GSBA Joins the NAACP in Celebrating 100 Years

The Garden State Bar Association (GSBA) proudly joins the NAACP in celebrating 100 years of preeminent commitment to civil rights and social justice. The steady efforts of the NAACP helped lay the groundwork for the ascendancy of political giants like President Barack Obama and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. By every measure, the achievement we have witnessed this year signals the end of political marginalization and the attainment of the NAACP's foremost goals.

Through W.E.B. DuBois, the Crisis Magazine, and other efforts, the NAACP set the intellectual groundwork in motion that has come to fruition this year. Through their innovative team at Howard Law School, NAACP champions Charles Hamilton Houston, Thurgood Marshall and others laid the legal groundwork for what was to come in the movement.

The gargantuan leap of the 2008 election is more than coincidental to tonight's celebration. In fact, it is central to our celebration of the NAACP. Houston and DuBois had set the precedent for marshalling the highest levels of education in the land toward building relevant scholarship and community institutions focused on our social uplift. Both used their Harvard degrees not for personal wealth, but to crystallize the NAACP into a powerful organizer of the ordinary citizen and the talented tenth into one common vision-the very blueprint exemplified by President Obama's campaign.

Indeed, we realize that the great milestone that we celebrate this month was cultivated by organized, protracted and institutional leadership equal to the task of fighting entrenched and systematic social and legal oppression. No institution has done more than the NAACP. Its vigilant adherence to the true meaning of Equal Protection and all of our constitutional laws has raised protection for all Americans. For African-American lawyers, the NAACP has fostered external dignity and internal clarity of communal purpose. On behalf of the Garden State Bar Association, happy 100th birthday to our most esteemed of civil rights institutions, the NAACP.