NCBL Declaration of Concern and Commitment for the 21st Century
- National Conference of Black Lawyers
- 6 hours ago
- 4 min read
Today, despite the monumental and historic victories over race and class oppression
won by Black people in the U.S. through the Black-led human rights struggles of the
1950–1975 period—struggles that gave birth to the National Conference of Black
Lawyers and its 1968 Declaration of Concern and Commitment, Black communities in
the U. S. have since experienced perfidious betrayals in the struggle for liberation,
justice, and self-determination, similar to those betrayals that defined the end of
Reconstruction in 1877.
These betrayals are not accidental. They reflect the persistent and systemic resistance
to Black liberation and self-determination that has confronted people of African descent
wherever we reside over the past 5 centuries—whether on the African continent, in the
Caribbean, in Latin America, or within the United States itself.
Today, many of the signature gains secured through generations of organized struggle
have been stripped away. The promise of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 has been eviscerated
by Supreme Court decisions that make it virtually impossible to challenge successfully
racial discrimination in the criminal legal system and other areas once protected by the
Fourteenth Amendment. Black dissent and protest have been conflated with criminality,
while police authority has been expanded through a racialized standard of
“reasonableness,” eroding Fourth Amendment protections, accelerating mass
incarceration, and normalizing state violence against Black communities.
The destruction of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the crippling of Section
2 have institutionalized racially discriminatory voter suppression across the United
States. These developments represent a deliberate effort to weaken Black political
power and further shrink Black democratic participation.
Today, the U.S. political system itself is in deep crisis. The Republican Party of the past
no longer exists; it has been replaced by a proto-fascist, cult-of-personality party,
financed and controlled by billionaires, openly hostile to democratic governance. The
Democratic Party, likewise, dependent on billionaire donors has proven structurally
incapable of representing the interests of Black people, who are overwhelmingly
working-class and severely exploited by the U.S. ruling class. The current U.S. executive
leadership under Donald Trump—who violated his oath of office by attempting to
1overturn a lawful presidential election—and the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v.
Anderson, which removed constitutional consequences for such conduct, have further
weakened the reach of the Fourteenth Amendment and accelerated the erosion of
democratic rights.
Since 1968, racial capitalism has compelled the transfer of enormous wealth from poor
and working-class communities—disproportionately Black and of color—to a small
international ruling class that has hollowed out democratic institutions, intensified
inequality, and consolidated its enormous power.
Racial capitalism is the system through which capitalism depends upon racial hierarchy,
state violence, and historic patterns of imperialist domination to globally extract even
more wealth from people of color in order to further expand profit at the expense of
human needs. Racial capitalism is enforced by the U.S. military industrial complex where
the CIA functions as a secret army unaccountable to the U.S. Congress.
Today, the United States stands as one of the most dangerous violators of international
law and the principles of the United Nations Charter. It funds and enables genocide,
wages illegal pre-emptive wars and wars of aggression, and seeks full-spectrum political
and economic dominance over the Global South. Many activists of the post-World War
II era believed the United States could overcome its structural racism and global
violence without the radical transformation of values warned of by Dr. Martin Luther
King Jr. in his 1967 Riverside Church address. History has proven otherwise. The United
States is now an over-extended empire increasingly reliant on coercion, repression, and
organized violence to maintain its power.
NCBL’s 1968 Declaration of Concern and Commitment stated: “To the extent that the
country, combating the crisis of maladministration of justice, and enlisting the total
Black community in this effort for its mutual survival and uplift, we must make it.”
Through decades of legal advocacy and movement advancement, NCBL recognizes
that institutional and structural racism are embedded within racial capitalism as a
governing system. Accordingly, NCBL reaffirms its commitment to oppose racial
capitalism in all its forms—domestic and global—and to fight for the restoration of
political, economic, and human rights that have been stripped from Black people and
people of African descent.
Today, as the legal arm of the movement for Black liberation, NCBL affirms its
commitment to reproductive health and justice, including the right to abortion,
contraception, and bodily autonomy. We stand with those advancing Reparations to
remedy historic and ongoing racial harm, and with those defending the fundamental
human rights of LGBTQ+ people. These struggles are interconnected fronts in the
collective fight for Black self-determination, dignity, and liberation.
Because our struggle is international and grounded in the shared condition of people of
African descent worldwide, NCBL unequivocally opposes imperialism, settler-
colonialism, apartheid, genocide, illegal pre-emptive wars, and wars of aggression
wherever they occur. We affirm the right of oppressed peoples to resist these systems
and commit to defending those who do so.
Our liberation is collective and inseparable. As the legal arm of the movement for
Black liberation, NCBL accepts its responsibility to stand with our people, defend our
struggles, and confront every legal, political, and economic system that threatens
Black life, dignity, and self-determination.
The National Conference of Black Lawyers
February 2026
