National Convention remarks

              REMARKS OF CECIL F. POOLE AT NAACP 54TH
ANNUAL CONVENTION, MORRISON HOTEL,
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, WEDNESDAY, JULY 3,
1963, 10 A.M.
THE YEAR AHEAD IN POLITICAL ACTION
Two weeks ago President Kennedy sent to Congress a civil rights legislative proposal known as "The Civil
Rights Act of 1963."    It is designed to cover the major areas where legislation may effectively preserve civil
rights and may proscribe discrimination.
Briefly, the proposed bill deals with voting rights;  a ban on discrimination in places of public accommodation;  provisions for speeding up school desegregation;  establishment of a Community Relations Service to settle
racial problems by conciliation; extension of the Federal Commission on Civil Rights; conversion of the President's Committee on Equal Employment into a full commission with legislative authorization and a budget for
operations; and other provisions for withholding federal financial assistance from activities which discriminate.
In his keynote address Monday, Secretary Roy Wilkins told this convention that the bill promises to deal
effectively with about 80% of the areas which have been the prime concern of the NAACP.
NAACP and other civil rights organizations regard these proposals as moderate but realistic attempts to
provide some minimum protections in the respects covered and to bring the full force of law to the aid of those
beleaguered people in Birmingham, and Jackson, and Greenville, and Danville, and everywhere else.
President Kennedy,  in submitting the bill to Congress has stated that in his view this legislation pertains
not at all of the drastic,  but is a simple and obviously needed means of establishing the legal and moral right of
all citizens to go about their daily lives free of the ugly shadows of discrimination which have existed so long
and about which we, as a national folk, have pretended such little concern.
This week, Attorney General Robert Kennedy led off the first salvoes in what will be long battle through
Washington's sweltering summer.    He too pointed out to Congress that these proposals are just moderate statements
that all our citizens are entitled to elemental decency in treatment and that they should not have to win their
rights by the process of battling in the streets.
It is vital to the country, to NAACP, and to each of us, that the Civil Rights Act of 1963 be enacted.
We are an action organization.   This bill, sponsored by an Administration now fully alive to the explosive
dangers of allowing repressive laws,  customs or traditions to prevail in areas where people are just people,  is
not just the responsibility of its executive athuor and protagonists:   it is life and death to us.   It is our number
one obligation to support it with vigor and political power, and to communicate the urgency of its passage to
everyone of our representatives in Congress.
It is the temper of this and other groups that the fires of liberty and freedom, which flared so hotly this
year, be not permitted to die away.    Suggestions—pleas—have been made that Congress not be placed in the
position of having to deliberate on these important measures with a "gun" of pressure,  i.e., demonstrations,
pointed at it.   It is now apparent that peaceful demonstrations — which have been absolutely necessary in order
to get civil rights out of the forgotten back reaches of America's conscience and into the foregoing's ugly relief
— will continue until that has been done which will bring some actual change.
These demonstrations have in major respects drawn the clear issue which this country now seems slowly
about to face.   The President understands and has told the country how urgent action—now has become.
What we must do,  then,  is,  individually, through groups,  in every possible political means of communication, make sure that our Congressmen and Senators get the message that we insist upon passage of this legislation.
Unfortunately, no sooner had the President dispatched the bill to the Capitol than the voices of resistance,
of delay, and of obfuscation began to be heard.