In Geneva, a bid to shame US over the killings of young black men
Meanwhile in Ferguson, Missouri, community leaders aim to strengthen black political consciousness
August 12, 2014 10:00PM ET
by Massoud Hayoun @mhayoun
As outraged residents of Ferguson, Missouri continue to protest a police shooting that left unarmed African-American teenager
Michael Brown dead,
Ron Davis – the father of another slain black teen in Jacksonville, Florida – is aiming to shame the United States before the United Nations for what he says are murders committed with impunity against young black men.
Davis' bid comes amid efforts back in Ferguson to build a more-than-a-century-old civil rights movement in response to Brown's killing that community leaders say never took hold in the Greater St. Louis area.
At the 85th meeting of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in Geneva, Switzerland on Wednesday and Thursday, Davis hopes to pressure Washington to bolster efforts to stop the phenomenon of what he and the United States Human Rights Network (USHRN), the NGO backing him, call “the criminalization of race” in America.
Davis is angry over what he and many others say is a spate of unpunished murders of young black men across the country.
Six months after neighborhood watch coordinator George Zimmerman was acquitted in the killing of unarmed black teenager
Trayvon Martin, Davis’ son Jordan was killed at a gas station after he and his friends refused to lower the music in their car. The case brought against Jordan’s killer, Michael Dunn,
resulted in a mistrial.
“These things eat at you that shouldn't have happened, and the people doing these transgressions are getting away with it,” Davis told Al Jazeera by telephone from Geneva.
Ron Davis hopes to direct his anger over the deaths into a solution for African-American fathers who have come to teach their children to accept police brutality as a fact of life in the United States. Davis and USHRN director Ejim Dike hope that taking U.S. race issues to the international community will create political leverage in Washington.
"We have a lot of people directly impacted by the violence. We have exhausted our domestic remedies. We have to take this to the United Nations. We have to see if we can leverage that pressure to see if we can get people to act on this issue,” Dike said.
“Talking about any issue as a human rights violation gets the attention of the U.S. government. It's embarrassing for the government that champions itself as a beacon of human rights in the world,” Dike added.
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on the brehs face