Roy Wilkins

Roy Wilkins was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on the thirtieth of August 1901, the son of a Methodist minister. He was raised by an aunt and uncle in St. Paul, Minnesota, took his undergraduate degree at the University of Minnesota in 1923, and became editor of The Crisis magazine in 1934 — succeeding W. E. B. Du Bois.

He served as executive secretary of the NAACP from 1955 to 1977 — the central administrative figure of the modern American civil-rights movement. Under his leadership the NAACP brought Brown v. Board of Education (1954) to the Supreme Court via the Legal Defense Fund of Thurgood Marshall (whom Wilkins had cultivated and protected through the 1940s), and built the legislative-advocacy apparatus that secured the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

He was the institutionally cautious one in a movement that produced many more flamboyant figures. He understood that the Black political project in the United States required, in addition to mass demonstrations and theological orators, a continuously funded national organization with offices in every city, a legal staff that could outwork the segregationist bar, and a press operation that could place stories in The New York Times. He built and ran that apparatus for forty-three years.

He clashed with Martin Luther King over strategy. He clashed with Stokely Carmichael over rhetoric. He clashed with Eldridge Cleaver over almost everything. He outlasted all of them.

He died in New York on the eighth of September 1981, age eighty.

He is honored here as the executive secretary whose forty-three years built the NAACP that secured the legislation.