Wilkins, Roy 1901–1981

The grandson of former slaves from Holly Springs, Mississippi, Roy Ottoway Wilkins was born August 30, 1901, in St. Louis, Missouri. As soon as he learned how to write, he dropped his middle name, the name of the doctor who delivered him. His mother died from tuberculosis when he was four years old; a brother and sister died from the same disease. After the death of his mother, Wilkins’s father, who worked in a brick kiln, could not care for him and his siblings. As a result, they went to live with his maternal aunt Elizabeth and uncle Sam Williams in a lower income, integrated neighborhood in St. Paul, Minnesota. He was generally spared the blatant racism often encountered by African Americans in the southern states.

After graduating from Mechanic Arts High School, Wilkins entered the University of Minnesota. He worked his way through college by taking jobs as a stockyard worker and Pullman car waiter. He also worked as a journalist and night editor with the Minnesota Daily and became editor of the St. Paul Appeal, an African American weekly newspaper. He was a member of the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). After graduating from the University of Minnesota in 1923 with a degree in sociology and a minor in journalism, Wilkins became editor of the Kansas City Call, another African American weekly. He married social worker Aminda “Minnie” Badeau in 1929; they had no children.

In Kansas City he first came face-to-face with racism. There he discovered that even having good manners was a crime for black men. Wilkins recounted a story of an incident when he offered his seat on a streetcar to an elderly white woman. Her response to another white passenger was that she was not so old that she would take a seat from a “nigger.” Wilkins indicated that he quickly changed from a “soft shell boy to a well-armored Kansas City slicker.” He began to use the pages of the Call to attack white racism. For example, he used the paper to wage a campaign against racist Missouri senator Henry J. Allen, who was subsequently defeated. When he moved the paper from simply generating sensational stories to bringing attention to segregation issues, circulation went from 4,000 to 20,000. This made the Call the second largest African American weekly in the country, after the Chicago Defender.

Wilkins continued to be actively involved in the local NAACP, serving as secretary of the Kansas City branch. Those activities and Wilkins’s work on the newspaper exposing segregation brought him to the attention of Walter White, executive director of the NAACP. In 1931, White recruited Wilkins to serve as assistant secretary of the organization in New York.

One of Wilkins’s first assignments was to investigate lynching and African American working conditions in the South. In 1932 he traveled incognito to the river camps set up along the Mississippi River to investigate the slave-labor-like conditions facing black convicts on federally controlled flood projects. His report, Mississippi Slave Labor, led to Congress enacting reform measures that improved the working conditions in levee labor camps. From that point forward, Wilkins was at the forefront of the NAACP’s efforts at addressing lynching, fair housing, equal employment opportunity, and integration. When W. E. B. Du Bois left the NAACP in 1934, Wilkins became editor of The Crisis, the official magazine of the organization. He served in that role until 1949.

After White’s death in 1955, Wilkins became executive secretary of the NAACP. By this time he was known to have an excellent reputation as an articulate advocate for civil rights. One of his first actions was to assist activists in Mississippi who were facing a credit squeeze by the racist White Citizens’ Council. Dr. T. R. M. Howard, a physician and local race relations activist, was the head of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership in Mound Bayou, Mississippi. He proposed to Wilkins that black businesses and organizations should move their accounts to a black-owned bank. Wilkins backed the proposal. By the end of 1955, approximately $280,000 had been deposited in Tri-State Bank of Memphis, Tennessee. The bank then made loans to African Americans who had been turned down by white banks. The venture proved to be successful.

Wilkins’s leadership coincided with the beginnings of the civil rights movement. One year after the organization’s victory in the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education, Rosa Parks, a member and former secretary of the Montgomery, Alabama, branch of the NAACP, refused to yield her seat on a segregated bus to a white rider. As a result, a one-day boycott against the transit system was initiated. The boycott lasted a year and catapulted to fame Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. King, then pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, spearheaded the Montgomery movement. Shortly after the Supreme Court ruled in Gayle v. Browder (1956) that segregation on city buses was unconstitutional, King founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), an association of scores of black churches. This organization became a competitor to the NAACP, its membership consisting of groups of churchgoers, whereas NAACP membership was individual, reflecting the NAACP’s legalist approach to racial issues. Wilkins had to contend with King’s belief that change would occur mainly through direct community action. Wilkins continued to promote the NAACP’s mission to fight segregation through legal challenges and legislation. However, he did work hand-in-hand with the SCLC on all major civil rights activities.

Wilkins participated in all the major events during the turbulent years of the 1960s. He helped to organize the 1963 March on Washington and appeared on the cover of Time magazine on August 30, 1963, just two days after the momentous march. He participated in the Selma to Montgomery march in 1965 and the March Against Fear in 1966. He led the NAACP in its efforts to secure support for and passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. In his role as executive director (the title changed from secretary to director in 1964), Wilkins was the individual who testified on behalf of the organization before Congress and consulted with presidents.

Wilkins not only directly consulted with all presidents from John F. Kennedy to Jimmy Carter but also had knowledge of the actions of presidents going back to Franklin Roosevelt. He analyzed the role that presidents played in responding to the NAACP’s agenda. He felt that Roosevelt was overrated, pointing to the fact that the New Deal’s social security program excluded farmers and domestics, the two areas of employment in which African Americans were most heavily represented. He gave more credit to Harry Truman, who, he felt, risked his reelection by throwing the full authority of the federal government behind a call for civil rights for all American citizens. Wilkins felt that Dwight Eisenhower was guilty of moral abdication in his tardy intervention in the Little Rock, Arkansas, Central High School desegregation case. Wilkins acknowledged that while John Kennedy improved the moral climate, he was evasive when it came to action. In his view, Lyndon Johnson was the most sincere and passionate advocate of civil rights. Richard Nixon was indifferent and set back the cause of civil rights, despite having introduced the concept of affirmative action.

As the civil rights movement gave way to the militancy of the Black Power movement, Wilkins was often criticized by black militants as leading an organization that was antiquated. Stokely Carmichael of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was especially critical of Wilkins and the NAACP. He and others saw Wilkins as a “knee-bowing supplicant” who was out of touch with the needs of the community. Wilkins saw the militants as young firebrands whose defiance in white America was “desperate lunacy.” He continued to appeal to the conscience of America, stating that America was as much the land of African Americans as of any other group. He held that African Americans help build and defend the nation and had every right to participate in society on all levels. The NAACP under his leadership provided financial and legal support for community-action programs in urban areas that were sponsored by the very organizations that criticized his leadership.

In addition to his NAACP duties, Wilkins was an adviser to the War Department during World War II. He chaired the American delegation to the International Conference on Human Rights in Teheran and was president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. For his work in civil rights Wilkins was awarded the Spingarn Medal by the NAACP in 1964, and he received the coveted Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1967 from President Johnson.

Wilkins retired from the NAACP at age seventy-six in 1977. He was succeeded by Benjamin Hooks. Wilkins died September 8, 1981, in New York. His autobiography, Standing Fast: The Autobiography of Roy Wilkins, was published posthumously in 1982. In 1986, on behalf of Congress, President Ronald Reagan presented his widow, Aminda Wilkins, the Congressional Gold Medal to commemorate Wilkins’s contributions to the cause of human liberty. He was also the twenty-fourth African American honored with a commemorative stamp as part of the U.S. Postal Service’s Black Heritage series. The stamp was unveiled January 24, 2001, in Minneapolis.

SEE ALSO NAACP.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

“The Awful Roar.” 1963. Time. August 30. Available from http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,940696,00.html

Minnesota Historical Society. 2007. “Roy Wilkins.” Available from http://www.mnhs.org/library/tips/history_topics/129wilkins.htm.

Reagan, Ronald. 1986. “Remarks at the Presentation Ceremony for the Congressional Gold Medal Honoring Roy Wilkins.” Available from http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1986/11686d.htm.

Wilkins, Roy, and Tom Mathews. 1982. Standing Fast: The Autobiography of Roy Wilkins. New York: Viking.

Williams, Juan. 1987. Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954–1965. New York: Viking Penguin.

Mamie E. Locke