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Activists look for changes with U.N.'s Second International Decade for People of African Descent
New York Amsterdam News|January 16, 2025
The United Nations has launched a second International Decade for People of African Descent. This new decade - which officially began Jan. 1, 2025, and will continue until Dec.r 31, 2034 -will again employ a Permanent Forum on People of African Descent to document and highlight quality-of-life issues for Black people worldwide.
- KAREN JUANITA CARRILLO, JESÚS CHUCHO GARCIA
Activists look for changes with U.N.'s Second International Decade for People of African Descent

The first Decade, which ran from 2015 to 2024, saw the Permanent Forum meet three times. The Permanent Forum will hold its fourth session at the United Nations' New York City headquarters April 14-17, 2025.

The theme of the Second Decade mirrors that of the initial decade: "recognition, justice, and development."

Activists expressed excitement, gratitude, and a good deal of apprehension about the naming of a Second Decade. "There were some positives in the First Decade," said Conrad Bryan of the Association of Mixed Race Irish, "but unfortunately so many States started taking action near the very end," making it seem as if not much was accomplished.

A long-term Black activist demand

The first Decade was important because it placed the global concerns of African descendants in the international arena. This had been a longterm Black activist demand -- a request that started back when the United Nations system was created.

Activists have wanted the United Nations to pay attention to the issues faced by Afrodescendant communities since its establishment.

In 1947, W.E.B. Du Bois, a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), sent the United Nations a 94-page document entitled "An Appeal to the World: A Statement on the Denial of Human Rights to Minorities." "[T]oday," DuBois wrote in the introduction, "the paradox again looms after the Second World War. We have [a] recrudescence of race hate and caste restrictions in the United States and of these dangerous tendencies not simply for the United States itself but for all nations. When will nations learn that their enemies are quite as often within their own country as without? It is not Russia that threatens the United States so much as Mississippi; not Stalin and Molotov but Bilbo and Rankin; internal injustice done to one's brothers is far more dangerous than the aggression of strangers from abroad."

This story is from the January 16, 2025 edition of New York Amsterdam News.

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This story is from the January 16, 2025 edition of New York Amsterdam News.

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