If, somewhere, there's a rating system for coincidences -- a scale ranging from the ordinary to the almost miraculous -- then the one that played out when President Obama spoke to the NAACP on on Thursday night has to rank pretty high. That the first black man to be elected president of the United States could speak to the NAACP 's annual convention was miracle enough, of course. But this convention also just happened to mark the great civil rights organization's centennial.
Obama, obviously, went out of his way to recognize the milestone, and to acknowledge the role the NAACP had played in his election.
"What we celebrate tonight is not simply the journey the NAACP has traveled, but the journey that we, as Americans, have traveled over the past one hundred years," the president said at the beginning of his address, according to his prepared remarks.
Speaking of civil rights leaders and workers from the NAACP, Obama continued, "Because of what they did, we are a more perfect union. Because Jim Crow laws were overturned, black CEOs today run Fortune 500 companies. Because civil rights laws were passed, black mayors, governors, and Members of Congress serve in places where they might once have been unable to vote. And because ordinary people made the civil rights movement their own, I made a trip to Springfield a couple years ago -- where Lincoln once lived, and race riots once raged -- and began the journey that has led me here tonight as the 44th President of the United States of America."