By Julian Bond

On July 10 in Milwaukee, Wis., NAACP Chairman Julian Bond addressed the organization's 96th annual convention, also marking the 50th anniversary of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. We recommend reading his entire hard-charging speech at www.naacp.org. Meanwhile, here are some excerpts to whet your activist whistle.

I am sorry to begin with some bad news -- for the fifth year in a row, the president of the United States will not grace us with his presence. He is the first president since Herbert Hoover not to speak to us. The good news is that next year we'll meet right in the nation's capital, Washington, D.C., blocks from the White House, and Mr. President, we're extending the invitation a year in advance. We want to see you and we want you to see us -- we want to know you think you're our president too ...

[We] know who we are -- we are the conscience of a nation. That is our inheritance -- the bequest of bondage, the legacy of lynching.

More than 4,000 blacks were lynched from 1882 to 1942 ... Walter White wrote of the 1918 lynching of pregnant Mary Turner in Valdosta, Ga. After she had been tied to a tree and burned: "a man stepped forward with a pocketknife and ripped open her abdomen in a crude Caesarean operation. Out tumbled the prematurely born child," White wrote. "Two feeble cries it gave -- and received for the answer the heel of a stalwart man, as life was ground out of the tiny form."

If a United States senator, in the year 2005, can't apologize for that, what outrage is deserving of an apology? And who is deserving of a Senate seat?

Last month the Senate considered a "resolution apologizing for past failures to pass anti-lynching laws." But they did not do so with a roll call vote that would have put senators on record. Instead, the Senate Majority Leader allowed the resolution to be adopted under a "voice vote procedure" that did not require any senator's presence.

Since you don't need to be present for Dr. Frist to diagnose your medical condition, why should he require your presence to vote?

The good doctor's tactic allowed eight senators to dodge the apology, but they deserve a roll call here: Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Thad Cochran of Mississippi, John Cornyn of Texas, Mike Enzi of Wyoming, Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, Trent Lott of Mississippi, John Sununu of New Hampshire and Craig Thomas of Wyoming...

We are the largest volunteer association for justice in the United States. We are the highest expression of self help. Our membership is not confined to black women and men and youth. We are black and white and red and yellow.

And we are gay and lesbian. We are a cross section of America, heavily weighted toward African Americans, but in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, we believe colored people come in all colors, all ages and races, in both genders.

Anyone who shares our mission and values is welcome. Our values are American values -- we believe in tolerance, inclusion, equality, celebrating the worth of every human being...

We are part of a progressive coalition in America that over decades created a truly compassionate government ... But in recent years, in a stealthy, devious campaign, the enemies of justice and fair play have whittled away at the components of the progressive coalition ... Ideas of government that were marginal, even delusional, have moved to center stage. The wacky has become the reality, the unimaginable is now taken for everyday truth.

How did they do it? How did they make political hay from barnyard straw?

They did it by coupling ostentatious piety with a victim mentality. They quoted Martin Luther King and misused his message, all the while profiting from a supine press. They reinforced their message by harnessing a round-the-clock perpetual motion attack machine and echo chamber...

They've tried an aggressive campaign to seduce black clergy and create a brand new political party, whose initials are F-B-G. That stands for the Faith Based Grant Party. Their hope is to create an alliance of the neo-cons and the theo-cons, all tied together by federal cash...

They want private charity to replace government's helping hand, substituting faith-based organizations free to discriminate and proselytize for the fairness and secularism required of the public sector...

Equally deceptive is their approach to civil rights ... The very names of these groups -- the Institute for Justice, the Center for Individual Rights, the American Civil Rights Institute -- are fraudulent, and their aims are frightening...

They've had a collection of black hustlers and hucksters on their payrolls for more than 20 years, promoting them as a new generation of black leaders. They can't deal with the leaders we choose for ourselves -- so they manufacture, promote, and hire new ones. The late Lee Atwater predicted this course years ago -- he said we're going to create "an alternative leadership structure" in black America, and they have.

Like ventriloquists' dummies, they speak in their puppet master's voice, but we can see his lips move and we can hear his money talk.

They've financed a conservative constellation of make-believe black-faced front organizations, all of them hollow shells with more names on the letterhead than there are people on their membership rolls...

The NAACP has always been non-partisan, but that doesn't mean we're non-critical. And it doesn't mean we're non compos mentis...

We will fight discrimination, wherever it raises its ugly head -- in the halls of government, in corporate suites or in the streets.

We demand fair treatment for people with HIV/AIDS, especially for people of color. This disease strikes African-American women more than any other group. It doesn't happen to "others" -- it happens to all of us.

As Frederick Douglass taught us: "Who would be free, must themselves strike the blow. You know that liberty given is never so precious as liberty sought for and fought for. The man outraged is the man to make the outcry. Depend upon it, men will not care much for a people who do not care for themselves."

We care for ourselves. We care for our country. We are the conscience of the nation.

Julian Bond is the executive director of NAACP. For more information, visit www.naacp.org.