By The Editors

“There has never been a year like this past year in America.”

Those were the opening words of the brief speech with which John Payton, President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF) welcomed the nearly 800 guests at LDF’s 23rd annual National Equal Justice Awards Dinner in New York on November 4; and that straightforward declarative sentence indeed seemed to capture an entire twelve months’ sense of excitement—and determination—that permeated the buoyant gathering.

Enjoying a moment together at the LDF Annual Dinner are, left to right: John Payton, LDF President and Director-Counsel; Richard Parsons, Chairman, Citigroup; Kenneth I. Chenault, Chairman & Chief Executive Officer, American Express Company; Ursula M. Burns, Chief Executive Officer, Xerox Corporation; Jaime Dimon, Chairman & Chief Executive Officer, JPMorgan Chase; Franklin A. Thomas, President, The Study Group; and Vernon E. Jordan, Jr.

Those qualities were evident in the brief remarks of the gala’s three honorees, all of them stalwart LDF supporters: Ursula M. Burns, Chief Executive Officer of the Xerox Corporation; Jamie Dimon, Chairman & Chief Executive Officer of JP Morgan Chase; and Vernon E. Jordan, Jr. Burns and Dimon were each honored with LDF’s National Equal Justice Award. Jordan, whose multi-faceted career began with and continues to be rooted in civil rights work, was honored with the organization’s Thurgood Marshall Lifetime Award.

Payton noted that the historic election of 2008 had produced, as most of his audience knew, an unprecedented connection between LDF and the country’s national administration. “The President of the United States is a former LDF cooperating attorney,” he said, as many around the ballroom of the Hilton New York & Towers Hotel in midtown Manhattan smiled, and added that the present Attorney General of the United States, Eric H. Holder, Jr., had begun his career as an LDF intern.

“How about that?” Payton said, as the audience applauded.

But Payton’s real purpose was the opposite of gloating. It was to remind them of “the economic recession and extraordinary anxiety” that has gripped the nation and “had an especially disastrous impact on the African-American and other vulnerable communities.”

That crisis and the race-driven crises that existed before it—in education, housing, employment, criminal justice system and health care—make clear the answer to the now oft-asked question of whether the U.S. can be characterized as a “post-racial society.”

“Not yet,” Payton concluded, adding that the extraordinary hatred expressed toward President Obama—evincing “a level of desperation and paranoia that I have never seen” – underscores that the optimism of progressive forces must be “focused by reality.”

That focus could be found in the remarks of the honorees, too.

Burns, the first black woman CEO of a Fortune 500 company, spoke not of her professional achievements, but of growing up in a housing project on New York‘s Lower East Side, and the unending support of her mother. Dimon spoke of the initiative aimed at boosting the achievement low-income youth he and his wife began years ago in New York and Chicago which is now part of the educational program of the Obama Administration.

Vernon Jordan, a member of the LDF Board for more than two decades, said the Marshall Award had special meaning for him because “to those of my generation, growing up in the segregated South, Thurgood Marshall was more than a crusader for justice, more than a torch bearer of liberty, more than a wise and learned man of the law. He was a teacher who taught us to believe in the shield of justice and the sword of truth; a role model whose career made us dream large dreams and work to secure them, [and] an agent of change who transformed the way an entire generation thought of itself, of its place in our society, and of the law itself.”