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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780813143798 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University Press of Kentucky |
| Publication date: | 12/12/2013 |
| Series: | Civil Rights and the Struggle for Black Equality in the Twentieth Century |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Roy Wilkins
The Quiet Revolutionary and the NAACP
By Yvonne Ryan
UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY
Copyright © 2014 The University Press of KentuckyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8131-4379-8
CHAPTER 1
The Family Firm
Roy Ottoway Wilkins was born at the turn of the twentieth century, on August 31, 1901. ("Ottoway" was a tribute to the doctor who delivered him, but it was possibly too unusual and was discarded as soon as Wilkins could write.) His grandfather, Asberry Wilkins, had been born a slave but had won his freedom when he was fourteen years old at the end of the Civil War. In Holly Springs, Mississippi, where Asberry had worked as a field hand, there was little opportunity for former slaves to make a living, so he became a sharecropper. With his wife, Emma, he raised five children, of which Wilkins's father, William, was the second eldest. William had ambitions far beyond Holly Springs. He attended Rust College, a local black college, but opportunities were no better for William than they had been for his father, and when he graduated the only work he could find was as a porter. The limitations of life for a young black man in Mississippi angered him, and he constantly challenged the white racism he confronted—often with his fists. One night, after William had been in one too many confrontations, Asberry was warned that his son was in danger. He encouraged William and his wife, Mayfield, a teacher, to leave town immediately. The pair took the first train north in the hope they would find work and a life free of the grinding oppression of the South.
The young couple eventually settled in St. Louis, but opportunities were not much greater in Missouri than Mississippi, and William Wilkins could only find work laboring in a brickyard. Nevertheless, it was enough to allow the couple to move into an apartment. There, Roy Wilkins was born in 1901, followed by his sister, Armeda, two years later and brother, Earl, in 1905. The senior Wilkins was stern and remote, emotionally and physically exhausted by the challenges of the daily realities of life in St. Louis. He began to take more and more comfort in religion. Life became even harder when, within a year of the birth of her youngest child, Mayfield Wilkins died of tuberculosis. As her health declined, she feared that her husband would not be able to look after the children and would, in desperation, send them to his mother in Holly Springs. Having escaped from Mississippi, Mayfield did not want her children to be raised there, so she wrote to her sister Elizabeth who lived in St. Paul, Minnesota, with her husband, Sam Williams, to ask that they raise the three children. The couple agreed, and the children left their father to start a new life in Minnesota. The Williamses adopted the children in 1911; but, although Wilkins saw his father, who became a traveling preacher, only intermittently throughout his childhood, he maintained contact with him and his stepmother until their deaths in the 1950s.
This tragic turn of events shaped Wilkins's life in an unexpected way. The influence of Sam Williams had a profound effect on the young boy. Williams was born in Mississippi but had also gone North to settle in St. Paul, where he found work looking after the private railway car of the president of the Northern Pacific Railroad. As such, he held a position of middle-class respectability in the local community. According to Wilkins, he was "not hard and not soft," but believed in discipline, diligence, and hard work. He advised his nephew that if a black man wanted to advance, he must be educated and neat and have clean fingernails—advice the young Roy Wilkins took to heart. He certainly followed his uncle's thrifty example. As a young boy he had a morning and evening newspaper round, and he financed his college studies with various summer jobs, working in a slaughterhouse and serving as a dining car waiter on the railroad back and forth to Seattle and as a redcap at St. Paul's Union Station. (This latter job led to a lifelong fascination with railways and transportation; Wilkins retained an encyclopedic knowledge of railway timetables, instantly recalling the best route to get from one city to another. In his later years, he often spent Sunday afternoons talking with the redcaps at La Guardia airport, close to his home in Queens, New York.) The fact that Sam Williams owned his own house, had no debts, and put all three of his adoptive children through college was always a source of pride to Wilkins, and throughout his life he was preoccupied with financial security—both his own and the NAACP's. Gilbert Jonas, who worked with Wilkins at the Association in the 1960s and 1970s, describes him as "notoriously tight fisted with the NAACP's money," adding that he was barely more generous with his own. He lived a relatively frugal life—his only extravagances were classic sports cars and occasional vacations in Europe or the Caribbean—and expected a similar parsimonious attitude from his staff.
During Wilkins's childhood, St. Paul's black population was smaller than in many other northern cities, and although hotels and restaurants were segregated, housing, schools, public leisure facilities, and transportation, for the most part, were not. The Williamses were one of the few black families living in their neighborhood, which was populated primarily by Swedish, Norwegian, Polish, German, and Irish first- and second-generation immigrants, many of whom spoke little English. Wilkins's best friend was Swedish, as were the Williamses' immediate neighbors, who treated Wilkins as one of their own family and with whom he kept in contact for many years after leaving Minnesota. An indication of the legacy this neighborhood had on him, as well as a glimpse of his sharp sense of humor, can be seen in a letter Wilkins wrote to Walter White, his future colleague, in 1931 en route to his new life with the NAACP in New York. "We leave here next Friday for ten days in Minnesota," Wilkins wrote, "where I will get in a little golf, fishing, and swimming along with my people, the blond, blue-eyed Scandinavians."
The environment in which Wilkins grew up bore little of the social complexities of rural Mississippi, for example, where class, hierarchy, power, and proximity all played a part in creating the appalling, oppressive conditions in which many black Americans were forced to exist. Although he must have grown up with family stories about his father's flight from likely death in Mississippi and the anger and frustration that followed, on a daily basis Wilkins was shielded to a large extent from this reality during his childhood and school years. While he had attended a black kindergarten in St. Louis, once they were in St. Paul, he and his siblings attended desegregated schools. Wilkins thrived in the classroom. When he enrolled at the University of Minnesota to study sociology and economics, he quickly became involved in the school newspaper and other aspects of college life, despite the fact that there were some restrictions on black students at the university.
Wilkins's entry into college life, that bridge to adulthood, coincided with his first real awareness of the violence of white racism. On June 15, 1920, three young black men who had just arrived in Duluth, Minnesota, as part of a traveling circus became victims of a lynching. The three were part of a group of six men accused of raping a white woman. As news of the alleged attack spread, a mob of thousands gathered outside the jail where the men were held. Some of the mob broke into the building and took away three of the prisoners, who were then tried and found guilty in a mock trial. They were then beaten almost to death and hanged from a lamppost in downtown Duluth. The proximity of the violence was shocking to Wilkins—it took place just 150 miles from his hometown—but he was particularly appalled at the viciousness and hatred of the thousands of white people who had joined in the attacks. The murders challenged Wilkins's view of a group he had previously thought of as neighbors and friends and made him aware of the vulnerability of blacks even in a relatively benign state such as Minnesota. "For the first time in my life," he later said, "I understood what Du Bois had been writing about. I found myself thinking of black people as a very vulnerable us—and white people as an unpredictable violent them."
Despite Wilkins's plan to study a subject that offered the prospect of secure employment when he graduated, he was far more interested in journalism, which offered a platform from which to challenge attacks like that at Duluth. While in high school, he had edited the school newspaper and regularly contributed poetry and news articles. In his second year at the University of Minnesota, he joined the staff of the Minnesota Daily, the college-produced commercial newspaper with a circulation of around 10,000, as the paper's first black reporter. After a year he became night editor of the paper, dividing his time between the classroom and the newsroom for the remainder of his college career. By the time Wilkins left university in 1923, any thoughts of a career in sociology were abandoned, and it was inevitable that he would continue working in and for newspapers.
His professional life began at a small weekly publication called the Northwestern Bulletin, which had been founded by a friend of Wilkins. It was a good place to begin but was far too small to contain his ambitions, so when he was offered the chance to edit The Appeal, a black newspaper with a proud history of crusading journalism, he seized the opportunity. Unfortunately, The Appeal's glory days were behind it, and the paper had become heavily reliant on advertising and features. Wilkins attempted to revive its campaigning zeal, running more stories about local and national black issues, and he enjoyed the chances the paper gave him to meet important people as they passed through the city; nonetheless it did not offer a big enough platform on which to establish his career as a newsman. When his father heard that the publisher of the Kansas City Call, a relatively new black weekly newspaper, was looking for a news editor, he pointed out that his son was more than qualified. Wilkins was hired and given his first assignment—to cover the NAACP convention that was taking place in the city. The Call changed Wilkins's life in several ways. Chester Franklin, the publisher, became a mentor to the young journalist and would prove to be a powerful ally during Wilkins's years at the NAACP. In addition, Wilkins's new role would introduce him to a whole new world.
Kansas City was one of the main destinations for thousands of poor, rural blacks migrating from the South; and, as the black population grew, so did the number of restrictive laws and covenants limiting blacks' freedom in the city: all public facilities apart from the trolley cars were rigorously segregated. Conditions were appalling for many of the new migrants: an NAACP study of race relations in the city published in 1925 found inadequate black schools, regular reports of police brutality, and a severe shortage of habitable, let alone decent, accommodation for the rising black population. Wilkins's new position gave him a forum to protest against the racism he saw, heard about, and experienced, and he made full use of it. One of his earliest campaigns was against a school bond issue, which would have allocated almost $1,000,000 to build a new high school for white students, while under $30,000 was earmarked to remodel a factory building for a black elementary school. The Call "crusaded and beat the bushes and whipped up community sentiment" in protest. Wilkins calculated that the complacency of those in favor of the issue who would not vote, assuming that the bond issue would pass without any problem, would clear the way for those against the issue to win the vote and defeat the proposal—which is exactly what happened.
Just as his adult life was taking shape, Wilkins suffered three devastating losses. His sister, Armeda, died of tuberculosis in November 1927 at the age of twenty-four. Then, barely two months later, his aunt and uncle died within two days of each other. Wilkins and his brother, Earl, were left on their own. Wilkins's nephew Roger later wrote that a "profound loneliness" marked both Roy and Earl and that no one, possibly not even their wives, was closer to each than the other. Given his very private nature, Wilkins said little about these losses in later years. Although he wrote briefly about it in his autobiography, the sense of loss of home, as much as people, is acute. His main words of tribute to his uncle, however, were that he had died leaving no debts, "a final testament to his belief in self-help"—a model that shaped Wilkins's philosophy for the rest of his life.
Once the family's house was sold, Wilkins brought his brother into the Call as an advertising salesman. Earl Wilkins would remain at the paper until his own untimely death from tuberculosis in January 1941. Although the two brothers had been separated by circumstances and distance, this renewed proximity brought them closer, so close that the two brothers even dated sisters for a time. Wilkins was engaged to Marvel Jackson, whom he had met at college, while Earl courted and later married her sister Helen. During their engagement, Marvel Jackson moved to New York to work first for W. E. B. Du Bois at The Crisis, then moving to the Amsterdam News, where she later became that paper's first female reporter. As she became more involved with the social and cultural life of New York City, Jackson later told an interviewer, she began to have second thoughts about her engagement and came to dread the thought of marrying Wilkins, but was spared any awkward disentanglement by a letter from him shortly before the proposed wedding date. During Jackson's absence, Wilkins had met Aminda Badeau, a social worker who had just moved to Kansas City from St. Louis; in his letter to Jackson, Wilkins confessed that Badeau was apparently three months pregnant. Although he promised to "straighten it out," Jackson quickly took the opportunity to break off the engagement, and Wilkins married Badeau in June 1929. According to Jackson, Earl Wilkins suspected Badeau of tricking his brother; in any case, the couple remained married until Wilkins's death in 1981 but never had children.
Ironically, Wilkins would soon follow his former fiancée to New York. By the late 1920s, he was combining his work at the Call with increasing activity within the local branch of the NAACP. Wilkins liked to say his family was entwined with the NAACP almost from its beginnings. As a boy, he sold copies of The Crisis, the Association's magazine; and his Uncle Sam was the forty-second member of the St. Paul branch, for which Wilkins served as secretary by the time he was twenty-two. He continued his involvement with the organization when he moved to Kansas City; there he was considered a bright young man who could bring some much-needed new blood into the local branch. He became secretary of the Kansas City branch, leading its contribution to the NAACP's campaign against the nomination of Judge John Parker to the Supreme Court. Parker had been heard to make racist remarks in an early speech, and when his nomination was announced the NAACP mobilized the full weight of its organization against Parker. In Kansas City, Wilkins used newspaper advertisements and his column in the Call to wage the battle. When Parker was defeated, Wilkins launched a similar campaign against Kansas senator Henry Allen at the request of the NAACP's national office. Allen, a former governor of the state, was an interim appointment who had voted for Parker's confirmation. Wilkins entered the fight against him "with both feet." He persuaded Chester Franklin to donate advertising space to the campaign against Allen, he wrote articles, he made speeches, and he helped mobilize the state's NAACP branches against the nomination. The campaign attracted widespread black support, and Allen lost his seat to George McGill, the Democratic candidate.
The Parker and Allen campaigns transformed Wilkins's life. They marked a turning point in his move from what he saw as the passivity of journalism to a more active campaign against racism. Wilkins's efforts in the two campaigns impressed Walter White, who at the time was the Association's assistant secretary. He met with Wilkins during several visits to Kansas City, and the two maintained a casual correspondence as Wilkins's reputation as a journalist and activist grew. This contact proved useful when, in 1930, W. E. B. Du Bois invited Wilkins to join the staff of the NAACP as business manager for The Crisis, its membership magazine. After much deliberation Wilkins declined the offer; but, despite his self-confessed lack of business knowledge, he had no hesitation in offering Du Bois some suggestions on how to improve the magazine's financial health, most of which focused on the need for better organization. Wilkins's decision to turn down Du Bois's offer was probably wise, because there is no doubt that Wilkins and Du Bois would have been a combustible combination, as subsequent events proved. Nevertheless, the force of Wilkins's opinions made such an impression that the following year, when White was promoted to secretary and began looking for an assistant, James Weldon Johnson, the departing secretary, suggested, "What about that young man who wrote the letter?"
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Roy Wilkins by Yvonne Ryan. Copyright © 2014 The University Press of Kentucky. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY.
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Table of Contents
IntroductionThe Family Firm
Treading Water
A Strategy for Freedom
Politics and Protest
All the Way with LBJ
A Crisis of Victory
The Survivor
Conclusion
What People are Saying About This
"Yvonne Ryan has written a very fine biography of one of the nation's foremost civil rights leaders. Her prose is lively and engaging, presenting her subject as a man of dedication and conviction, one who committed most of his life to the NAACP and the cause of equal justice. Little has been written on Wilkins, and this book will certainly help to fill that void." — Robert A. Pratt, author of We Shall Not Be Moved: The Desegregation of the University of Georgia