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One hundred years ago, W. E. B. DuBois published The Souls of Black Folk, famously predicting that the problem of the 20th Century would be the problem of the color line.

Fifty years ago President Harry Truman desegregated the American military.

Forty years ago last month, NAACP field Secretary Medgar Evers was assassinated in Jackson, Mississippi.

And forty years ago next month, Martin Luther King, Jr., fresh from the battlefields of Birmingham, told the nation of his dream at the March on Washington.

AndWe meet in a place ^state where NAACP history dates to 1915, when the first Flordia branch was started in Key West. In 1916 W. E. B. DuBois came to Florida to energize our members, as we gather this week to be energized again.

In 1917, James Weldon Johnson, himself a native Floridian, organized Branches in Florida in his capacity as our first National Field Secretary.

By 1926, perhaps decimated by World War I, not a single dues-paying Florida Branch existed, but the NAACP stayed in the fight. It took Chambers v. Florida to the United States Supreme Court, saving an innocent black man from the electric chair. In 1940, NAACP attorneys filed suit to equalize teachers' salaries, the first such suit in the South.

When the Florida State Conference was formed in 1941, Harry T. Moore became its President and later its full-time Executive Secretary along with officers E. D. Davis, W. J. H. Black, Frank Burts, Emma Pickett, Mamie Mike, and K. S. Johnson.

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