NAACP: Historical Audio Files
Tuesday, July 08, 2008
On the eve of the centennial convention, WNYC looked into its archives for some historical perspectives:
America (My Country, 'Tis of Thee)
>> NAACP Executive Director Walter White, 38th Annual Conference, June 29, 1947
'The NAACP came into being 38 years ago because decent Americans just could not take the evils of mob violence and racial bigotry. We carry on today because we just can’t take the gouging out of the eyes of a Negro war veteran by South Carolina policemen who was speedily set free. We just can’t take the acquittal of men who have taken the law into their own hands and thereby lynched not only American citizens but the law as well. We just can’t take the denial to any American citizen of the right to work, to vote, to live outside a ghetto, to share the privileges as well as the responsibilities of citizenship solely because of the color of his skin.'
>> President Harry Truman, 38th Annual Conference of the NAACP, June 29, 1947
'As Americans, we believe that every man should be free to live his life as he wishes. He should be limited only by his responsibility to his fellow countrymen. If this freedom is to be more than a dream, each man must be guaranteed equality of opportunity. The only limit to an American's achievement should be his ability, his industry, and his character. These rewards for his effort should be determined only by those truly relevant qualifies.
Our immediate task is to remove the last remnants of the barriers which stand between millions of our citizens and their birthright. There is no justifiable reason for discrimination because of ancestry, or religion, or race, or color.
We must not tolerate such limitations on the freedom of any of our people and on their enjoyment of basic rights which every citizen in a truly democratic society must possess.'
>>W.E.B Du Bois, NAACP Co-founder, excerpt of lecture 'Socialism and the American Negro', Madison Wisconsin, 1960
'The NAACP organized in 1909, added to the program of the Niagara Movement the realization that the fight for freedom could not be carried on by Negroes alone but by a national movement which united Negroes and whites. They emphasized the role which prejudice played. A prejudice often unconscious but nevertheless effective. The NAACP made a nationwide fight against the horror lynching and mob violence. Then more and more began to concentrate on the legal aspects of race discrimination. The fact that the Negro was pressed because the constitution of the United States was not being enforced. This fight had unprecedented success and culminated in 1954 in the unanimous decision of the Supreme Court against segregation. But during all this struggle we knew that something still was lacking. If we hark back to the cry of the French Revolution, liberty, equality and brotherhood it was clear that there was not and could not be liberty of individual action under the great industrial organization which was growing up in the world led by the United States.'
>> Medgar Evers, NAACP State Chair, May 29, 1963
“This demonstration will continue. We will have a mass meeting tonight, and after the mass meeting, we will be demonstrating even further, on tomorrow. So then this will only give us an impetus to move ahead rather than to slow down. We intend to completely eradicate Jim Crow here in Jackson, Mississippi.”
>> President Lyndon B. Johnson asks for passage of civil rights bill, 55 years after the founding of the NAACP, November 27, 1963
“All I have I would have given gladly not to be standing here today. An assassin's bullet has thrust upon me the awesome burden of the Presidency. No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy's memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long.”
>> NAACP Executive Director Roy Wilkins, November 27, 1963
>> NAACP Executive Director Roy Wilkins, November 29, 1963
>> Thurgood Marshall discusses the role of the federal courts and 'Liberty under law and equality before it', December 1963
>> NAACP Executive Director Roy Wilkins, July 5, 1966
>> A. Philip Randolph, 1966
“What can be done to right the wrongs of the Negro people of this country? What can be done to bring about social and racial justice, and fulfill the promises of American life for all our people, both the black working poor, and the white working poor?....It is our fervent plea, for strong voices to be raised, from all areas of our society, out of varying traditions and interests, to arouse the conscience of our land, in order to achieve, in fact, that which has already been won in law, and what always has been in the hearts of good men, equality, justice, freedom and human dignity for all men, regardless of color or country.”
>> A. Philip Randolph, May 7, 1969
Thanks to WNYC Archivist Andy Lanset