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71st Annual N.A.A.C.P. Convention
Fontainebleu Hotel, Miami Beach, June 28–July 30, 1980

Challenge for Economic Independence

Address by Ernest N. Morial, Mayor
New Orleans, Louisiana

Freedom Awards Banquet

It is an honor to speak to you tonight at the conclusion of the 70th Annual Convention of the NAACP. I believe that there is no other institution in our nation which more fully embodies the ideals of humanitarianism or which has striven harder to challenge this nation to fulfill its creed of liberty, justice and equality for all.

It is altogether fitting that we are here tonight in the city of Louisville, for we have been here before.

We were here in 1914 when Louisville adopted the wall prohibiting Blacks from buying property in white neighborhoods. That was the first of many Jim Crow laws that would fall as a result of the NAACP's legal engineering.

We were in Alabama in 1943 when then chief counsel Charlie Houston won the first legal victory against the all-white railroad unions.

We were in Texas, in 1947, when chief counsel Thurgood Marshall won the Supreme Court order forcing the University Of Texas Law School to admit a black student.

And the NAACP was in my own state of Louisiana, in 1950, when 12 black students were refused admission to graduate schools at L. S. U. in Baton Rouge. It was Thurgood Marshall and my mentor, the late A. P. Tureaud, who won the Supreme Court order against the Senate.

And we were in Washington, D.C. on May 17, 1954, when the Supreme Court announced its decision in five school desegregation cases. For 45 years, the NAACP's legal machinery had built the foundation for that day.

It was the NAACP's deliberate, painstaking legal strategy that became the blueprint for nearly every other organization seeking to eliminate legally sanctioned social injustice through litigation.

It was the NAACP that pried open the doors for us — the doors of the schools, the doors of the polling places, the union halls, the personnel offices, the legislatures, the neighborhoods.

It was the NAACP that forged a sword of justice on the anvil of racial discrimination — a sword more powerful than all the ax handles, lynching ropes and guns the forces of hate could muster.

The volume of victories over the past 70 years is enormous. The New York Times recently said that the civil rights movement has been so successful that it could, in good conscience, proclaim itself victorious and fade from sight. We find that there are many people searching for new directions, new ideas and new strategies in the civil rights movement.

We need not search very far.

In the 25th year since the Supreme Court forever shattered the doctrine of segregation, but we find that our society has made a mockery of the words "all deliberate speed." Racial isolation penalizes both black children and white children because they must eventually live in a world that is neither totally white nor totally black.

In the great cities of this nation, we find millions of Americans still living in the squalor of urban poverty. There are those who in the name of an Urban Renaissance would simply evict the poor from our cities, but this is no solution to poverty.

We find unemployment in some inter-cities as high as 40 percent with the burden of joblessness and despair falling most heavily on a new generation of black youth.

We face a frustrating energy situation that threatens to cripple our economy and further oppress the poor. Instead of solutions, some of the nation's leaders give us a modern version of the caveat, "Let them eat cake."

Surely our nation's leaders are capable of greater inspiration than that.

And surely our policymakers are capable of greater imagination in the battle against inflation. They are as predictable as Pavlov's dog. Say the word inflation and they salivate for cuts in social programs.

No one should underestimate the need for an effective war against inflation. It is a matter of life or death for the poor and the elderly.

But we cannot accept the counsel of those who would sit in their plush offices and tell us we should induce another recession to fight inflation while we already have nearly six million who are jobless. Surely economics has progressed beyond the point of offering human sacrifices to appease the inflation god.

A balanced budget is worthless if we must mortgage the lives of citizens and the futures of our children to achieve it.

Ours is a nation that was founded upon democracy and we must demand solutions that are democratic. Everyone must share the burden of solving our economic problems — not just those whose voices are too weak to be heard.

In our public schools, we find a significant portion of our graduates incapable of reading the very words of their diplomas. How can we expect these young people to compete in a world that is becoming more complex each day?

And we continue to wonder why every major city has excess hospital beds collecting dust while major segments of our society lack even basic medical care.

We certainly need not search very far to find issues. They are as numerous as promises in an election year. But effective strategies for approaching those issues are as hard to come by as a tank of gas on a Sunday afternoon.

As we meet here in convention on the 70th anniversary of this great Association, we must ask ourselves "What will be the role of the NAACP in the last two decades of the Twentieth Century?" There is a need for a new agenda of priorities, a new blueprint for social change in the battle for justice.

Let us first begin by realizing that the battle ground must be the cities of this great nation. Through the pioneering legal work of the NAACP and others, an earlier generation of blacks was liberated from the land that had been their prison

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