Roy Wilkins: “The Clock Will Not Be Turned Back”

About the Author

Roy Wilkins dedicated more than fifty years of his life to the cause of civil rights for black Americans. Born in 1901 in St. Louis, Missouri, he was raised in St. Paul, Minnesota, by an aunt and uncle after his mother died of tuberculosis when Wilkins was four years old. In an early display of his love of journalism, Wilkins edited the student newspaper while he was a pupil at the integrated Mechanic Arts High School. At the University of Minnesota, where he majored in sociology and minored in journalism, Wilkins took a number of jobs (including slaughterhouse worker and Pullman car waiter) to support his studies, but he also made time to write for the university newspaper, the Minnesota Daily; edit the St. Paul Appeal, a black weekly; and join the local branch of the NAACP. After graduating in 1924, Wilkins moved to Kansas City to work for the Kansas City Call, an influential black newspaper. Rising quickly to the position of managing editor, Wilkins was something of a crusading journalist, using the pages of his paper to urge blacks to mobilize their voting strength to defeat racist politicians. In 1931 Walter White, the NAACP’s executive secretary, appointed Wilkins as his assistant. Three years later Wilkins succeeded the legendary W. E. B. Du Bois as editor of the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis. In 1955, following Walter White’s death, Wilkins became head of the NAACP (the position was later renamed executive director); he would lead the organization until his retirement in July 1977.

Throughout his career Wilkins remained firmly committed to the goal of integration, and he sought equal rights for black Americans within the framework of America’s constitutional system. Indeed, Wilkins was a proud patriot who argued that blacks were entitled, as Americans, to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and the equal protection of the laws. Uncomfortable with the civil rights movement’s enthusiastic embrace of direct action during the early 1960s, Wilkins chose to emphasize the importance of litigation, court rulings, and legislative victories in winning black freedom. Not renowned as a public speaker, and not a little jealous of the fame and plaudits that came the way of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Wilkins was most effective when working behind the scenes––negotiating with presidents and politicians, testifying before congressional committees, and lobbying for change. In 1950 he helped to found the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, a coalition of organizations that coordinated national efforts to produce civil rights legislation. During the mid-1960s Wilkins worked particularly closely with the presidential administration of Lyndon B. Johnson––and it was Johnson who awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, to the NAACP chief in 1969. Often accused of exerting excessive control over the NAACP (as when he sought to eliminate any hint of Communism or racial separatism among the membership), Wilkins was succeeded by Benjamin Hooks in July 1977. Admitted to the New York University Medical Center in August 1981 suffering from heart trouble, Wilkins died from kidney failure, aged eighty, on September 8, 1981.