Wilkins, Roy Ottoway

Impact on the world

Succeeded Walter White, already profiled in this collection, as the NAACP's executive secretary in 1955, leading the organization for 22 years through some of the most consequential civil rights legislation in American history, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, while helping organize the historic 1963 March on Washington, where he was introduced to the crowd as 'the acknowledged champion of civil rights in America'; a committed advocate of nonviolent, legally focused incrementalism, he became a controversial figure within the broader movement for his open rejection of Black Power militancy, his public clashes with activists including Stokely Carmichael, and his documented 1951 cooperation with the FBI and U.S. State Department on a campaign to discredit performer and activist Paul Robeson across Africa.

Life & background

Born in St. Louis in 1901, Wilkins's father had fled the city before his birth after refusing to yield a sidewalk to a white man, fearing lynching for the refusal alone, and his mother died of tuberculosis when he was five, leading his aunt and uncle in St. Paul, Minnesota to raise him alongside his siblings in a relatively integrated environment that shaped what scholars have since termed his distinctly moderate 'Minnesota approach' to civil rights work. After graduating from the University of Minnesota in 1923 with a sociology degree, he became a reporter and later managing editor of the Kansas City Call, a Black-owned newspaper, before joining the NAACP's national staff in 1931 as assistant secretary under Walter White and succeeding W.E.B. Du Bois as editor of the organization's magazine, The Crisis, from 1934 to 1949. In 1951, while serving in that editorial role, Wilkins cooperated with the FBI and State Department on a covert campaign distributing ghost-written material across Africa specifically designed to discredit Paul Robeson, the prominent Black entertainer and outspoken leftist activist, and the following year threatened to revoke an NAACP youth chapter's charter unless it canceled a planned Robeson concert, episodes that drew sustained criticism from contemporaries including Du Bois, Robeson himself, and other activists who viewed Wilkins's anticommunism as a betrayal of broader Black solidarity. He co-founded the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights in 1950 alongside A. Philip Randolph, a coalition that has coordinated the national legislative campaign behind every major civil rights law since 1957, and became NAACP executive secretary in 1955, immediately backing a plan to move Black depositors' accounts to the Black-owned Tri-State Bank in Memphis specifically to counter a coordinated white financial squeeze against civil rights activists in Mississippi. He helped organize the 1963 March on Washington and participated in the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery marches and 1966 March Against Fear, while consistently rejecting both political violence and Black separatism as strategies, a position that increasingly put him at odds with younger, more militant activists by the late 1960s even as he maintained direct lines of communication with four successive U.S. presidents. He received the NAACP's own Spingarn Medal in 1964 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Lyndon Johnson in 1967, resisted mounting internal pressure to retire through the early 1970s, and finally stepped down in 1977 at age 76 due to failing health, dying in 1981; his 1982 posthumously published autobiography, 'Standing Fast,' insisted that the people his organization fought for were never abstractions in a legislative argument, but actual human beings deserving of dignity.

Sources

1. NAACP official history; Encyclopædia Britannica; JFK Presidential Library; MNopedia; Britannica Kids