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Roy Wilkins
Civil Rights Leader, Executive Director - NAACP
Scott # 3501
Issued January 24, 2001 in Minneapolis,
MN
Designed by Richard Sheaff |
Roy Ottoway Wilkins was born on August 30, 1901
in St. Louis, Missouri. Roy grew up in the home of an Aunt and Uncle in St
Paul, Minnesota. (His father had fled St Louis to avoid being lynched.)
Roy attended racially integrated schools,
however he became aware of racism at an early age due to several incidents
that happened while he was living in St. Paul. He was strongly affected by one
incident in 1909 where 3 black men were lynched by a Minnesota mob of 5000
whites.
Roy attended the University of Minnesota and
received his Bachelors degree in 1923. He served as an editor of the school
paper, The Minnesota Daily and also edited a Black weekly, The St
Paul Appeal. He became a member of the NAACP while still a student at
the university.
Roy worked for a Black weekly, The Kansas
City Call from 1923 until 1931. In 1931 he joined Walter White
and served as the assistant executive secretary of the NAACP. In 1932, Roy
proved a case of discrimination against a flood control project in
Mississippi. He was arrested in 1934 as a member of a picket march in
Washington, D.C. to protest lynching. Later that year he replaced W.E.B.
Dubois as the editor of the NAACP's Crisis Magazine.
In 1955 Roy was appointed to serve as the
Executive Director of the NAACP. He led the NAACP through the Civil
Rights Era and helped to organize the 1963 March on Washington
with Martin Luther King. Roy believed in legal non-violent means of combating
Racism which alienated him from many of the more radical Black groups.
Roy served in many other organizations. These
included such diverse groups as The Leadership Conference on Civil
Rights, The Eleanor Roosevelt Foundation, The Kennedy Memorial
Library Foundation, and Peace with Freedom.
Roy was nicknamed Mr. Civil Rights
for his tireless work on behalf of racial equality and civil rights.
Roy Wilkins died on September 8, 1981 in New
York City.
Sources:
Encyclopedia
Britannica
Encyclopedia
Africana
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