Roy Wilkins

Roy Ottoway Wilkins was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on the thirtieth of August 1901, the son of a Methodist minister. When his mother died of tuberculosis in his early childhood, he and his siblings were taken in and raised by an aunt and uncle in the Rondo neighborhood of St. Paul, Minnesota. There he attended integrated schools and took his undergraduate degree in sociology at the University of Minnesota in 1923, working along the way as a student journalist for the Minnesota Daily and editing a Black community newspaper.

After graduating, Wilkins became editor of the Kansas City Call, a weekly serving that city's Black community, where his editorials against segregation and disenfranchisement sharpened his lifelong voice. In 1931 he joined the national NAACP in New York as assistant secretary under Walter White, and in 1934 he succeeded W. E. B. Du Bois as editor of the organization's magazine, The Crisis, guiding its pages for more than a decade.

Wilkins rose to lead the NAACP as executive secretary in 1955, a title later changed to executive director, a post he held until his retirement in 1977. Under his steady, disciplined stewardship the association pressed the legal and legislative campaigns that reshaped the nation, from Brown v. Board of Education to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He helped organize the 1963 March on Washington and marched at Selma and in Mississippi.

Preferring the courtroom, the ballot, and the negotiating table to spectacle, Wilkins was the movement's great administrator, holding a vast organization together through decades of struggle. He was awarded the Spingarn Medal and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and died in New York City on the eighth of September 1981. May the quiet architect of so many hard-won victories be forever honored.