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NAACP CONVENTION ADDRESS - PUBLIC MASS MEETING
Georgia World Congress Center/Hall C
Atlanta, Georgia
7:00PM/July 12, 1998
@ 1998 by Julian Bond

THE NAACP - YESTERDAY, TODAY, & TOMORROW

This is the fourth time the NAACP convention has gathered in Atlanta; we were here in 1962, before that in 1951 and before that in 1920.

In each of those years, the conventioneers were welcomed by a vibrant Atlanta Branch which did much to make this city the attractive place it is today. ^{Rev R.L. White is President.}

In 1908, in Nashville, Tennessee, a baby was born. She is my mother, and two weeks ago, she celebrated her 90th birthday!

A year after she was born, the NAACP was born, and now 89 years later, she and the NAACP are in great shape!. I owe both a great debt of gratitude. ^{Her grandchildren are here too}.

Here on the podium is another heroine of the struggle for civil rights - Judge Constance Baker Motley.

With Thurgood Marshall and Jack Greenberg and that small band of dedicated lawyers, in small-town courthouses with white and black drinking fountains, she fought for our rights and she won.

We all owe a great debt of gratitude to the courageous woman who saved the NAACP from financial disaster, Myrlie Evers-Williams. She helped salvage us us from financial ruin, and she restored our reputation.

The NAACP today is universally recognized as the premier civil rights organization in the United States, and it is overwhelmingly respected by the people whom we serve.¹

But the society we service has serious problems. In those 89 years, we have helped to solve many of them, but the basic problem - racial discrimination - just won't go away.

At the turn of the century, the great scholar, activist and NAACP found W. E. B. DuBois predicted that "the problem of the