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The Augusta News-Review - July 14, 1977
/( r Wilkins
Integration was the‘natural’ order
By Mallory K. Millender
Fourth part of a series
Roy Wilkins was the son of a
minister in the African
Methodist Episcopal Church,
bom in St. Louis, August 30,
1901, the eldest of three
children. His parents, the Rev.
William D. Wilkins and Mrs.
Mayfield Edmondson Wilkins,
were college graduates. His
mother died when he was five,
and he was taken along with
his brother, Earl, and his sister,
Anneda, to St. Paul, Minn,
where they were reared by
their mother’s sister and her
husband.
In St. Paul, three of his
closest friends were Swedish.
There were only four or five
Black families in the
neighborhood. There was no
segregation in the public
schools or in public
transportation. But hotels,
restaurants and downtown
theaters were off-limits to
Blacks even though there were
only 3,000 Blacks in the entire
state of Minnesota.
Mrs Wilkins talked about
her husband’s childhood in St.
Paul's integrated schools.
“Now he not only was in this
integrated situation,’’ she said,
“but he was always at the top
of it. He was a leader. He was
the editor of the high school
paper. And this is easy to
understand because he was
brighter than these immigrants’
children who he went to school
with. So that took away what
ever inferiority he may have
felt because he was Black."
“This” (Jim Crow), Wilkins
was to say later, “is no mere
intellectual exercise for me,"
although he admitted that he
suffered little for being Black
while growing up in St. Paul.
“Although I personally haven't
been exposed to anything
traumatic, as many Negroes
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Wilkins fishing with friends
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Rov Wilkins
Born, August 30. 190 I
have, their very real feeling of
emotional rebellion is what 1
feel.”
Wilkins majored in sociology
and took courses in journalism
at the University of Minnesota.
A lynching in Duluth, Minn,
prompted him to deliver a
speech which won him first
prize in an oratorical contest.
He was night editor of the
school’s daily newspaper and
editor of a Black weekly
newspaper, the ST. PAUL
APPEAL He served as
secretary of the local NAACP
and was a delegate to his first
NAACP National Convention
in Kansas City in 1923. During
the summers, he worked on
trains as a redcap and
dining-car waiter. He also was a
clean-up man in a stockyard.
After he graduated in 1923,
Wilkins went to Kansas City,
Mo. to work for THE KANSAS
CITY CALL, a Black weekly
newspaper. He soon became
managing editor of THE
CALL, and, in this capacity, he
read stories from all parts of
the country that spoke of
discrimination, terror and
lynchings. It was in Kansas
City that he met full-scale
segregation for the first time in
his life.
His experiences in Kansas
City led him to increase his
activities in the NAACP. He
again served as secretary of the
local chapter.
While in Kansas City,
Wilkins met Aminda Ann
Badeau and married her on
September 15, 1929.
Mrs. Wilkins recalled that
when she first met her husband
“His quick mind really
stimulated me. And he had a
kind of self-assurance that I
liked.’’ Also, she added
emphatically, “he was a
gentleman.”
But the quality she feels that
has endeared him to many
people is a sincerity which
“shines through everything he
does.” She added: “He has a
self-effacement that people
admire and a humility that few
people have who have reached
where he has reached.”
It was Wilkins’s enthusiastic
effort against the re-election of
a segregationist from Kansas to
the U. S. Senate that brought
him to the attention of
national NAACP leaders.
In 1931, after spending eight
years with THE CALL, he quit
the newspaper to join the
national office of the NAACP
as assistant secretary. He also
succeeded W. E. B. Dubois as
editor of the CRISIS, the
NAACP's official organ.
In 1933, Wilkins and George
Schuyler, journalist and
author, disguised themselves as
day laborers and toured the
Mississippi Delta camps where
U. S. Army engineers, through
private contractors, were
building levees on the river.
Their report revealed that
Black workers were being paid
as low as 10 cents an hour for a
12 to 14 hour day. As a result
of Wilkins and Schuyler's
work, tlie Secretary of War
announced that unskilled
workers would have their pay
raised an hours shortened.
Wilkins was appointed
acting-executive secretary in
1949 when Walter White Was
given a leave of absence
because of ill health.
The same year, Wilkins
helped to establish the goals
for the NAACP’s Emergency
Civil Rights Committee, which
in October invited some 60
national organizations involved
in civil rights to join in the
National Emergency Civil
Rights Mobilization that would
organize a lobbying blitz and
conference for Washington in
Mid-January of the following
year. The Civil Rights
Committee met in New York
City on October 15 and called
for all Americans to join in a
qrusade to remove the stigma
of discrimination and
segregation from our national
life.” Other groups, including
the CIO, were also invited to
lobby for these civil rights
goals.
The goals of the Emergency
Civil Rights Committee
were announced to the
branches by Roy Wilkins.
Following the Oct. 15 meeting
of the Planning Committee, a
conference was held with 22
national church, labor, civic
and trade organizations to map
plans for developing
widespread support for their
civil rights program.
The Mobilization was
authorized by a resolution that
was adopted at the annual
NAACP Convention in 1949 in
Los Angeles. Roy Wilkins was
general chairman of the
demonstration which brought
more than 4,000 delegates
representing 100 organizations
to Washington. He led a
delegation that asked President
Truman to support the passage
of a bill that would establish a
Fair Employment Practice
Commission “to promote tlie
fullest utilization of manpower
and to eliminate discriminatory
employment practices” bared
on race, religion or creed.
The Emergency Civil Rights
Committee developed into the
Leadership Conference for
Civil Rights. Wilkins served as
chairman of this organization
since its inception in 1949
until January, 1977, when he
was succeeded by Clarence
Mitchell. This group is the
foremost lobbying group for
civil rights on the national
scene to this very day.
Wilkins, Walter White, and
NAACP Counsel Thurgood
Marshall, now a Supreme Court
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Wilkins (seated right) manager of his baseball team at W hittier Elementary School, St. Paul, Minn.
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House in w hich he grew up in St. Paul, Minn. 906 Galtier.
Justice, all had a hand in
spurring the 1954 Supreme
Court decision ordering the
desegregation of public
schools. Wilkins calls the May
17, 1954 Supreme Court
decision the greatest moment
of his career because “the dual
constitutionality under which
the Negro race had lived since
1896 (Plessy v. Ferguson) was
done away with.”
He was elected to succeed
waiter White as executive
secretary April 11, 1955. (The
title was changed to executive
director in 1965). In
succeeding White, Wilkins said,
“Nobody can really take
Walter White’s place. So all I
can do is just do the best I
can.”
Always a smart dresser, Wilkins distinguished himself early as a leader.
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