Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,343

This is the grave of Roy Wilkins.

Born in St. Louis in 1901, Wilkins immediately experienced the horrors of American racism, even as he was born. His father was not there for the birth because he was on the run, fearful of being lynched after a conflict when he would not step off the sidewalk to make way for a white man. His father does not seem to have ever returned, or at least he was out of the picture. His mother died in 1905 of tuberculosis, the great killer of the era. So an aunt raised he and his siblings up in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

The University of Minnesota was a desegregated institution and that is where Wilkins went to college. He started working in newspapers at that time and soon became editor of The Appeal, which was a Black newspaper. After college, he continued down this road, pushing for the rights of his people and generally promoting a middle-class uplift narrative in his messaging. This soon led him to New York and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The NAACP wasn’t really the dominant civil rights organization yet, but it was rising and Wilkins would move it forward significantly. Walter Francis White hired him as the organization’s assistant secretary in 1931. In 1934, he became editor of The Crisis, the NAACP’s journal, when W.E.B. DuBois stepped away.

As a rising star in the NAACP, Wilkins was central to the organization’s strategies in this era. The organization focused heavily on legal battles, which was very slowly starting to lead to some victories in the 30s. But it also wouldn’t touch anything around the accusations of interracial sex that led to lynchings. Of course the organization supported the proposed federal anti-lynching law that southern senators kept filibustering, but when the Scottsboro Boys incident happened, where a bunch of young Black men and consensual sex with two white girls on a train and were then accused of rape, the NAACP stayed way away, uncomfortable with even touching the subject and very much not liking the mass movement led by the Communist Party that filled the vacuum and also saved those boys’ lives.

Wilkins became head of the NAACP in 1955. This was shortly after the organization’s huge success in Brown v. Board of Education and also the same year as the Montgomery Bus Boycott brought new voices and strategies into the movement. He had mixed feelings on all of this. Wilkins was pretty protective of the NAACP and the idea of himself as the key leader on civil rights. So even Martin Luther King made him somewhat nervous, but when the student movements of the 60s rose, with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he really didn’t like that. At the March on Washington, Wilkins was highly disapproving of the relatively radical speech John Lewis had prepared as SNCC’s representative and it nearly blew the thing up before A. Philip Randolph worked it all out. He also was very invested in central planning from the New York offices of the NAACP. One of the many conflicts that the great organizer Ella Baker had with Wilkins was that she, correctly as it turned out, believed that the organization should engage in grassroots organizing in the South, providing training and seed money for people to lead their own campaigns. She traveled the South doing this very thing. Wilkins hated all of that. He didn’t trust grassroots leaders and believed so strongly in political processes to dismiss much of this.

Baker left the NAACP and later became the godmother of SNCC, providing the training and leadership and experience that those kids needed and they loved her for it. Wilkins? They were as skeptical of him as he was of them. And when SNCC engaged in the Freedom Rides, Wilkins denounced them. He did not support radical action of any kind. He did not want to directly challenge white supremacy in that way. He feared a backlash, perhaps rightfully, but the other way meant taking years and years to win tiny little victories. And even the major victories for which Wilkins deserves significant credit, such as Brown, really were never properly implemented. The Court issued its ridiculous “with any deliberate speed” statement the next year which put the brakes on real desegregation and even today, Maddie and Connor generally are attending nearly all white schools.

What Wilkins absolutely did provide for the entire movement was the kind of moderate positioning that made him effective in the halls of white power. While Eisenhower–who was quite racist–did not pay him too much attention, once the Kennedy administration came to power, he was the key liaison between the grassroots movement and the White House. Really that continued for a long time, into the Carter administration. He had the ability to speak to Johnson and to Nixon, which did have value. One reason this worked is that he was a full fledged Cold Warrior and he also didn’t complain too much about conditions for Black soldiers. Since he supported whatever campaign a president wanted in invading an Asian, African, or Latin American nation, Wilkins was on board. LBJ gave Wilkins the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969 in part because he supported the Vietnam War, whereas King had broken with Johnson, much to the latter’s bitterness. Wilkins also did see himself becoming out of touch and started working more closely with King beginning in 1963 on the Birmingham campaign, in which he participated.

But Wilkins, I mean, like Booker T. Washington before him, he worked on some pretty bad things that really tarnish his legacy. He hated communism and would crack down on anyone working to support Paul Robeson during the Cold War attacks on the great singer, actor, and activist. When a youth group of the NAACP planned a support action for Robeson, he threatened to cancel their charter. In fact, he worked with the vile J. Edgar Hoover, as well as the State Department, on a propaganda pamphlet to defame Robeson in Africa. This was part of the Cold War foreign policy that lots of left of center organizations took place in–very much including the AFL-CIO–that looks horrible in retrospect and was horrible at the time. But no one was going to out-redbait Wilkins. And let’s be clear–criticism of him on things like this is not some presentist look at the past. Other civil rights leaders, from DuBois to Fred Shuttlesworth to all of SNCC criticized Wilkins at the time for this stuff. Moreover, when Robert Williams, head of the NAACP chapter in Monroe, North Carolina, called for armed self-defense to protect his community, Wilkins excommunicated him from the movement. Williams ended up in Cuba running a radio show for civil rights activists back in America that often criticized Wilkins.

By the early 1970s, with the rise of Black Power, which Wilkins despised, there were increasing calls for a new generation to take over at the NAACP. He turned 70 in 1971, but had no interest in giving up power. 70 was ancient for a political leader at that time (today, that would make him fairly young Democratic senator) and the younger generation just felt he would never let go. And in fact he did not until 1977. Benjamin Hooks took over. He worked on an autobiography, published posthumously in 1982. He had died the year before of heart problems. He was 80 years old.

Roy Wilkins is buried in East Farmingdale, New York.

If you would like this series to visit other civil rights leaders, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Septima Clark is in Charleston, South Carolina and John Lewis is in Atlanta. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.