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War. We hired Clarence Darrow to defend Henry and Ossian Sweet in 1926; they had exercised the American right of self defense when a white mob attacked their Detroit home.

In 1930, we joined with organized labor to defeat the nomination of segregationist Judge John J. Parker to the Supreme Court. And then we targeted - and defeated - many of the Senators who had supported Parker's nomination.

Here in New York in the 1930s we demonstrated for fair hiring in Harlem. We joined A. Philip Randolph in threatening a March on Washington in 1941 - it resulted in President Roosevelt's Executive Order creating a Fair Employment Practices Committee.

A series of school cases culminated in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 - exactly midway in the Association's history, 45 years after the NAACP's birth and 45 years ago. Brown effectively ended segregation's legality; it also gave a nonviolent army license to challenge segregation's morality as well.

"Not until the Supreme Court acted in 1954 did the nation acknowledge that it has been blaming the black man for what it had done to him. His sentence to second class citizenship had been commuted; the quest for meaningful equality - equality in fact as well as in law - had begun."

If the Depression in 1929 had convinced America it was obliged to protect its citizens' well being, the Brown decisions in 1954 and 1955 "began to convince reluctant Americans they would have to share their bounty, their knowledge and their world."⁵

For the American Negro:

"No more would he be a grinning supplicant for the benefactions and discards of the master class; no more would he be a party to his own degradation. He was both thrilled that the signal for the demise of his class status had come from on high, and angry that it had taken so long and extracted so steep a price in suffering."⁶