The world is witnessing a full-scale attack on human rights. In the United States, the federal government is targeting advances made by both the Civil Rights Movement and the contemporary Movement for Black Lives. The Trump administration plans to close civil rights divisions at the Department of Education and the Environmental Protection Agency. Universities are threatened with lawsuits and the withdrawal of federal funding for promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion. The Supreme Court is weakening voting rights protections, ending abortion rights, and outlawing affirmative action. The state is suppressing and punishing activism, especially pro-Palestinian voices.
The US government has always been a problematic and unreliable guardian of human rights, particularly for African Americans and other racialized populations. It never fulfilled the 40 acres promise. It welcomed Confederate traitors back into power who had rebelled to maintain slavery. At the judicial level, the Supreme Court invalidated the Civil Rights Act of 1875, narrowed the protections of the 14th Amendment, ruled segregation constitutional, and was complicit in Jim Crow.
A history of local and transnational struggle
Bleak as things appear, it is important to remember that localized transnational movements for racial justice have, in many contexts, effectively mobilized the people’s power to resist repressive states and their corporate accomplices. Grassroots translocal organizing by Black communities and allies enabled the Reconstruction Era, ushered in public education, overturned official segregation, and finally won the civil rights protections of the 1960s. These victories set up the federal government as a prominent, albeit flawed, defender of civil rights, but also created Human Relations Commissions in cities across the country to handle discrimination claims in areas including housing, employment, and policing.
In the early years of the United Nations (UN), African American civil society leaders submitted two historic petitions to the international body: “An Appeal to the World” (1947), authored by W. E. B. DuBois and others for the NAACP; and “We Charge Genocide: The Historic Petition to the United Nations for Relief From a Crime of The United States Government Against the Negro People” (1951), submitted by Paul Robeson and William Patterson for the Civil Rights Congress. “We Charge Genocide” showed that the longstanding abuse of people of African descent in the United States violated the Genocide Convention. It opens plainly and starkly:
Out of the inhuman black ghettos of American cities, out of the cotton plantations of the South, comes this record of mass slayings on the basis of race, of lives deliberately warped and distorted by the willful creation of conditions making for premature death, poverty and disease.
In 1964, Malcolm X began lobbying heads of state at the second Organization of African Unity summit in Cairo to raise human rights claims against the US government for its treatment of Black people. Less than a year later, he was assassinated. Around the same time, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was also engaging in transnational solidarity work, calling on the global community to participate in a “massive economic boycott” of Apartheid South Africa.
Global mobilization in support of the African National Congress-led resistance against South African Apartheid eventually brought down that system. US activism by the Free South Africa movement, Black trade unionists, Coretta Scott King, Gay MacDougall (current member of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination), faith leaders, athletes, celebrities, students, and more resulted in successful divestment campaigns all over the country, culminating in the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986—passed over the veto of President Ronald Reagan.
Translocal resistance
In a context of resurgent federal belligerence and the gerrymandered capture of many state legislatures by right-wing extremists, struggles for racial justice have once again shifted to the local level. In response, US activists are again building movements for racial justice both within cities and across borders. During the 2014 Ferguson Uprising, as Black frontliners faced down tear gas, activists from Palestine shared advice about protecting oneself from chemical munitions. When delegations of Black activists later traveled to Palestine on solidarity missions, they continued a legacy of pan-African support for anti-colonial struggles. Black grassroots movements have been working in coalition to advance climate justice as a form of racial justice, including through UN monitoring processes. In recent years, movements for racial justice have expanded their use of “shadow reporting” to call attention to injustices and mobilize resistance.
Within weeks of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police officers, his brother Philonise testified before the UN at an “urgent debate on systemic racism and police brutality in the United States.” Prompted by a call from the Africa Group of the Human Rights Council, this organizing effort was the result of a transnational coalition led by the US Human Rights Network and the ACLU. It produced the International Independent Expert Mechanism to Advance Racial Justice and Equality in the context of Law Enforcement (EMLER) and a civil society extension, the UN Anti-Racism Coalition. Known as the George Floyd Mechanism, EMLER conducted a country visit to the United States, met with elected officials and impacted people in six cities, and produced a report of its findings in 2024.
Today, human rights cities initiatives in locations such as Dayton, Ohio, are also demanding that municipal governments protect international human rights locally. Intransigence at the national level has sparked the creation of reparations task forces in at least 11 states and 22 towns or cities. Abolitionist movements successfully divested from local police and county jails in cities including Austin, TX; Denver, CO; Oakland, CA; Baltimore, MD; and Philadelphia, PA, among others. The municipal level provides an accessible venue for taking action and manifesting real change.
These channels for accountability constitute a new architecture for the cultivation of a cross-city global movement to fight racial discrimination. Cities acting individually cannot root out structural racism, however. Intersectional, decolonial movements that connect local action to wider initiatives through national and global channels are imperative if civil society is to galvanize the power necessary to confront the full scope of the challenge before us.