A Death in Belmont by Sebastian Junger

Genocide, which described the treatment of blacks in America in terms drawn straight from the Nuremberg trials of World War II. The word “genocide” was newly minted then, and extremely potent. Patterson made an eloquent case that extra-judicial violence, police and prosecutorial misconduct, and economic injustice against blacks amounted to an attempt to “destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” The group they referred to was the fifteen million Americans with African blood in their veins, and the attempt to destroy that group violated the same international laws, Patterson claimed, that had been used to prosecute Nazi war criminals several years earlier.
    Patterson accused the United States of violating the 1948 Genocide Convention, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the United Nations Charter, and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution. He delivered his petition simultaneously to the Fifth Session of the UN General Assembly in Paris and to the office of the secretary general in New York. Any doubt of complicity by the federal government was erased in 1949, when Congress abandoned a bill that would have made lynching a federal crime. Heavily pressured by the United States, the UN never responded to Patterson’s charges. Roy Smith undoubtedly did not know that such an eloquent document was arguing for his rights in far-off cities, but it probably wouldn’t have mattered much to him anyway. Soon after getting out of Parchman, Roy Smith voted, as they say, with his feet. He joined the hundreds of thousands of young blacks who streamed out of the former Confederate states, heading north.

NINE
    â€œR OY SMITH JUST liked to have fun, we was all young and naturally we drinked—quite a bit of drinkin’, in fact. Mostly Seagram’s, I believe, Seven Crown, beer, stuff like that. Roy would work but he wasn’t no steady man, sort of go place to place, more or less work on cars and stuff. Wild, drinkin’, that was what he liked to do, he liked to have fun. ’Course I was married a long time ’fore me and Roy got together. He liked women, he loved women, he never did get married that I know of, but he had lots of women, never did hang on, that’s the way he was, never had no particular one.”
    James Jenkins is Roy’s uncle on his mother’s side. He is a small, dignified man who lives near the airport in South Memphis with his wife, Arizona. As a teenager Arizona fasted for three days and was visited by the Lord in her own living room and started testifying on the spot, and she has been testifying ever since. She and James have had had fourteen children, though one of their sons was killed by a drug dealer who broke into his apartment and shot him with a .357 Magnum. He was trying to kill someone else.
    When Roy was young he spent some time with James in Memphis, and he immediately fell in love with Arizona’s sister. The sister was nineteen years old and spent six months making promises to Roy while simultaneously trying to keep her husband from finding out. Her husband finally tracked Roy down and had a conversation with him that involved at least one knife, and after that the affair ended and Roy left Memphis for good. Working odd jobs, Roy followed his uncle to Wayne, Michigan, and then to Detroit and finally to Chicago. Uncle and nephew wound up on the West Side living together and working in restaurants together and drinking together and fighting together. According to James, they could get into a fight just walking down the street and looking at someone wrong.
    â€œOne time I got into a theater, and this white guy behind me put his feet up cross the seat back,” James recalls of one particularly memorable evening out with Roy. “I turned and I said, ‘I don’t think it right you putting your feet up in my face,’ and so he said, ‘I’ll tell you