Obama's Speech at NAACP July 16

Obama gives a rousing and emotional speech. Wowsa, powerful. Yes we can. For me, this ranks up there as one of his best speeches. Transcript.

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Obama To Keynote NAACP 100th Anniversary

Meeting in the Rose Garden
UPDATE July 16: See Obama's speech here.

Obama will be in New York to speak July 16 at the NAACP convention. Obama will speak at 7:30 pm eastern. CNN.com or msnbc.com will probably live stream it.

In the video below, Al Sharpton speaks on Obama's appearance. He also speaks on the recent discrimination experienced by children, who were thrown out of a pool because they were black and Latino. Sadly, we are nowhere near post racism. I learned a lot about that during the 2008 campaign and watching Sarah Palin rallies. But younger people are far more enlightened than the older folks and it may be a matter of time. I believe it all comes down to our public school system. The more educated someone is the less likely they are to be racist. Bigotry is a sign of stupidity, though there are people who are smart, some Congress members come to mind, yet still racist. That has a lot to do with age and where they grew up. The South still has a lot of work to do.

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Take that Jesse Jackson

A big night for the NAACP.

Sen. Barack Obama's speech Monday night to the NAACP will mark a historic first: an African-American presidential nominee of a major party will be addressing the nation's oldest civil rights organization.

Sen. Barack Obama is expected to address the "responsibility deficit" during a speech to the NAACP.

The speech by the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee in Cincinnati will also highlight a new generation of black leadership forged not in the civil rights battles of '60s and '70s, but during subsequent decades in which many African-Americans made great strides culturally, politically and economically, but many more remained economically disadvantaged.

Update:
Excerpt of speech:

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was but a 26-year old pastor when he led a bus boycott in Montgomery that mobilized a movement. John Lewis was but a 25-year old activist when he faced down Billy clubs on the bridge in Selma and helped arouse the conscience of our nation. Diane Nash was even younger when she helped found SNCC and led Freedom Rides down south. And your chairman Julian Bond was but a 25-year old state legislator when he put his own shoulder to the wheel of history.

It is because of them; and all those whose names never made it into the history books – those men and women, young and old, black, brown and white, clear-eyed and straight-backed, who refused to settle for the world as it is; who had the courage to remake the world as it should be – that I stand before you tonight as the Democratic nominee for President of the United States of America.

And if I have the privilege of serving as your next President, I will stand up for you the same way that earlier generations of Americans stood up for me – by fighting to ensure that every single one of us has the chance to make it if we try. That means removing the barriers of prejudice and misunderstanding that still exist in America. It means fighting to eliminate discrimination from every corner of our country. It means changing hearts, and changing minds, and making sure that every American is treated equally under the law.

But social justice is not enough. As Dr. King once said, "the inseparable twin of racial justice is economic justice." That's why Dr. King went to Memphis in his final days to stand with striking sanitation workers. That's why the march that Roy Wilkins helped lead forty five years ago this summer wasn't just named the March on Washington, and it wasn't just named the March on Washington for Freedom; it was named the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

What Dr. King and Roy Wilkins understood is that it matters little if you have the right to sit at the front of the bus if you can't afford the bus fare; it matters little if you have the right to sit at the lunch counter if you can't afford the lunch. What they understood is that so long as Americans are denied the decent wages, and good benefits, and fair treatment they deserve, the dream for which so many gave so much will remain out of reach; that to live up to our founding promise of equality for all, we have to make sure that opportunity is open to all Americans.

That is what I've been fighting to do throughout my over 20 years in public service. That's why I've fought in the Senate to end tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas and give those tax breaks to companies that create good jobs here in America. That's why I brought Democrats and Republicans together in Illinois to put $100 million in tax cuts into the pockets of hardworking families, to expand health care to 150,000 children and parents, and to end the outrage of black women making just 62 cents for every dollar that many of their male coworkers make. read it all.