Roy Wilkins

Roy Wilkins does not look like a civil rights leader. With his dark conservative suit, close-cut graying hair and gentle manner, he seems more a college professor or successful businessman than the leader of the nation's oldest and largest civil rights organization. In conversation and speeches, he is soft-spoken avoiding fire-eating rhetoric. But he is persuasive. Instead of the catch-phrases by civil rights leaders. Wilkins is more apt statistics or recount historical anecdotes. When he demands action on civil rights, he never shouts "We're not asking any more, we're going to take our rights"; he is more likely to speak of the test that the problem poses for democratic institutions.

Wilkins was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1901, but moved to St. Paul, Minnesota when still a child. There, he says, "the problems of racial discrimination were not very great." After graduating from the University of Minnesota, he returned to Missouri to help edit the Kansas City Call, a Negro weekly newspaper. It was in Kansas City, with its "segregated schools, segregated movie theaters, segregated restaurants, practically segregated everything" that he "realized the meaning of racial discrimination." In 1931, Wilkins left the Call to become assistant secretary of the then struggling NAACP.

Wilkins' early work with the NAACP included investigating lynchings in the South, initiating court cases and lobbying for a federal anti-lynching law. His work rarely involved the mass participation so common to civil rights activity today. In 1950 Wilkins succeeded Walter White as executive secretary of the NAACP. As executive secretary, he has worked mainly with problems of discrimination in public education.

The Negro revolt of the 1960's, according to Wilkins, was made possible by the foundations the NAACP has laid. "This is a social movement that has been building since 1920," he says. "The eruption happened because of the NAACP. Officers of the NAACP began the first sit-in in Greensboro, North Carolina." Has the rise of the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee undercut the NAACP's importance in the Movement? "Hell, SNCC's our baby! We raised them! We got 117,000 new members last year, they have only 150. How can you call them a Movement? They're just a club."

Wilkins admits that his work aims more at achieving specific ends than at generating mass awareness. He considers the concept of mass action "something of a fantasy." "People have to be manipulated," he says. "Movements are carried through by a very small elite. School boycotts and similar massive techniques can at times be effective, but all too often boycotts get mixed up with politics. Then the people involved become more interested in fighting City Hall than in getting better schools." But he thinks the Boston school boycott's leaders had acted wisely, with a clear understanding of ends.

Wilkins' calm and calculating manner is some-what unnerving. But this man, who has devoted forty years to getting things done, keeps his passions well below the surface. His pride is deep enough so that he does not have to swallow it when he must compromise. He is a steady and persistent man, with a shrewd understanding of people. Wilkins knows the facts of political life; if his placid exterior disturbs those who believe his cause demands anger, it is indispensable when, says, a conservative legislator must be cajoled into supporting a civil rights bill. Wilkins inspires respect and profound confidence, not emotional faith. After a few hours with him, one feels certain that Wilkins and men like him will be responsible for important gains in civil rights long after the summer patriots have wearied of their slogans.