Roy Wilkins
Roy Ottoway Wilkins (August 30, 1901 – September 8, 1981) was a prominent activist in the Civil Rights Movement in the United States from the 1930s to the 1970s. Wilkins’ most notable role was in his leadership of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
Wilkins was born in St. Louis, Missouri on August 30, 1901. His father was not present for his birth, having fled the town in fear of being lynched after he refused demands to step away and yield the sidewalk to a white man. When he was four years old, his mother died from tuberculosis, after which Wilkins and his siblings were raised by an aunt and uncle in an integrated community of St. Paul, Minnesota, where they attended local schools. His nephew was Roger Wilkins. Wilkins graduated from the University of Minnesota with a degree in sociology in 1923.
In 1929, he married social worker Aminda “Minnie” Badeau; the couple had no children of their own, but the couple did raise the two children of Hazel Wilkins-Colton, a writer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
While attending college, Wilkins worked as a journalist at The Minnesota Daily and became editor of The Appeal, an African-American newspaper. After he graduated he became the editor of The Call in 1923.
His confrontation of the Jim Crow Laws led his activist work and in 1931, he moved to New York City as assistant NAACP secretary under Walter Francis White. When W. E. B. Du Bois left the organization in 1934, Wilkins replaced him as editor of The Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP. From 1949-50, Wilkins chaired the National Emergency Civil Rights Mobilization, which comprised more than 100 local and national groups.
He served as an adviser to the War Department during World War II.
In 1950, Wilkins — along with A. Philip Randolph, founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and Arnold Aronson, a leader of the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council — founded the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR). LCCR has become the premier civil rights coalition, and has coordinated the national legislative campaign on behalf of every major civil rights law since 1957.
In 1955, Roy Wilkins was chosen to be the executive secretary of the NAACP and in 1964 he became its executive director. He had developed an excellent reputation as an articulate spokesperson for the civil rights movement. One of his first actions was to provide support to civil rights activists in Mississippi who were being subject to a “credit squeeze” by members of the White Citizens Councils.
Wilkins backed a proposal suggested by Dr. T.R.M. Howard of Mound Bayou, Mississippi, who headed the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, a leading civil rights organization in the state. Under the plan, black businesses and voluntary associations shifted their accounts to the black-owned Tri-State Bank of Memphis, Tennessee. By the end of 1955, about $300,000 had been deposited in Tri-State for this purpose. The money enabled Tri-State to extend loans to credit-worthy blacks who were denied loans by white banks. Wilkins participated in the March on Washington (August 1963) which he helped organize, the Selma to Montgomery marches (1965), and the March Against Fear (1966).
He believed in achieving reform by legislative means, testified before many Congressional hearings and conferred with Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter. Wilkins strongly opposed militancy in the movement for civil rights as represented by the “black power” movement due to his non-violence initiative. He was a strong critic of racism in any form regardless of its creed, color, or political motivation, and he also declared that violence and racial separation of blacks and whites were not the answer.
Wilkins was also a member of Omega Psi Phi, a fraternity with a civil rights focus, and one of the intercollegiate Greek-letter fraternities established for African Americans.In 1964, he was awarded the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP.
In 1967, Wilkins was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Lyndon Johnson. During his tenure, the NAACP played a pivotal role in leading the nation into the Civil Rights Movement and spearheaded the efforts that led to significant civil rights victories, including Brown v. Board of Education, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
In 1968, Wilkins also served as chair of the U.S. delegation to the International Conference on Human Rights. After turning 70 in 1971, he faced increased calls to step down as NAACP chief. In 1976, he fell into a dispute with undisclosed board members at the NAACP national convention in Memphis, Tennessee. Although he had intended to retire that year, he decided to postpone it until 1977 because he thought that the pension plan offered to him by the NAACP was inadequate. Board member Emmitt Douglas of Louisiana demanded that Wilkins disclose the offenders and not impugn the board as a whole. Wilkins merely said that the offenders had “vilified” his reputation and questioned his health and integrity.
In 1977, at the age of 76, Wilkins finally retired from the NAACP and was succeeded by Benjamin Hooks. He was honored with the title Director Emeritus of the NAACP in the same year. Roy Wilkins died on September 8, 1981 in New York City of heart problems related to a pacemaker implanted on him in 1979 due to his irregular heartbeat. In 1982, his autobiography Standing Fast: The Autobiography of Roy Wilkins was published posthumously.
Content: Wikipedia
Photo: Black Time Travel
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