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Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient Roy Wilkins
ROY WILKINS
Awarded by
President Lyndon B. Johnson
January 20, 1969
Roy Wilkins--one of our generation's early Civil Rights leaders--remains one of the Nation's great Civil Rights leaders. In his long devotion to the cause of the American Negro, he has advanced the cause of all the American people. With courage, he has served both black and white and helped his President be just to both. No one knows better than he the anger born of injustice. But he also knows that anger alone never freed a human soul. And so he has stirred the Nation's conscience and mobilized its commitment to make good the century-old promise of emancipation. In so doing, he has helped make our democratic dream a living reality.
"We believe all men are created equal yet many are denied equal treatment... not because of their own failures, but because of the color of their skin."
~ President Lyndon B. Johnson on signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964
Roy Ottoway Wilkins, one-time executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), was the grandson of Mississippi slaves. Born August 30, 1901, in St. Louis, Missouri, Wilkins dropped his middle name, which was the name of the doctor who delivered him, as soon as he “learned how to write.” When Wilkins was five, his mother died; and since his father “couldn’t pick up the pieces” left by her death, Wilkins and his siblings were sent packing to their maternal relatives in St. Paul.
Roy Wilkins and Hubert Humphrey at the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights in Washington, D.C., January 27, 1975. According to his memoirs, Wilkins first became aware of different skin colors at age six while enrolled in an integrated class at Whittier Grammar School on Marion and Wayzata Streets. The kindergarten he had attended in St. Louis had been segregated. “I suppose the faith I have in integration comes from the days I spent in a schoolboy’s cap and knickers chasing around the quiet, tree-shaded lanes that stretched off and away from our little cottage,” Wilkins writes. His best friend was Herman Anderson, a shy blond boy whose mother told her son that what really mattered “was the kind of person you were.”
As a teenager, Wilkins dreamed of being an engineer. However, he soon discovered that he had a penchant for books and writing. In the fall of 1919, he enrolled at the University of Minnesota as a freshman, paying just $115 for tuition and other required fees. “Minnesotans were fiercely proud of the University, and I didn’t think of going anywhere else,” he explained in his biography, Standing Fast . While a student, Wilkins was a reporter and night editor for The Minnesota Daily , a reporter for the St. Paul black community weekly, Appeal , and a member of the local NAACP. He received a bachelor’s degree in sociology with a minor in journalism in 1923.
In the late 1920s, Wilkins was a full-time journalist for Call in Kansas City, where “even good manners could be a crime for a black man.” It was here that he fell in love and eventually married Aminda “Minnie” Badeau, a social worker from St. Louis. The couple made the move from the Midwest to New York when Wilkins was offered the position of NAACP assistant secretary in 1931.
Between 1955 and 1977, Wilkins held executive secretary and executive director roles with the NAACP. He was often described as a “gentle giant” because of his modest, yet powerful influence in the civil rights movement. Under his leadership, the NAACP campaigned for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. He helped organize the 1963 March on Washington, consulted with presidents of four administrations, and received the nation’s highest civilian decoration--the Presidential Medal of Freedom . In 1976, the University of Minnesota awarded Wilkins an honorary degree. Four years after his retirement from active leadership with the NAACP, Wilkins died.
“…in each generation, God somehow manages to select someone that has the perseverance, the ability, the articulation to be able to improve upon the contribution that [ethnic groups] can make,” testified Rep. Charles Rangel, New York, during the discussion of a bill in 1984 to award a commemorative medal to Wilkins’s widow. “As you protect the constitutional rights of one set of people, you’re protecting the
constitutional rights for all. So, whether we’re talking about a black person or white, a Jew or gentile, a Catholic or Protestant, Roy Wilkins has done so much for America and the free world…”
Visit The Roy Wilkins Center for Human Relations and Social Justice
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Medal History
