Civil Rights Library

Roy Wilkins

On September 8, 1981, Roy Wilkins, who had served as Executive Secretary of the NAACP for 22 years, died quietly in New York City at the age of 80. He had retired from the NAACP in 1977and since then had been in declining health. His death removed from scene the last of the towering leaders who had played major roles in the Civil Rights Movement of the fifties and sixties—Martin Luther King, Whitney Young, Malcolm X, A. Philip Randolph.

Of his passing, Newsweek magazine said:(He was among the last of a generation of civil rights leaders who pulled and tugged and cajoled the nation through decades of change so profound that many Americans cannot imagine, still remember, what segregation was like.)

A courtly and gracious man, he was sustained by determined optimism and a steady faith that “there are more people who want to do good than do evil.”

When asked to describe his greatest satisfaction in life, he pointed to the Brown decision of 1954 that ended segregation in public schools and heralded the end of legalized segregation in the country.

Born in St. Louis on August 30, 1901, Wilkins was reared in the home of an aunt and uncle living in St. Paul, Minnesota. Though poor, he was able to attend integrated schools in the city, and he grew up in what might be termed a racially mixed community.

Wilkins majored in sociology and minored in Journalism while attending the University of Minnesota, supporting himself by doing a variety of odd jobs. He also served as night editor of the Minnesota Daily (the school paper) and edited the black weekly, the St. Paul Appeal. After receiving his B.A. in 1923, he joined the staff of the Kansas City Call, a leading black weekly. While in Missouri, Wilkins gained his first insight into segregation as an entrenched system, and resolved to broaden his activities in the NAACP, an organization which he had first joined in college.