New York – 25 March 2024 –Yolanda Renee King, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s granddaughter, today joined the President of the UN General Assembly and others to mark the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Today’s gathering underscores the UN’s commitment to remember the terrible consequences of slavery – and its determination to battle its lasting effects.
From the beginning, the UN has fought injustice around the globe, beginning within its first year as global scrutiny turned to apartheid in South Africa – the entrenched system of grinding the majority of its peoples into poverty and misery. Defeating that blight on one of the continent’s richest and most diverse countries took nearly half a century. The UN marks Mandela Day every 18 July as a tribute to South African President Nelson Mandela’s contributions to the culture of peace and freedom build on apartheid collapsed.
The UN also turned early attention to colonialism, another relic of history with profound impacts: colonialism. In 1945, one in three people lived in territories dependent on colonial powers – some 750 million worldwide. Today, that total is fewer than two million, including those who live in the US territories of the US Virgin Islands, Guam, and American Samoa.
The impact of the UN’s work to support people seeking their right to self-determination has been particularly dramatic in Africa: in 1945, just four of the UN’s 51 founding member states were from the African Continent – Ethiopia, Liberia, Egypt, and the Union of South Africa. Today, 54 of the UN General Assembly’s 193 member states are African.
The first leader of the UN’s Trusteeship Department, which was charged with decolonization, was Dr. Ralph Bunche. An early senior UN official, Dr. Bunche later marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and others during the US Civil Rights Era.
Before joining the UN, Dr. Bunche was the first African-American to hold a top State Department job. He was a member of senior US delegations to the conferences that negotiated the UN’s founding – including at Washington, DC’s Dumbarton Oaks in 1944. He participated in drafting the UN Charter and was a delegate to the first session of the UN General Assembly in 1946.
The UN Secretary-General dispatched Dr. Bunche to the Middle East after extremists murdered Folke Bernadotte, the first UN official attempting to negotiate a plan to divide Palestine between Arabs and Jews. Dr. Bunche’s leadership of difficult negotiations produced an armistice between Egypt and Israel, earning him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950 - the first person of African descent so honored.
He continued to play key roles in helping to resolve crises in the Sinai (1956), the Congo (1960), Yemen (1963), Cyprus (1964) and Bahrain (1970). He supervised the cease-fire between India and Pakistan in 1965.
Dr. Bunche’s early work to create the very concept of peacekeeping -- deploying soldiers not to fight wars, but to keep the peace impartially and with the consent of belligerents – helping to form one of the UN’s most important roles ever since. UN peacekeepers won the Nobel Prize for their work in 1988.
The UN’s commitments to advance human rights and support the aspirations for peace and development stretch back to its founding – and forward in their pursuit around the globe every day. Its work often is rooted in old wrongs that perhaps cannot be made right, but can help sustain the determination and momentum to achieve the shared goals of the peoples of the United Nations.
The International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade is one such effort, emphasizing universal human rights that remain the driving force behind many of the movements and milestones celebrated as part of Black History Month in the United States – and during the UN’s International Decade for People of African Descent.
Visiting UNHQ in New York soon? Consider taking in this exhibit in the Visitors Lobby: “Who were the enslaved? Commemorating lives under enslavement at the Cape of Good Hope.” This is adaptation of a 2023 exhibit at the Iziko Slave Lodge in Cape Town, South Africa.
