A Speech From a President Well Overdue

At the recent Centennial Convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), President Obama delivered an incredibly moving and impassioned speech, even for him. The full video and transcript can be accessed at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/31951708#31951708 and http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-by-the-President-to-the-NAACP-Centennial-Convention-07/16/2009/, respectively. (It is unfortunate to say that President Obama is the only President to date who could deliver such a speech.) With that being said, the following excerpts are just some of the extremely memorable moments of his address:

• When speaking about the founders of the Civil Rights Movement, President Obama stated that those individuals realized change "would come from men and women of every age and faith and every race and region -- taking Greyhounds on Freedom Rides, sitting down at Greensboro lunch counters, registering voters in rural Mississippi; knowing they would be harassed, knowing they would be beaten, knowing that some of them might never return".
• "Because ordinary people did such extraordinary things, because they made the Civil Rights Movement their own, even though there may not be a plaque or their names might not be in the history books -- because of their efforts, I made a little trip to Springfield, IL a couple years ago -- where [President Abraham] Lincoln once lived and race riots once raged -- and began the journey that has led me to be here tonight as the forty-fourth President of the United States of America."
• "What's required today -- what's required to overcome today's barriers is the same as what was needed then. The same commitment. The same sense of urgency. The same sense of sacrifice. The same sense of community. The same willingness to do our part for ourselves and one another that has always defined America at its best and the African-American experience at its best."
• "The pain of discrimination is still felt in America. By African-American women paid less for doing the same work as colleagues of a different color and a different gender. By Latinos made to feel unwelcome in their own country. By Muslim Americans viewed with suspicion simply because they kneel down to pray to their God. By our gay brothers and sisters, still taunted, still attacked, still denied their rights."
• "The African-American community will still fall behind in the United States and the United States will fall behind in the world unless we do a far better job than we have been doing of educating our sons and daughters."
• "There are overcrowded classrooms and crumbling schools and corridors of shame in America filled with poor children -- not just black children, brown and white children as well. The state of our schools is not an African-American problem; it is an American problem. Because if black and brown children cannot compete, then America cannot compete."
• "We need a new mindset, a new set of attitudes -- because one of the most durable and destructive legacies of discrimination is the way we've internalized a sense of limitation; how so many in our community have come to expect so little from the world and from themselves."
• "They might think they've got a pretty good jump shot or a pretty good flow but our kids can't all aspire to be LeBron [James] or Lil Wayne. I want them aspiring to be scientists and engineers -- doctors and teachers -- not just ballers and rappers. I want them aspiring to be a Supreme Court Justice. I want them aspiring to be the President of the United States of America."
• While discussing his recent trip to Ghana with his family, President Obama remarked: "I was reminded that no matter how bitter the rod, how stony the road, we have always persevered. We have not faltered, nor have we grown weary. As Americans, we have demanded and strived for and shaped a better destiny. And that is what we are called on to do once more."
• "If three civil rights workers in Mississippi -- black, white, Christian and Jew, city born and country bred -- could lay down their lives in freedom's cause, I know we can come together to face down the challenges of our own time."
• "And one hundred years from now, on the two hundredth anniversary of the NAACP -- let it be said that this generation did its part; that we too ran the race; that full of faith that our dark past has taught us, full of the hope that the present has brought us -- we faced, in our lives and all across this nation, the rising sun of a new day begun."