NAACP Fighting Fund for Freedom (aka Freedom Fund Banquet) – The NAACP Freedom Fund began in 1953 (on a national level) as a ten-year program to intensify efforts to complete the job of emancipation. Near the culmination of this effort, Medgar W. Evers, a heroic NAACP Mississippi Field Secretary, was killed by an assassin’s bullet. This prompted the NAACP Chairman Bishop Stephen Spottswood to pay tribute to this gallant warrior at the NAACP Convention in Chicago, Illinois in July 1963. He did so by proclaiming that the NAACP Fighting Fund for Freedom will continue until the job of emancipating our people is complete. (Source: The 96th Annual Thurgood Marshall Freedom Fund Dinner and Awards Ceremony)