 (1993); W.E.B. Du Bois, My Mission, THE CRISIS, May 1919, at 8, reprinted in 1 SELECTIONS FROM THE CRISIS 187 (Herbert Aptheker ed., 1983).
14

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rejected by European leaders, but his action and its content constituted a powerful point in the twentieth century evolution of the Black International Tradition. Further, the presence of an NAACP representative at the founding meeting of the African National Conference in Johannesburg in 1910 represented a linkage of struggles against lynching and American apartheid in the United States and the systematic killing and oppression of Africans in pre-apartheid South Africa. In South Africa, consciousness of violent white racism was increasing through the Indian community's mass struggle, of which the young Mohandas K. Gandhi was a part as of 1912, before his emigration to India. And looking forward, it is important to recognize the impact Gandhi's non-violent struggle against British colonialism in India, beginning in the 1930s, had on the young Martin Luther King, Jr.'s ideas and the growth of his commitment to non-violence while he was in college and seminary. After World War II, in the mid-1950s, the active global decolonization struggles were increasingly led by a series of mass movements unfolding colonial territory by colonial territory, not least in Africa. An example of the linkage between the early Civil Rights human-rights-self-determinationand the global Movement decolonization narrative is the presence of Adam Clayton Powell, a leader of Harlem civil rights marches in the 1940s, pastor of its largest church and a crusading Congressman, at the 1955 Bandung Conference, which was the first self-identified Conference of "third world" peoples. 17 There is an historical symbiosis between the emergence of these decolonization struggles, fed in part by the educational symbiosis among Black Folks in the United States of leaders such as Kwame Nkhrumah of Ghana and Azikwe of Nigeria, and the rise of our own Civil Rights Movement beginning in Montgomery in 1955, led by the young, talented preacher Martin Luther King, Jr. We note the feedback global supportand global recognition of its meaning for America-that the American Civil Rights Movement began to garner from, for example, the governments and peoples of the newly independent Ghana, Nigeria, and Kenya, and other developing states, such as Cuba.' 8 We note in the early 1970s the impact of these events on the great African-American leader Malcolm X, who was drawn to the historical Muslim perennial mass movement and pilgrimage towards Mecca, as he joined it in his Hajj. He returned to stir America, in his intense and riveting work, with a more inclusive and wider definition of liberation for all oppressed peoples. Malcolm X had acquired a personal capacity to put the Black liberation struggle in a stronger human context and to borrow from the long
17 JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN, FROM SLAVERY AMERICANS
18 id.

To

FREEDOM, A HISTORY OF AFRICAN

554-55 (2009).

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Islamic traditions in connecting the Movement with Black Muslims in America.19 As he stated during his trip to Mecca: America needs to understand Islam, because this is the one religion that erases from its society the race
problem.
. .

. I have never before seen sincere and true

brotherhood practiced by all colors together, irrespective

of their color. . . . [P]erhaps if white Americans could

accept the Oneness of God, then perhaps, too, they could accept in reality the Oneness of Man-and cease to measure, and hinder, and harm others in terms of their
"differences" in color.
. .

. Each hour here in the Holy

Land enables me to have greater spiritual insights into what is happening in America between black and white.20 Lastly, in this incomplete sketch, we cannot forget the historic international anti-apartheid struggle of the 1960s through the early 1990s. Nelson Mandela and other African National Congress heroes in South Africa evolved into African-American heroes. The Civil Rights Movement fused with the human rights movement in the nationwide Free South Africa campaign of the 1980s under the leadership, inter alia, of Rev. Leon Sullivan with his Sullivan Principles of corporate and investor responsibility against South African apartheid, Congressman Charles Diggs, law professor Goler Butcher, and Randall Robinson of the NGO TransAfrica. The Free South Africa campaign prescribed new national legal rights principles as it grew. These norms included the obligation to divest from the economic support and institutions of a foreign oppressor regime. They also asserted that trade with an oppressor government aids that oppressor and constitutes a tacit endorsement of that regime and its racist policies. In essence, these principles prescribed duties on corporations, codified through the Sullivan Principles, to provide equal treatment and benefits to South African black workers and essentially called for extending U.S. equal protection standards to similarly oppressed overseas groups in U.S. trading partner states.2 1 The Free South Africa campaign grew into a mighty mass movement that took a major foreign policy issue on South Africa away from the Reagan administration executive and its policy of "constructive engagement" by producing veto-proof federal legislation: the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986.22 This act directly
19 Id. 20 ALEX HALEY, THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOLM
21

X 345-46 (1965). See generally Henry J. Richardson, III, Reverend Leon Sullivan ' Principles, Race, and InternationalLaw: A Comment, 15 TEMP. INT'L & COMP. L.J. 55 (2001). 22 Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986, H.R. 4868, 99th Cong. (1986).

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supported South African liberation through mandatory economic sanctions and corporate divestment. Framed in part by the work of Rev. Leon Sullivan and his Sullivan Principles but propelled by the general campaign, the movement laid the foundation for the global principles and evolving law that corporations have human rights responsibilities overseas to vulnerable peoples within their influence. In essence, the Free South Africa Movement injected international human rights norms into the domestic jurisdiction of South Africa by influencing multinational corporations who had considerable impact upon South Africa's economy.2 3 The Movement, including the Sullivan Principles, expanded the international legal doctrine of state responsibility, especially with regard to duties of states under international law relative to multinational corporations subject to that state's jurisdiction. It clarified the obligation of the U.S. government to extend and promote racial equality through regulation of multinational corporations. 24 1 believe that African Americans were so successful in producing new American policy and law, at least for that moment, in the Free South Africa Movement that, paradoxically, they and other scholars are almost afraid to study it, explore its strategies, and draw its lessons, including those about norm creation and law. The dearth of scholarly publications on these issues is unfortunate.
B. EXAMPLES OF THE GLOBAL IMPACT OF
THE AMERICAN CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

We begin this short sketch by noting that the American Free South Africa Movement directly and purposefully supported the successful liberation struggle of the African National Congress in South Africa.25 The American Civil Rights Movement was a model for foreign Black consciousness rights movements in other instances as well, such as other African-heritage rights movements and organizations of lawyers of color dedicated to representing vulnerable groups in Canada and Great Britain.26 The Movement as both a jurisprudential model and source of leverage also influenced Thurgood Marshall in his role in the Kenyan independence constitution negotiations with Britain, as Mary Dudziak has recently well written this history.27 And we must include the cross23 24

See, e.g., id. at 78 ("The racial narrative in the Global Principles continues into their holding multinationals responsible for the rights-welfare of communities within their-in the words of U.N. Secretary-General Annan's subsequent U.N. Global Compact-'spheres of influence."').
25

See generally Richardson,supra note 21.

See generally Richardson,supra note 21.

26

See, e.g., National Conference of Black Lawyers,

http://www.ncbl.org. See

generally Gerald Home, Hands Across the Water: Afro-American Lawyers and the Decolonization ofSouthern Africa, 45 GUILD PRAC. I10 (1988).
27 MARY DUDZIAK, EXPORTING AMERICAN DREAMS: THURGOOD MARSHALL'S AFRICAN JOURNEY (2008).

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impact, through the early work of Du Bois and Paul Robeson and later through the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr., of the American Civil Rights Movement on the global peace movement. This cross-impact arguably culminated on King's birthday in 2003 in the largest simultaneous global peace marches and demonstrations in history, involving millions of people in more than twenty cities globally, protesting the U.S. invasion of Iraq. 28 This Iraq Anti-War movement is evidence of King's legacy of combining civil rights, human rights, and peace movements through Gandhian principles. 29 Additionally, the impact of the Civil Rights Movement coupled with the rise of Critical Race Theory and similar American jurisprudence has now been felt, for example, in Brazil. Recently emerged is a notable politics of color initiated by Afro-Brazilians who acknowledge the influence of AfricanAmerican struggles. They call into question the "non-racial" tradition of assimilado that shapes the distribution of privilege and deprivation in that society, 30 and they are identifying and organizing around racial discrimination issues. Similar movements have also arisen elsewhere in Inter-American states, including in Colombia where a movement has organized around the oppression of Afro-Colombians.3 1
II. THE IMPACT OF Two KEY TREATIES ON AFRICAN-AMERICAN COLLECTIVE DEBATES ON THE BEST ROUTE TOWARDS LIBERATION

I turn now to focus on two major treaties. These treaties are of historical significance in their own eras in the march of the Black International Tradition. But they also provide current insights on how rights-related treaties and international law can shape crucial AfricanAmerican debates about which collective decisions best serve the purpose of moving towards security of rights and freedom from racism in America. Each treaty has respectively served as a fulcrum at a key point in Black History, around which competing collective Black claims swirled about the correct essential-not merely the best-path of African Americans towards better protection and definitions of their rights, towards their liberation from racism. Around both treaties--even though the earlier was not formally ratified by the United States-these collective debates were taking place. They were part of African
Henry J. Richardson III, Dr Martin Luther King, Jr as an International Human Rights Leader, 52 VILLANOVA L. R. 471, 473 (2007). 29 Id. at 478.
28

See Peter Fry, Politics, Nationality and the Meanings of "Race" in Brazil, 129 DAEDALUS 83-87, 90-93 (2000).
30

See Gay MacDougall, United Nations Independent Expert on Minority Issues, Statement on the conclusion of her official visit to Colombia (Feb. 12, 2010),
31

availableat http://www.ohchr.org/en/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?Ne wslD=9821&LanglD=E.

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Americans' necessary attempts to help shape decisions in the intertwined processes of public authority of the American community and that of the global community. The first of these two treaties is the Treaty of Berlin of 1885, which codified imposed boundaries to partition Africa among the European colonial powers.3 2 The second is the United Nations Charter of 1946, which constitutively established a new world order at the close of World War II, to which individual human rights were integral, and undermined the legality of colonialism under international law.
A. THE BERLIN CONFERENCE AND THE TREATY OFBERLIN

The Conference of Berlin convened in 1884 to negotiate accommodating arrangements on the African continent among European empire states, plus other interested governments, including the United States. These states had already drawn lines on European maps delimiting their territorial spheres of influence and colonizing in Africa. Such boundaries reflected their stakes in cheaply harvesting African resources for the wealth of the European metropolitan state, including in the remnants of the international slave trade, securing control of territory and peoples for future economic monopolies, and preventing undue advantage in this regard to rival European states. The interests of African peoples were generally irrelevant to this process, and European military action to enforce these claims was assumed. European rivalries around these issues, including boundary issues of claimed colonial African territories, had appeared and threatened conflict. Hence the Conference produced the Treaty of Berlin in 1885 (formally, the General Act of the Conference of Berlin). The Treaty codified, under international law, European colonial spheres of influence on the African continent based on principles of European economic tolerance and cooperation. Indeed, it ushered in the beginning of this coercive and active phase of colonizing African peoples with, inter alia, a declaration proclaiming the end of the African slave trade. It also solidified, with systemic detrimental consequences in Africa down to the present moment, the division of the Continent by European-drawn colonial boundaries. The fixing of such borders had little to do with patterns of African customs, lands, life, cultures, and politics, resulting in continuing border disputes, jurisdictional frictions, litigation, and barriers to defining continental African interests. Nevertheless, the colonial fixing of these borders carried forward to territorially define modern African independent states following decolonization. Incorporating its imperial European prerogatives of African partition, the Treaty arrived in America, with the possibility of its
32

General Act of Berlin Conference, February 26, 1885, 3 Wiktor 71.

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ratification by Washington, 3 to serve as a fulcrum of and provide a focus on issues in a continuing collective debate among AfricanAmerican leaders. Those leaders favoring African-American emigration back to Africa tended to see the Treaty's European imperial partition of Africa as promising benefits for African peoples in building African progress. Along with earlier leaders, they tended to see African Americans as both providing and sharing in those benefits in Liberia, Sierra Leone, the Congo, and elsewhere, 34 even including the future dream of a powerful unified African continent. For example, both Timothy Fortune, editor and co-founder of the New York Globe (later the New York Freeman), and John Bruce demonstrated an optimism concerning the impact of European colonialism upon Africa, believing that out of the white oppression of Africans would emerge a united "African Empire: comparable to the unification of Germany." 35 Fortune expressed these sentiments in The Freeman, 1887, stating: It is written on the wall that there will one day be an African empire whose extent and power will be inferior to that of no government now denominated as a first
class power .
.

. people will become educated, not only

in the grasping and cruel nature of the white man, but in the knowledge of their power, their priority of ownership in the soil, and in the desperation which tyranny and greed never fail to breed for their own destruction. Out of the convulsions, which are sure to come, an African Confederation, not unlike that of Germany, will certainly be evolved. It can hardly be prevented, save by Omnipotent interposition. So out of toil and privation and long agony, good will eventually come to the swarthy millions of our Fatherland. 6 Leaders such as Fortune and Bruce thus tended to urge African Americans to support the Treaty by both supporting African emigration and approving of European colonialism in Africa for these projected purposes.
3
34

FROM SLAVERY TO HISTORY OF AFRICAN AMERICANS 182-83 (McGraw-Hill 9th ed. 2010). See generally SCHOMBURG CTR. FOR RESEARCH IN BLACK CULTURE, N.Y. PUB. LIBRARY, AFRICAN AMERICAN DESK REFERENCE 52 (1999); JEREMY I. LEVITT, THE EVOLUTION OF DEADLY CONFLICT IN LIBERIA, FROM 'PATERNALTARIANISM'TO STATE COLLAPSE (2005). FREEDOM:

See WILLIAMS BIOGRAPHY, supra note 15, at 186-87. See id at 183; JOHN FRANKLIN & EVELYN HIGGINBOTHAM,

Johnson A. Adefila, The Black Press and Africa in the 19th Century Black American Strugglefor Equality, in CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON HISTORICAL AND
3

CONTEMPORARY ISSUES ABOUT AFRICA AND BLACK AMERICA

38-40 (Tunde

Adeleke ed., 2004).

" Id. at 40.

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Fortune and Bruce were also joined by Booker T. Washington, who stated that "it was to the advantage of the African people to use European imperialism as a means of 'uplifting' themselves and developing their resources"37 and further encouraged American investment in Africa to develop business opportunities for African Americans. These perspectives were generally consonant with those of earlier nineteenth-century proponents of African-American emigration. These early proponents wove these goals into European colonialism in various ways, not excluding African-American colonization of Africa in the context of Black nationalism. Leaders of this ideology included Martin Delaney, Bishop Henry Turner, Henry Highland Garnet, John Mercer Langston, Alexander Crummell, and Edward Blyden. Garnet, for example, supported limited emigration to West Africa for the purposes of establishing a Black industrial nation that could compete with the Western world and establish markets for sugar, cotton, and the like.38 In 1858, in conjunction with this view, he helped create the African Civilization Society in order to encourage black professionals to establish a cotton industry within the Niger region that could possibly compete with the southern U.S. cotton industry. He envisioned a small group of African Americans setting up permanent residence within the Niger region, supervising the cotton trade and establishing an AfricanAmerican state while also spreading the Christian gospel.39 Other leaders had related visions. Alexander Crummell, a prominent African-American Episcopalian clergyman and an ardent supporter of Afro-American colonization in Africa, spent twenty years in Liberia exploring the possibility of creating an Afro-American colony there. Ultimately, he believed that African Americans, having been redeemed and civilized by the Western world, should return to their ancestral land and use their knowledge and belief in Christianity to promote the regeneration and modernization of the continent.4 0 Some leaders adopted a more Pan-African view, asserting that Black people were all interconnected through racial identity. They should thus return to their homeland, establish a Black nation and fulfill their duty of civilizing and proselytizing their African brethren. 4 ' Delaney shared this view that the
3 SYLVIA JACOBS, THE AFRICAN NEXUS: BLACK AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES ON THE EUROPEAN PARTITIONING OF AFRICA, 1880-1920, at 49 (1981). 38 Ella Forbes, African American Resistance to Colonization,21 J. BLACK STUD.

210, 222 (1990).

3

Richard Blackett, The African Civilization Society, in ORGANIZING BLACK George Shepperson, Aspects ofAmerican Interest in the Berlin Conference, in

AMERICA: AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AFRICAN AMERICAN ASSOCIATIONS 4, 14-15

(Nina Mjagkij ed., 2001).

40

BISMARCK, EUROPE, AND AFRICA: THE BERLIN AFRICA CONFERENCE 1884-1885

AND THE ONSET OF PARTITION 289 (Stig F6rster, Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Ronald

Robinson eds., Oxford Univ. Press 1988). 41 See Adefila, supra note 35, at 35.

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only option left for Blacks was to assert African heritage as the basis for a new identity and, after visiting Africa from 1859-1861, championed the cause of emigration as a way of creating a new black nationality in Africa.42 As a result of American refusal to grant Blacks full equality, voluntary emigration to Africa remained a debated issue among Black leaders.4 3 Edward Blyden, in 1895, cited the Treaty directly:
The African problem in Africa . .. is now engaging the

earnest attention and taxing the energies of all the powers in Europe. The decision of the Berlin Conference ten years ago, has placed Europe in relations to Africa such as never before existed between the two
continents. Every power of Europe .
.

. has established

or is seeking to establish interests in Africa. The conferences at Berlin in 1884-85, and at Brussels in 1890, assumed for Europe the continent of Africa as its special field of operations. The scramble is over and now the question is how to utilize the plunder in the * 44 interests of civilization and progress. Blyden had hoped that America would follow the advances of European colonialism in Africa by creating a colony within Africa where African Americans could resettle and establish themselves. Shortly after the Berlin Conference, Blyden had attempted through the influence of the American Colonization Society-which had, from slaveholders and other white dominant perspectives, long pushed for African American emigration-to persuade the American government to appoint him as a roving agent in West Africa. He would report on the activities of the European powers so that the American government could intervene on the part of Africans whenever necessary. Generally, Blyden emphasized that Europeans could not and did not intend to colonize Africa, and apparently did so because he did not want to discourage AfricanAmerican emigration. He generally emphasized the benign hopes for African-focused development benefits of European partition rather than the visible trends of control, exploitation, and oppression of African peoples.45

Id. at 30. 43 id 4 Shepperson, supra note 40, at 290-91. 45 See HOLLIS R. LYNCH, EDWARD WILMOT BLYDEN: PAN-NEGRO PATRIOT 1832-1912, at 196-200 (1967); see also EDWARD W. BLYDEN, THE AFRICAN PROBLEM AND OTHER DISCOURSEs 23 (1890).
42

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However, the opposing non-emigration position of this historic debate had long been framed by leaders such as Fredrick Douglass.46 As early as 1859, Douglass firmly held that those Blacks who emigrated were "traitors to the cause," that the United States and the American Colonization Society (which he vehemently opposed) should give no support to African-American emigration, and that African Americans should remain in the United States and work to ensure equality. In his "The Folly of Colonization," he further wrote: But the worst thing, perhaps, about this colonization nonsense is that it tends to throw over the Negro a mantle of despair. It leads him to doubt the possibility of his progress as an American citizen. It also encourages popular prejudice with the hope that by persecution the Negro can finally be dislodged and driven from his natural home, while in the nature of the case he must stay here and will stay here, if for no other reason than because he cannot well get away. I object to the colonization scheme, because it tends to weaken the Negro's hold on one country, while it can give him no rational hope of another. Its tendency is to make him despondent and doubtful, where he should feel assured and confident. It forces upon him the idea that he is forever doomed to be a stranger and a sojourner in the land of his birth, and that he has no permanent abiding place here.47 Douglass' perspectives were consonant in the same period with those of Samuel Cornish, the editor of the Black newspaper The Rights of All, who stated, "Nothing appears to me more trifling than to talk of repaying to Africa the debt we owe her, by returning her sons to its coasts. I consider that the shortest way to accomplish this grand object, is to do her sons justice wherever we find them."4 8 George Washington Williams, lawyer, journalist, historian, explorer, and the first African-American international lawyer, was the AfricanAmerican intellectual leader who at the time most directly addressed the Treaty of Berlin. He was an early proponent of African-American colonization, but with conflicted views on European-African imperialism, and he originally supported American ratification of the Treaty. But he later became one of the strongest opponents of European
46

See generally FREDERICK

DOUGLASS, NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF FREDERICK

DOUGLASS: AN AMERICAN SLAVE

(George Stade ed., Barnes & Noble 2003)

(1845). (1894), available at http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?document- 1034. 48 Adefila, supra note 35, at 36.
47 FREDERICK DOUGLASS, THE FOLLY OF COLONIZATION

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colonization, including by the Belgian regime in the Congo. Belgium's legal structure and oppressive policies in the Congo raised contemporary questions, even from other European-African colonial powers. Williams promised U.S. President Harrison that he would write a memorandum on the "International Law and sentimental reasons" advocating U.S. ratification of the Treaty. 49 However, he requested that the U.S. government postpone the decision until after he completed his on-theground investigation of Belgian King Leopold's regime over the Congo, which he conducted on his own during an expedition to identify Congo railroad investment property for the magnate Huntington Hartford. In 1890, after his investigation found a system of consistent Belgian atrocities against the Congolese, Williams wrote an Open Letter to accuse the Belgian King of violating the Treaty by maladministration and gross brutalities in the Congo. This Letter was nothing less than an international law brief on Belgian violations of Congolese rights, even under contemporary international law of the period permitting colonialism. 5 0 He also wrote to President Harrison to try to gain international support for censuring the Belgian Congo regime. Unfortunately Williams, having never fully recovered from Civil War combat wounds, died in London shortly after emerging from his African expedition. The young W.E.B. Du Bois, by his own admission, did not really take notice of the Treaty during the 1880s: The Congo Free State was established and the Berlin Conference of 1885 was reported to be an act of civilization against the slave trade and liquor. French, English and Germans pushed on in Africa, but I did not question the interpretation which pictured this as the advance of civilization and the benevolent tutelage of barbarians. 52 His opposition to colonization increased with the beginning of his historic work organizing global Pan-African Conferences, and with the approach of World War I.53 But with the approach of World War II, Du Bois again returned to the Treaty, stating in 1940, "Hitler is the late crude but logical exponent of white world race philosophy since the

49 WILLIAMS BIOGRAPHY, supra note

' 0 Id. at 243-54.

' Id. at 264.
52

15, at 264.

George Shepperson, The Centennial of the West African Conference of Berlin, 1884-1885, 46 PHYLON 37, 47 (1985). 1999).

5 SCHOMBURG CENTER FOR RESEARCH IN BLACK CULTURE, THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY AFRICAN AMERICAN DESK REFERENCE 11 (Stonesong Press

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Conference of Berlin in 1884."54 Thus he, then as the leading AfricanAmerican scholar of international affairs, implicitly referred to the evils of European imperialism and the partition of Africa by comparing that imperialist philosophy and program and their consequences for African peoples to that of Hitler, his global racial program, and its potential consequences for all peoples. Curiously, contemporary Black leaders, save Williams implicitly and later Du Bois indirectly, did not seem to take any notice of the codified tradeoff in the Treaty agreed to by European powers (and to some extent by the United States). These countries confirmed under international law the illegality of the slave trade regarding African "native tribes" and the territories of the Congo Basin, but their confirmation resulted in the construction and imposition of a new international legal basis for European coercive colonial domination of presumptively inferior African peoples. Thus the Treaty of Berlin was a globally significant European treaty, a major international legal foundation for European colonialism that was signed but not ratified by the United States. Notwithstanding its lack of formal American ratification, it became a focal point in its widely recognized constitutive authority-a fulcrum-for essential, internal, and local collective historic African-American debate about the correct path to liberation of both themselves and African peoples. This debatea century old upon the Treaty's arrival-addressed key issues of identity and citizenship regarding African Americans' own domiciles on different continents, as well as the racial legitimacy of European states agreeing to partition Africa. In this regard, the Treaty also became a focus of African-American implicit claims to international law, plus other international interests, regarding issues about their own path to liberation.
B. THE UNITED NATIONS CHARTER

Let us now turn to how the United Nations Charter, which was ratified by the United States as a major treaty and came into force in 1946,6 also served as a fulcrum around which a different historic African-American collective debate revolved. This debate was among the African-American leadership and among its people, about the best way forward, in the new world order after World War II, to define, ground, protect, enforce, and expand African-American rights in the
Shepperson, supra note 52, at 47 (1985). s5 See, e.g., General Act of the Berlin Conference on West Africa, Arts. 1, 2, 5,
54

6, 9, 13, Feb. 26, 1885. 56 Office of the Historian, Bureau of Public Affairs, U.S. Dep't of State, The
United States and the Founding of the United Nations (August 1941-October 1945) (Oct. 2005), http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/UN/usun.html.

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United States. It was a debate among Black Americans in which the American white establishment, invoking the rise of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, increasingly interfered and attempted to shape the terms and issues to limit Black influence in defining them.17 Such white elite interference recalled the role, beginning a century and a half earlier, of the American Colonization Society in the African-American emigration/African colonization debate discussed above. The debate-which would, inter alia, split the NAACP and see Du Bois ejected from that Organization in 1948-was about whether African-American rights in America could be finally secured, including under law, only by their making common cause in the world community with the rights struggles of the colonized and newly independent African and other peoples of color still trapped in or just emerging formally from European empires, irrespective of American foreign policy on these issues. Alternatively, others argued that the legal and strategic foundation of African Americans' rights in America must prominently and exclusively rest on American law, whatever possible equitablerights-interpretation of its Constitution, and their collective claim as stakeholders in racial America through, for example, recognition of the history of Black military service to America. Thus, the debate centered on whether African Americans' international outreach must be consonant with Washington's foreign policies, including those towards overseas peoples of color, as such policies were increasingly driven by both domestic racism and U.S. Cold War fears about communism. As the young W.E.B. Du Bois had played a late role in the liberation path debate around the Treaty of Berlin, a still actively energetic Du Bois in his seventies was at the center of this liberation path debate around the Charter.5 9 As he fought successfully to become part of the NAACP delegation to the Charter negotiating San Francisco Conference in 1944, where the great diplomat Ralph Bunche was the only Black member of the official U.S. government delegation, Du Bois was riding the national expectations of Black Americans as then consistently expressed in the Black press.60 Black Americans were much looking
5 See generally GERALD HORNE, BLACK AND RED: W.E.B. Du BOIS AND THE AFRO-AMERICAN RESPONSE TO THE COLD WAR, 1944-1963 (1986). 58 See RICHARDSON, supra note 2, at xxxi-xli.
60

59 See id.

See CAROL ANDERSON, EYES OFF THE PRIZE: THE UNITED NATIONS AND THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN STRUGGLE FOR HUMAN RIGHTS, 1944-1955, at 108 (2003)

(noting that the Atlanta Daily World commented that the NAACP directed the world's attention to a miserable failure of democracy here in the United States and the Chicago Defender called the petition a historic landmark, stating, "If this appeal does no more than awaken white America to the full realization of the menace of racism to our national well-being and security it will have
achieved a noble purpose"); see also RICHARDSON, supra note 2, at xxxii

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forward to America's ratification of the Charter because of the conjunction between its human rights provisions, which were binding on all U.N. member states, and the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which declares treaties of the United States to be the law of the land equivalent to federal statutes.6 2 If this demanded legal process were successful, the Charter in an important sense would have become a significant source of federal rights for Blacks, since there was no national civil rights legislation at that time. At the San Francisco Conference and beyond, Du Bois energetically framed both that issue as well as, inter alia, the question of whether the final Charter text would clearly guarantee the rights of colonized peoples to be free of colonialism under the legal doctrine of the right of self determination of peoples.63 His energetic efforts angered many liberal elites, including Eleanor Roosevelt, who had been invited into the process by part of the NAACP leadership to help curb Du Bois. Her lack of success included Du Bois' subsequent U.S. Senate testimony, as a private person, in 1946, supporting America's ratification of the Charter per his position above on self determination and abolition of colonialism. 4 But the barons of key Senate committees, staunch and strategic defenders of southern American apartheid, were aided by the rise of Brickerism, whose proponents supported, on largely racial grounds, a constitutional amendment barring a defined Treaty power in the Constitution. Neither the barons nor the Brickerites would allow this potential use of the American constitutional treaty power by the President through Charter ratification to create, in effect, federal civil ("Many Black folks did consciously believe that it was crucial to the welfare of the 'race' (Black folks) that the Charter be ratified as a U.S. treaty."). 61 U.N. Charter art. 55 states: With a view to the creation of conditions of stability and wellbeing which are necessary for peaceful and friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, the United Nations shall promote: a) higher standards of living, full employment, and conditions of economic and social progress and development; b) solutions of international economic, social, health, and related problems; and international cultural and educational cooperation; and c) universal respect for, and observance of, human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion. U.N. Charter art. 56 notes that "[a]ll Members pledge themselves to take joint and separate action in co-operation with the Organization for the achievement of
the 62 purposes set forth in Article 55." See U.S. CONST. art. VI, 2. 63 See HORNE, supra note 57, at 37 (discussing Du Bois' popular lecture tour

following the San Francisco conference as he spoke to crowds of 2,000, 700 and 1,000 in Oakland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, respectively). 6 See RICHARDSON, supra note 2, at xxxi-xli.

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rights legislation benefitting Black folks. This would have done an "end run" around their "segregation forever"-decades of opposition, nullification, and interposition of all potential civil rights legislation. The Charter would have undermined what they, using, inter alia, Ku Klux Klan local terrorist enforcement since Reconstruction in Southern and middle-Western states, had established: a legal American apartheid system against Blacks.66 Those senators therefore forced President Truman, as a condition for their support of Charter ratification, to declare-under international law and American constitutional law-that the United States considered the Charter human rights provisions not to be binding on American law nor the internal law of any Member state, but that they represented only non-legal aspirational goals of humankind. This strike of interpretive jurisprudence framed the substantial postwar American legal, jurisprudential, political, and racial barriers to African Americans making claims to international law as a legal basis, even in part, for grounding their rights to equality in the United States. Indeed, various forms of these barriers and dangers of basing Blacks' rights in whole or in part on international law had confronted Black folks, and have helped evolve the Black International Tradition from its inception in the seventeenth century. In other words, under the strong impulse of race, the Charter ratification by the American government defined an oppressive distinction. The "civil rights narrative," to which under American authority Black legal claims were officially demanded to be confined, was now to be legally distinct from the "human rights narrative," where all official opposition would be levied to prevent African Americans from seeking freedom from racism by appealing to human rights doctrines of international law. As other papers in this Symposium indicate, this race-driven jurisprudential attack has had profound consequences to the present for African-American legal and public advocacy.

65 See

id. at xxxviii, xxxix (discussing the U.S. Government's concerns with the

ratification of the U.N. Charter), 207 (discussing the Bricker Amendment). 66 See WILLIAMS BIOGRAPHY, supra note 15, at 256. 67 RICHARDSON, supra note 2, at xxxix. 68 See, e.g., Juan F. Perea, An Essay on the Iconic Status of the Civil Rights Movement and Its Unintended Consequences, 18 VA. J. SOC. POL'Y & L. 44

(2010) (discussing how the iconic status of the Civil Rights Movement obscures important history of African-American struggle against white racism); Muriel
Morisey, Fifty Years After the Sit-Ins: Events, Trends, and Recommendations, 18 VA. J. Soc. POL'Y & L. 82 (2010) (exploring how social reform efforts should

adapt to the increasing number of historically oppressed groups in powerful government positions); Brenda Saunders Hampden, Stony the Road We Trod:
Reflections on Fifty Years After the Sit-Ins, 18 VA. J. SOC. POt'Y & L. 3 (2010)

(discussing the author's experiences from the sit-ins and civil rights

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Some African Americans attempted early on to use the United Nations as their international legal forum for strengthening their rights in America and for developing an international human rights basis, supported by U.N. and international scrutiny, for their freedom from racism. They were opposed on many levels. Du Bois was ejected from the NAACP in 1948 over this general issue and his refusal to subordinate it to official Cold War fears. Such fears included those of other Black leaders that the nascent Civil Rights Movement would be officially labeled as "communist," thus opening the Movement to additional government intimidation.6 9 But prior to his ejection, the NAACP Board authorized the publication under their imprimatur of Du Bois' An Appeal to the World in 1947, and its presentation to both the U.N. Commission on Human Rights and the U.N. General Assembly. 70 The Appeal is a small, powerful book of articles by Du Bois and other contemporary Black and civil rights leaders.71 It lays down the composite foundation of the need and the right of African Americans to petition the United Nations under its Charter for the protection of their long-deprived rights in America. Rayford Logan's article therein on African-American rights as they sound through Charter rights for the 72 * international protection of minorities* is especially pertinent. Moreover, subsequent to his NAACP ejection in 1948, Du Bois traveled the country lecturing on the Appeal to mostly Black audiences of hundreds and thousands. 73 His warm reception reflected the often bitter divisions among African Americans over the issues framing his ejection. Further, Malcolm X supported the framing of the mistreatment of African Americans within the international human rights context, stating, "the American black man needed to recognize that he had a strong, airtight case to take the United States before the United Nations on a formal accusation of 'denial of human rights'-and that if Angola and South demonstrations of the 1960s); Taunya Lovell Banks, Thurgood Marshall, the
Race Man, and Gender Equality in the Courts, 18 VA. J. SOC. POL'Y & L. 15 (2010) (considering how Marshall's role as a participant in the Black Civil Rights Movement influenced his thinking about gender equality). 69 See generally ANDERSON, supra note 60, at 141-47. 70 See generally HORNE, supra note 57. 71 NAACP, 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 (1947).

Rayford W. Logan, The Charter of the United Nations and Its Provisionsfor Human Rights and the Rights of Minorities and DecisionsAlready Taken Under this Charter, in AN APPEAL TO THE WORLD, supra note 71, at 85. 7 See HORNE, supra note 57, at 37; see also BRENDA GAYLE PLUMMER, RISING WIND, BLACK AMERICANS AND U.S. FOREIGN AFFAIRS, 1935-1960, at 179 (1996) (discussing Du Bois's efforts to publicize the petition by traveling over 20,000 miles and lecturing in twenty states).
72

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Africa were precedent cases, then there would be no easy way that the U.S. could escape being censured, right on its own home ground."74 Since then only the pioneering work of determined NGOs, such as the National Conference of Black Lawyers, has wrested some progress from official opposition, as well as from continuing divisions among local Black folks on the vital importance of international work. African Americans, having now incorporated this issue more into mainstream public narratives from the reputed "dangerous Black far left," continue to work to expand their right to freely and effectively make claims to the human rights narrative, as a foundation for perfecting and expanding their rights in America in consonance with its national law. The U.N. Charter struggle continues to have far-reaching implications, some of which reached through the Civil Rights Movement. The effort to link African-American rights in America to minorities' rights under international human rights law continues, against official opposition. U.N. human rights decision makers are increasingly applying emerging international human rights law to African-American local conditions. This is in part due to, for example, mandatory reports by the U.S. government to CERD (the treaty body in the Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Racial Discrimination), but also NGOs' reports to CERD on issues regarding U.S. obligations under that Convention, and the opportunities in the United States that it presents. U.N. Rapporteurs have also helped link international human rights law to African-American rights in America. For instance, Gay McDougall, steeped in the civil rights and anti-apartheid movements, has played a prominent leadership role since the late 1970s in pushing to expand international human rights law regarding race and minorities, including to South African liberation, apply it to African-American conditions, and link the two movements. Such leadership was recently illustrated, for example, in her current role as U.N. Rapporteur for Minority Rights. In that capacity she issued a joint statement framing the prejudicial lack of post-Hurricane Katrina governmental assistance to the Black citizens of the ninth ward of New Orleans to rebuild their homes and neighborhood as a violation by the United States of the international human right to housing. The Charter-struggle implications will extend into the future for African-American rights in the United States. For example, with the rapid approach of climate change issues, questions about states'
74 HALEY, supra note 20, at 384.

See Press Release, Office of the High Comm'r for Human Rights, UN Experts Call on U.S. Government to Halt Ongoing Evictions and to Take Immediate Steps to Protect the Human Rights of African-Americans Affected by Hurricane Katrina and the Demolition of Public Housing in New Orleans, Louisiana, U.N. Doc. OHCHR (Feb. 28, 2008).
75

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responsibility to protect their citizens from the rights-violating consequences in their territories of global climate change will soon be upon all states, including the United States. Regarding the role that race will play in America in decisions ranging from defining such rights and their beneficiaries to the need for climate change protection, we cannot assume, even without the Katrina debacle, that race will be absent and that issues of deprived equity will not arise for African Americans. When they do arise, one may question whether African Americans can make claims to extraterritorial assistance and legal doctrines as a matter of right regarding remedies for shortfalls in their conditions in the United States. African Americans might look to, for example, the increasingly substantive obligation on all states of international cooperation in Articles 55 and 56 of the U.N. Charter.
III. CONCLUSION

The Black International Tradition has been a sustaining element of African-American History for four centuries. The Tradition framed the original and continuing African-American interests in making claims to international law and other outside norms for more equitable governance. We can in this context identify early mass struggles and rebellions where slaves, free Blacks, and then African Americans took both inspiration and models for their own early struggles towards freedom on this territory. As these struggles moved into the twentieth century, we can speak of them more directly as part of the historical input of the Civil Rights Movement, not least regarding the historic work of Du Bois, Gandhi, King, and the South African ANC. And as the American Civil Rights Movement unfolded, both members in the Movement and its enemies and opponents raised questions, for different purposes, about its international underpinnings and its international reach by example to those peoples of color seeking freedom in other lands, including the Movement's intersections with the international peace movement. This reach has occurred notwithstanding much American official effort to continue to define civil rights as a purely domestic set of issues, even though they have had constant foreign policy consequences. Further, as a consequence of the embedded authority of the Black International Tradition, and as illustrations of the Tradition's evolution, we can identify at least two major treaties-there may be more-which served as fulcrums during their respective eras. Around their content and authority, collective African-American debates swirled about the next essential political and jurisprudential rights concepts and strategies that must be adopted to push forward towards liberation. Through identifying the content of African-American claims to international law regarding rights protection, we can explore how such treaties influence outcomes of these important collective Black debates. The Treaty of Berlin helped

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frame the last issues in the late nineteenth century around the question of African emigration and colonization, as it was collectively concluded that mass African-American emigration back to Africa was not possible. The U.N. Charter and related treaties continue to frame the question of whether African-American rights and international outreach are to be grounded only in American law and policy, or will also be strongly grounded under international human rights law. There is no more important legacy of the Civil Rights Movement-a legacy that always has been but now is recognized as unfolding in a globalized world community-than its having clarified the great need to understand, address, and act on this question, as a question of law and justice, so as to carry the freedom struggle forward.