NAACP chief Brooks urges members to tackle injustice with renewed vigor

The NAACP's national leader said Monday that the group was strong as ever and vowed that it would fight with renewed intensity on behalf of African Americans to defend freedoms under attack decades after the height of the civil rights movement.

In a rousing keynote speech at the NAACP's national convention in Philadelphia, Cornell William Brooks urged members to emulate the bravery of previous generations who risked their lives with demonstrations and marches to bring about change. He also responded to persistent criticism that the group has lost relevance.

"We are giants," said Brooks, an ordained African Methodist Episcopal pastor and lawyer who is completing his first year at the helm of the century-old organization. "We were built for this moment. We will march."

His remarks, against the backdrop of racial turmoil and violence that has rattled communities nationwide over the last year, set the stage for a planned speech to the group by President Obama on Tuesday.

A few weeks from now, the NAACP will lead an 860-mile march from Selma, Ala., to Washington to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, which President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law on Aug. 6, 1965.

Called "America's Journey for Justice," the march begins Aug. 1 and will end with a demonstration on Sept. 15.

The NAACP, seeing threats to liberty as reemerging decades after the era of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights pioneers, is revisiting marches, one of the tools that proved so effective in the 1960s.

Despite questions the group confronts about its modern-day power, Brooks said that power remains considerable.

As his speech built in intensity, Brooks, 54, began to shout and perspire, gesticulating so passionately at times that he had to keep readjusting the black-framed eyeglasses that repeatedly slid down his nose.

"I know that we are strong! I know that we are courageous! I know that we are powerful! I know that we will not stop! I know we will not relent! I know we will not give up! I know that we are here to stay!" he said, the crowd in a Convention Center ballroom roaring and giving a standing ovation.

The NAACP, Brooks said, must push back against efforts to dilute voting rights for blacks, as well as violence against blacks and unequal treatment by the criminal justice system.

Time and again, Brooks, who also holds a master's degree in divinity, urged members to understand - not question - the organization's power. He used the Bible to make that point.

Moses, Brooks said, sent scouts into the Promised Land, only to have a majority return with a grim report that Canaan was populated by giants. They, in contrast, felt themselves to be mere "grasshoppers," Brooks said.

Citizens of the civil rights struggle should not view themselves that way, he said.

"We are giants!" Brooks bellowed, echoing the refrain throughout his 45-minute speech.

Previous generations "laid down their lives understanding that the ballot box is the civic communion table and the right to vote is a public sacrament," the Yale Law School graduate said, his words surging with a cadence and power that resembled a sermon.

Brooks took to the stage on Day 3 of the five-day convention, to a crowd from across the country looking to him to set the tone and policy priorities in the coming year.

Present throughout his remarks were references to the last year, a traumatic one for African Americans that saw several killings of unarmed black men by police, violent street clashes with authorities and, last month, the massacre of nine church worshipers in South Carolina by a suspected white supremacist.

Brooks and other speakers before him, including elected federal officials, noted that violence was but one of the many challenges to confront as racism has flared anew, partly as a backlash to the coalition that helped make Obama the nation's first African American president.

The campaign in many statehouses to curb voter access through voter identification laws - viewed in part as an effort to suppress the African American vote - was another that drew considerable attention.

U.S. Rep. James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, whose civil rights activism in the 1960s put him behind bars more than once, said the need to protect voting rights was paramount to the NAACP a half-century later.

"For as long as we continue to see the kind of voter suppression that continues to take place in state after state, there's relevancy for the NAACP," Clyburn said.

Backers of a voter ID law in Pennsylvania said it was an attempt to clamp down on voter fraud but offered no evidence such fraud was happening. Enacted by Pennsylvania's Republican-controlled legislature under GOP Gov. Tom Corbett, it was overturned as unconstitutional in January 2014 by Commonwealth Court.

Jean Foward of Dayton, Ohio, said she found Brooks' speech "motivational" - a reminder that "we have to continue fighting for justice." Her husband is head of the Dayton branch of the NAACP.

"A lot of people think of us as being nonrelevant anymore," Foward said, "because we don't have the actual lynchings and more obvious problems. But they are there."

Obama is scheduled to speak Tuesday afternoon, followed Wednesday by former President Bill Clinton and, later that night, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch, the first African American woman to become the nation's top prosecutor.

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