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Roy Wilkins

1901–1981 · 80 years

The administrator the movement fought with and could not do without

Portrait of Roy Wilkins — Yoichi Okamoto — 1968-04-30 — Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

His father had already left St. Louis by the time he was born there — gone after refusing to step off a sidewalk for a white man and declining to wait for what came next. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was four, and an aunt and uncle took the three children north to the Rondo neighborhood of St. Paul. Roy Wilkins went through integrated schools, wrote for the Minnesota Daily while taking a sociology degree at the University of Minnesota, and was editing a Black weekly, the St. Paul Appeal, before he turned 22. In 1923 he left for Kansas City to run the Call. Jim Crow, which he had mostly read about, was waiting there in person.

He joined the NAACP staff in New York in 1931 and took over The Crisis from W. E. B. Du Bois in 1934. He was in the building for the whole legal campaign that produced Brown v. Board of Education, and he got the top job the year after it landed. He held it for 22 years. The lobbying coalition he co-founded in 1950 worked every major civil rights bill through Congress — 1957, 1964, 1965, 1968. He testified constantly, dealt with five presidents, and was called Mr. Civil Rights by people who did not all mean it kindly.

The charge was that he was an administrator where a leader should have been. He criticized the Freedom Riders' methods as late as 1962. In June 1966 he refused to sign Stokely Carmichael's manifesto on the March Against Fear and let the march go without him, and when Carmichael came off that road saying Black Power, Wilkins called it destructive. He denounced communists in the movement, and in 1951 he helped the FBI and the State Department place a ghostwritten attack on Paul Robeson. Younger activists called him an Uncle Tom. Amiri Baraka wrote a poem about what he would do to him on a sidewalk. Gil Scott-Heron made him shorthand for everything the revolution would not be. He also spent three weeks of the winter of 1932 in workman's clothes in the Mississippi levee camps, counting beatings.

He retired in 1977 at 76, after six years of being told he was too old, and died on September 8, 1981 of heart trouble. St. Paul renamed its auditorium for him, the University of Minnesota built a dormitory and a research center under his name, Queens got a park, and the Postal Service issued a 34-cent stamp in 2001. The argument outlived all of it. Historians of the movement have spent 40 years weighing the lawyers against the marchers, and Wilkins is where the weighing gets hard — the 2023 film Rustin handed him to Chris Rock to play as an obstacle, and the strategy he defended is still the one that produced the statutes.

Lifespan

15401700180019002030

Roy Wilkins's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

Mississippi River Slavery — 1932 article
NAACP leaflet from the levee-camp investigation he ran undercover with George Schuyler 1932
The Crisis other
Edited the NAACP magazine for 15 years after Du Bois left it 1934
Leadership Conference on Civil Rights company
Co-founded with A. Philip Randolph and Arnold Aronson — the coalition behind every major civil rights law since 1957 1950
Civil Rights Act of 1964 law
Lobbied through Congress by the coalition he built and the association he ran 1964
Standing Fast: The Autobiography of Roy Wilkins book
Written with Tom Mathews and published after his death 1982

Life in brief

with age at each point

August 30, 1901 aged 0 Born in St. Louis to a father who had already fled the city His mother died of tuberculosis when he was four. An aunt and uncle raised the children in St. Paul.
1931 aged ~30 Moves to New York as assistant secretary of the NAACP under Walter White He had spent eight years editing the Kansas City Call after graduating from the University of Minnesota in 1923.
December 15, 1932 aged 31 Goes undercover in the Mississippi levee camps in workman's clothes Three weeks with George Schuyler documenting unequal pay, overwork and beatings. The War Department raised wages the following September.
1934 aged ~33 Succeeds W. E. B. Du Bois as editor of The Crisis Du Bois had resigned after publishing an editorial arguing for voluntary segregation.
1955 aged ~54 Named executive secretary of the NAACP The title became executive director in 1964. He held the job until 1977.
August 28, 1963 aged 61 Speaks at the March on Washington, which he helped organize
June 1966 aged 64 Breaks with Stokely Carmichael over the March Against Fear He refused to sign a manifesto he read as an attack on Lyndon Johnson. The march went on without him, and Carmichael came off it saying Black Power.
1977 aged ~76 Retires from the NAACP at 76 and is succeeded by Benjamin Hooks Calls for him to step down had run for six years.
September 8, 1981 aged 80 Dies in New York City of heart trouble He was 80. A pacemaker had been implanted in 1979.