Wilkins, Roy

By: Arvarh E. Strickland

Source:

 American National Biography Online

Wilkins, Roy

Sex:  Male

Born:  St. Louis, Missouri, United States
30 August 1901

Died:  New York, New York, United States, New York University Medical Center
8 September 1981

Activity/Profession:  Civil Rights Activist, Organization Founder / Official

Roy Wilkins, 1958. Photograph by Carl Van Vechten.

Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-USZ62-116609).

civil rights organization executive, was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the son of William DeWitte Wilkins, a minister, and Mayfield Edmundson. His parents left Holly Springs, Mississippi, for St. Louis soon after their marriage in 1900 to seek refuge from threatened racial violence against his father. His mother died while he was still quite young, and her sister Elizabeth Edmundson Williams took Wilkins and his younger sister and brother to live with her in St. Paul, Minnesota. His aunt and her husband, Sam Williams, a sleeping-car porter, provided a stable home for the Wilkins children in an integrated, working-class neighborhood.

Wilkins attended the University of Minnesota, where he earned a bachelor of arts degree in sociology in 1923. He also took journalism courses and gained experience as a journalist by working on campus publications. He supported himself while in college by working as a redcap, a dining-car waiter, and a slaughterhouse laborer. In 1922 he became editor of the Appeal, a local black weekly newspaper.

After graduation Wilkins began work on 1 October 1923 as news editor of the Kansas City Call, a black weekly. He found black Kansas City, even with all of its problems, to be an exciting and colorful place. “White Kansas City,” however, he recalled, “was an entirely different place, a Jim Crow town that nearly ate my heart out as the years went by.” In Kansas City Wilkins became a fighter for African-American rights. He joined the struggle for better schools, for an end to discrimination in education, for an end to police brutality, and for the defeat of racist politicians. In 1929 he married Aminda “Minnie” Badeau, a social worker; the couple had no children.

In 1931 Walter White replaced James Weldon Johnson as executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). White offered his former position as assistant secretary to Wilkins, who on 15 August 1931 began a 24-year apprenticeship under White. In his autobiography, Standing Fast (1982), Wilkins said of his new job, “My new duties involved a little bit of everything—writing, lecturing, organizing new branches, raising money for a treasury that was always Depression-dry, running the office while Walter was touring around the country. For a while I even reviewed legal cases.” He also continued to write a column for the Call and worked with W. E. B. Du Bois on the Crisis, the NAACP’s magazine.

Wilkins’s duties turned out to be quite diverse. He undertook his first major investigation in 1932 in connection with a report that the U.S. Corps of Engineers was exploiting African-American workers employed in building flood-control dams and levees in Mississippi. He volunteered to get eyewitness evidence of conditions. After Du Bois resigned from the NAACP, in addition to his duties as assistant secretary, from 1934 to 1949 Wilkins also edited the Crisis.

The Scottsboro incident, a famous case of the 1930s, occurred just as Wilkins joined the NAACP staff. At the time, White told him, “Roy, the Scottsboro Case is your baby.” He was involved in this struggle with the southern system of justice and the machinations of the Communist party for nearly two decades. The case involved nine young black men accused of raping two white women in Alabama while hitching a ride on a freight train traveling from Chattanooga to Memphis. Although the evidence was less than compelling, eight of the nine Scottsboro Boys were sentenced to death, and one received a life sentence.

At this point both the NAACP and the International Labor Defense (ILD), a Communist organization, offered to defend the young men. Their parents accepted the ILD’s offer. The case became a profitable venture for the Communist party with an estimated $1 million raised through an international propaganda campaign. But after successive trials the men remained in prison. In 1935 the NAACP and other civil rights organizations entered the case. Wilkins represented the NAACP on a Scottsboro Defense Committee. He said that they set out as quickly as they could “to save the boys from the Communists and the white juries of Alabama.” This, however, was a long process. The last of the Scottsboro Boys was not freed until 1950. Wilkins tried to help the young men in finding employment as they were released from prison. The Scottsboro case was Wilkins’s initial encounter in his long opposition to Communist involvement in the struggle for civil rights.

During World War II job discrimination, racial violence, and segregation in the armed forces became the major issues for the NAACP and other civil rights groups. The NAACP provided both staff and financial support for A. Philip Randolph’s proposed March on Washington in 1941. Wilkins played a key role in these activities. During the Harlem riots in 1943 he joined White and New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia in the streets in sound trucks urging rioters to calm down. In May 1945 Wilkins was a consultant to the American delegation at the United Nations charter conference in San Francisco. The next year he was diagnosed with colon cancer. After an operation and a period of recuperation, he returned to his NAACP duties.

Wilkins welcomed Harry Truman’s ascension to the presidency in 1945. He had followed Truman’s political career in Missouri and assessed him as having a border-state view on race. Wilkins said that although Truman did not believe in social equality, “No one had ever convinced him that the Bill of Rights was a document for white folks only.”

White took a leave of absence from the NAACP in 1949, and Wilkins became acting executive secretary. During this period fair employment practices became the NAACP’s priority. Wilkins chaired the National Emergency Civil Rights Mobilization, a movement made up of more than 100 local and national groups that sent 4,218 participants from thirty-three states to a march in Washington on 15 January 1950. This event served as a mass lobby for fair employment legislation and other civil rights bills. President Truman met with a delegation from the march. The mobilization led to greater cooperation among civil rights organizations through the organizing of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, which Wilkins chaired. When White returned in May 1950, the NAACP board of directors relieved him of some of his duties and named Wilkins the day-to-day administrator of the organization. After White died in March 1955, the NAACP board of directors unanimously named Wilkins to succeed him the next month.

The first decade of Wilkins’s leadership was the NAACP’s greatest period of accomplishment. The crowning achievement was the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. In spite of the Court’s failure to order immediate integration of schools, the NAACP leadership remained optimistic that desegregation could be achieved. But the organization had not reckoned on the tenacious resistance African Americans would face in trying to desegregate southern schools. NAACP efforts were frustrated by legal tactics, such as “freedom of choice” plans, by violence, and by economic and other forms of intimidation carried out by the newly founded White Citizens Councils. Wilkins became highly critical of the failure of the federal government to enforce the Brown decision.

Even so, there were encouraging signs of progress coming out of Washington. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957, the first such measure in the twentieth century. Wilkins took little satisfaction in the new law because Title III, a provision allowing the Justice Department to sue in civil rights cases (including school desegregation), was stripped from the bill before it was passed. Still, he had worked hard to get the measure through Congress. Looking back on this experience in his autobiography, he concluded, “I still think I did the right thing. In the middle of the battle, Hubert Humphrey took me aside and said, ‘Roy, if there’s one thing I have learned in politics, it’s never to turn your back on a crumb.’ He knew what he was talking about. The crumb of 1957 had to come first before the civil rights acts that followed later.” Wilkins, along with NAACP lobbyist Clarence Mitchell, played a major role in working with President Lyndon B. Johnson and in lobbying Congress to get the civil rights acts of 1964, 1965, and 1968 enacted. He was also a key figure in the 1963 March on Washington.

The years after 1955 were also years of challenge for Wilkins. The Montgomery bus boycott, the lunch counter sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Freedom Rides brought new leaders, new organizations, and new tactics to the struggle. In spite of the successes achieved by Martin Luther King, Jr., Wilkins remained steadfast in his belief that legal and political action and not direct action had to be the main thrust of the civil rights struggle. NAACP youth councils, however, were among the first groups to employ direct-action tactics. At the organization’s 1960 convention, Wilkins paid tribute to the sit-in demonstrators. He said that these demonstrations had made “men and women of the Negro youths overnight.” He continued, “It has electrified the adult Negro community with the exception of the usual Uncle Toms and Nervous Nellies. It has stirred white college students from coast to coast as they have not been stirred since Pearl Harbor.” After the speech the young conventioneers hoisted Wilkins to their shoulders and paraded around the hall.

As time passed, however, Wilkins became increasingly alienated from proponents of direct action and from African-American youths as they turned increasingly to black nationalism. He chided King that his tactics had not desegregated anything. Wilkins believed that in spite of its popularity, direct action was of limited effectiveness and was inappropriate for application on a national scale. His alienation from young blacks, such as Stokely Carmichael, became complete in the mid-1960s when they embraced black power. Wilkins’s keynote address to the 1966 NAACP convention dealt with this issue. His nephew, the journalist Roger Wilkins, at first persuaded him to tone down his attack on black power advocates, but he restored to his speech the line “Black Power means black death.” In A Man’s Life (1982), Roger Wilkins wrote, “I think that line more than any other made him the target of the black youth and radical communities.”

Wilkins was subjected to attack both from outside and from within the NAACP. Militant groups invaded and took over his office, and a group was arrested for plotting to assassinate him. “Young Turks” within the NAACP called for a more militant course for the organization and called for his retirement. Wilkins understood the frustration that led to the urban violence in the 1960s, but he condemned that violence and favored the use of the military when necessary to quell it. As a member of President Johnson’s National Advisory Commission on Civil Rights, however, he helped to draft the tough language in the commission’s report that warned of the danger of the nation dividing into separate black and white societies. He was also disappointed that President Johnson virtually ignored the work of his commission.

Wilkins’s final years as executive director of the NAACP were far from halcyon. He spent the 1970s trying to hold back the tide of reaction that came with the administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. He criticized these presidents and white liberals for slowing the pace of desegregation and for their opposition to school busing. Simultaneously, he struggled against members of his board of directors who openly urged his retirement. Finally, in 1977, at age seventy-five, he handed over the organization he had served for forty-six years to Benjamin Hooks. Wilkins spent the remaining years of his life in New York City, where he died.

Roy Wilkins was not a complex person. As Melvin Drimmer so aptly stated in Phylon (June 1984), his “place in the civil rights pantheon does not owe to his role as a dreamer, intellectual, rebel, poet, philosopher, revolutionary, or spellbinder. He was not any of these. He was rather a phenomenon of the 20th century, the professional bureaucrat.” Working quietly as a power broker with national leaders, Wilkins was a key figure in the dismantling of the major legal barriers to civil rights. He never wavered in his belief that the ultimate goal in the struggle for African-American freedom must be full integration into American society. This belief was bolstered by his implicit faith in the Constitution and the American legal system. During the Vietnam War, the Black Power Movement, and the setbacks of the Nixon and Ford administrations, he never let the NAACP lose sight of the ultimate goal. The organization that he handed over to Hooks was still strong and capable of carrying on the struggle for African-American equality.

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