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[[image - black and white photograph of Congressman Charles Diggs presenting Spingarn Medal to Judge Damon J. Keith]]
[[caption]] Congressman Charles Diggs, right, presents the 59th Spingarn Medal to United States District Court Judge Damon J. Keith at ceremonies held at the 65th Annual NAACP Convention, July 2, in New Orleans. Judge Keith was cited as a "distinguished jurist compassionate interpreter of the law and dedicated public servant." The Spingarn Medal, instituted in 1914, is presented to the black man or black woman who has made the highest achievement during the preceding year or years. Special attention was called to Judge Keith's "steadfast defense of constitutional principles . . . his trail-blazing Pontiac (Michigan) decision . . . (and) his lifetime of distinguished public service." [[/caption]]

[[images - three black and white photographs of scenes from the NAACP Convention]]

the Independent, opened the conference, and Mr. Charles Edward Russell, always the friend of those who struggle for opportunity, presided at the stormy session at the close. The full proceedings have been published by the Association.

Out of this conference we formed a committee of forty and secured the services of Miss Frances Blascoer, as secretary. We were greatly hampered by lack of funds. Important national work would present itself which we were unable to handle. But our secretary was an excellent organizer, and at the end of a year we had held four mass meetings, had distributed thousands of pamphlets, and numbered our membership in the hundreds. In May, 1910, we held our second conference in New York, and again our meetings were attended by earnest, interested people. It was then that we organized a permanent body to be known as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Its officers were:

National President, Moorfield Storey, Bost; Chairman of the Executive Committee, William English Walling; Treasurer, John E. Milholland; Disbursing Treasurer, Oswald Garrison Villard; Executive Secretary, Frances Blascoer; Director of Publicity and Research, Dr. W. E. B. DuBois.

"The securing of a sufficient financial support to warrant our calling Dr. DuBois from Atlanta University into an executive office in the Association was the most important work of the second conference.

When Dr. DuBois came to us we were brought closely in touch with an organization of colored people, formed in 1905 at Niagara and known as the Niagara Movement. This organization had held important conferences at Niagara, Harpers Ferry, and Boston, and had attempted a work of legal redress along very much the lines upon which the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was working. Its platform, as presented in a statement in 1905, ran as follows:
Freedom of speech and criticism.
An unfettered and unsubsidized press.
Manhood suffrage.
The abolition of all caste distinctions based simply on race and color.
The recognition of the principle of human brotherhood as a practical present creed.
The recognition of the highest and best training as the monopoly of no class or race.
A belief in the dignity of labor.
United effort to realize these ideals under wise and courageous leadership.

In 1910 it had conducted important civil rights cases and had in its membership some of the ablest colored lawyers in the country, with Mr. W. Ashbie Hawkins, who has since worked with our Association, on the Baltimore Segregation acts, as its treasurer.

The Niagara Movement, hampered as it was by lack of funds and by a membership confined to one race only, continued to push slowly on, but when the larger possibilities of this new Association were clear, the members of the Niagara Movement were advised to join, as the platforms were practically identical. Many of the most prominent members of the Niagara Movement thus brought their energy and ability into the service of the Association, and eight are now serving on its Board of Directors.

Our history, after 1910, may be read in our annual reports, and in the numbers of THE CRISIS. We opened two offices in the Evening Post building. With Dr. DuBois came Mr. Frank M. Turner, a Wilberforce graduate, who has shown great efficiency in handling our books. In November of 1910 appeared the first number of THE CRISIS, with Dr. DuBois as editor, and Mary Dunlop MacLean, whose death has been the greatest loss the Association has known, as  managing editor. Our propaganda work was put on a national footing, our legal work was well under way and we were in truth, a National Association, pledged to a nation-wide work for justice to the Negro race.

I remember the afternoon that THE CRISIS received its name. We were sitting around the conventional table that seems a necessary adjunct to every Board, and were having an informal talk regarding the new magazine. We touched the subject of poetry.

"There is a poem of Lowell's," I said, "that means more to me to-day than any other poem in the world—'The Present Crisis.'"

Mr. Walling looked up. "The Crisis," he said. "There is the name for your magazine, THE CRISIS."

And if we had a creed to which our members, black and white, our branches North and South and East and West, our college societies, our children's circles, should all subscribe, it should be the lines of Lowell's noble verse, lines that are as true to-day as when they were written seventy years ago:

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