US President Barack Obama has paid passionate tribute to black civil rights trailblazers on the centennial of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
But he says a "new mindset" is necessary to achieve a post-racial America.
Obama, the first black president in US history, was given a thunderous welcome on Thursday at a dinner marking the 100th anniversary of the NAACP, founded just after slavery when segregation "was a way of life (and) when lynchings were all too common."
The president quickly paid homage to civil rights heroes such as scholar WEB Du Bois, and the slain civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr for overcoming "the stain of slavery and the sin of segregation."
"Because of what they did, we are a more perfect union," Obama told a packed hotel ballroom.
"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 (Abraham) 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."
But while Obama, the son of a black Kenyan father and a white woman from Kansas, paid tribute to the progress made by the civil rights movement, he warned: "we know that too many barriers still remain."
He pointed to the spiraling costs of healthcare, noting that African Americans are "more likely to suffer from a host of diseases but less likely to own health insurance than just about anyone else.
Black youths, he said, are "five times as likely as a white child to see the inside of a jail," and the scourge of HIV/Aids, while ravaging regions such as Africa, is "devastating the African-American community here at home with disproportionate force."
But with a sizzling cadence invoking the passion of a southern preacher, Obama warned that "government programs alone won't get our children to the Promised Land.
"We need a new mindset, a new set of attitudes - because one of the most durable and destructive legacies of discrimination is the way that we have internalised a sense of limitation; how so many in our community have come to expect so little of ourselves."