'What Really Matters Is That You Keep Up the Struggle'

An interview with Roger Wilkins, George Mason University Robinson Professor of History and Culture

April 2004

Roger Wilkins was born to make civil rights history. His father, Earl Wilkins, was a legendary journalist who wrote for the African American press of the 1930s and 1940s. His mother, Helen J. Claytor, was the first African American to head the National Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA). And Roy Wilkins, his "Uncle Roy," was the executive director of the NAACP during the civil rights years of the 1960s.

Over the decades, Wilkins managed to make his own place in the history books. In 1966, as a 33-year-old lawyer, he became the highest-ranking African American in Lyndon Johnson's Justice Department, working as an assistant attorney general to Robert F. Kennedy and then Ramsey Clark. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., once referred to him as "the leader of the Civil Rights Movement inside the U.S. government."

For much of the 1970s, Wilkins smashed past employment barriers, working at high-level posts that had previously been closed to blacks. A perennial "first," he was a program officer at the Ford Foundation. He was the first African American to serve on the editorial board of the Washington Post, and later the first at the New York Times.

As a public servant and journalist, Wilkins's beat was always social change. Today, as a Robinson Professor of History and Culture at Virginia's George Mason University, he teaches young people the history he witnessed and lived.

Mr. Wilkins spoke with Claudia Dreifus, a contributing editor to AARP The Magazine, about his civil rights experiences and how a new generation can learn from the past.

What do your students know about the Civil Rights Movement?
Wilkins: They know about Martin Luther King and police dogs in Birmingham. That's about it. Some don't know anything. I had a bright young girl tell me she thought the slaves had come here voluntarily. That's what she had been taught by her parents and her "good" suburban school in southern Virginia.

My students certainly don't know very much about slavery and how it is connected to everything that happened in the 20th century. My students don't have any idea what 20th-century segregation has been like for black people. Even though the world is still divided, and black people and white people don't know each other very well, it's impossible for them to know how really separate we once were.

Tell us what you remember about growing up under segregation.
Wilkins: I was born in Kansas City, Missouri. And that was a segregated city, which to me, as a very young child, meant that white people looked at you mean and black people smiled at you.

My first school was a segregated one-room schoolhouse in our segregated neighborhood. But that was closed very shortly after I started kindergarten, and they put us on buses and sent us way across town to the segregated school there.

In the 1950s and 1960s, when white people were objecting to busing for integration and one of their moans and groans was about these little tiny children bused away from their neighborhoods, I remembered how when I was four, nobody was worried about me. And sometimes white kids would call us monkeys and stuff like that. There wasn't any question about what this was about, you know? We saw nicer, newer schools that the white kids went to. I understood the deep meaning of segregation long before I knew my multiplication tables.

Once when I was around four, I told my father that I wanted to drive a railroad train when I grew up. "You won't be able to do that," he told me. "You see, there are rules that say that Negroes can't drive railroad trains."

"That's not fair," I answered, "Who makes these rules?" And my father said, "White people make the rules, and it's not fair, and you'll have to fight against that for all your life."

"Sometimes still, people are not very pleasant, even in public settings. Their body language says they'd just as soon that you'd not be there—but they can't insult you the way they used to. Before the Civil Rights Movement, the insults were constant. The big thing is that legal segregation is dead. And segregation was living a life surrounded by 'you can'ts.'"

Your family originally came from Mississippi, did it not?
Wilkins: Yes, and that was one thing my father—who died when I was eight of [tuberculosis]—never spoke to me about. Both he and my mother were graduates of the University of Minnesota. But his father, my grandfather, had been born in Mississippi, and he ran north just ahead of a lynch mob that was out to kill him. My grandfather had whipped a white man who'd been discourteous to him, and you didn't do that in Holly Springs, Mississippi, and live to tell about it.

My grandfather's own parents had been born into slavery. You know, I think about those ancestors all the time. They were working people who never had the opportunity to make something out of their own labor because the fruits of their labor were stolen. Yet they had faith that life would eventually be better and more just.

How old were you at the time the Supreme Court handed down the Brown decision?
Wilkins: Twenty-two. I was in the second semester of law school [at the University of Michigan]. And it felt like it was the second emancipation. I remember feeling, "This is terrific. One of these days, black kids in the South will get a chance to do what I'm doing now—attend law school in a great state university." Did I think hotels, restaurants, theaters, neighborhoods would open up because of it? No. I didn't think white folks would give any of that up. Did I think that voting was going to happen? No. I didn't think white folks were going to give that up. Did I have a theory on how we were going to achieve the rest of it? No.

My theory was that I'd finish law school and I'd go work with Thurgood and I would help. Of course, I didn't call him Thurgood then—I called him Mr. Marshall. From childhood on, I thought of him as a giant. When I was eight, my father died, and my mother and I moved to New York City. To make this poor little fatherless boy feel better, my Uncle Roy, Walter White, and Thurgood Marshall took me on my first subway ride. So as you can see, the NAACP is in my blood.

For a while in the 1960s, that blood was viewed as bad blood, at least within some militant corners of the Civil Rights Movement. There was a moment when the NAACP was dismissed as too accommodating to the powerful. Was that attitude wrong?
Wilkins: I really loved my Uncle Roy, who was executive director of the NAACP. And I worried about the attacks. Obviously, I was young, and I thought that the operating structure of the NAACP was by that time a little outdated. On the other hand, I also knew that the lobbying that the NAACP did was indispensable.

I thought of Martin Luther King and Roy Wilkins as two sides of the same coin. You couldn't get the consensus that would push legislation without the activity in the South. You couldn't get the legislation through without sophisticated lobbying up here. Roy did the lobbying stuff up here.

People in the Kennedy administration used to tell me, "Your uncle is really the one, he's a pro." They listened to him. He could get them to do stuff that Martin Luther King could never get them to do. They didn't understand Martin because Martin was a preacher, and all these uptight white guys, they could not deal with preacherly stuff.

Was all that negativity about the NAACP painful to you?
Wilkins: I thought of it as young people reacting against the older generation. Of course, it was hard for me. Most of the people who were trashing my Uncle Roy were friends, people like Stokely Carmichael. But I knew something they didn't: In quarters where power was transacted, Roy Wilkins was respected.

Six months before he died, I talked to Lyndon Johnson and said, "You ought to make a civil rights speech. Why are you silent?" Next thing I knew, Roy was down at the LBJ ranch, and five weeks before he died, Lyndon Johnson dedicated his library with the best civil rights speech of the 1970s. And who helped him craft it? Roy! It wasn't done by the kids hollering and jabbering that the NAACP was passé. None of them could have been within a million miles of Johnson, moving his brain to make that speech.

You know, a lot of us are still with the NAACP and have been working in recent years to help it flourish for the next generation. Julian Bond is now chair of the NAACP board. John Lewis is in Congress. Kweisi Mfume left Congress in order to help revive the NAACP. I'm the vice chair of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and the publisher of the NAACP's magazine, Crisis. For all the criticism back then, we're still investing in civil rights.

"I teach in a state university in Virginia. Fifty years ago that would've been illegal. I live in an integrated neighborhood here in Washington, D.C. The other night, my wife and I were planning our holiday dinner. We could call any restaurant in this city that we could afford and just go there."

During the civil rights years, you worked inside the government and in journalism. In those days, you were constantly referred to with the prefix "Roger Wilkins, the highest-ranking black man at the Justice Department," or "Roger Wilkins, the only black on the editorial board of a major American newspaper." Were there ever moments when you longed to wear overalls, go south, and basically be with your generation?
Wilkins: Oh yeah. There was a very large part of me that yearned to be Andy Young. What he and Julian Bond were doing in the 1960s seemed so unambiguous. I believed it was my job to make my white colleagues at the Justice Department understand what I witnessed during my trips to the South. It was terrible to go down there and see all this human pain, the poorest black people be so brave in the face of vicious opposition, and then come back to the halls of power and try to get these powerful white people to understand and move.

One good thing about being in the government, one could sometimes really change something. Once when I was in the Justice Department in the '60s, I took a United Airlines flight across the country, and it was amazing: All the black people were seated in one section on the plane. That just couldn't have happened [accidentally]. You can roll the dice all day long, and that combination won't come out that way. I wrote a steaming letter on my official stationery. When they found out who I was, they just about cried!

What was the downside to being the highest-ranking black person at the Justice Department?
Wilkins: There were Movement people who thought of me as some kind of double agent. They hinted I might be a spy for J. Edgar Hoover. One hated living with the distrust. It cost me a lot. I was depleted in those years. I yearned for the lack of ambiguity that someone like Julian Bond had when he worked for [the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee]. On the other hand, I always knew the value of an honest inside guy. And even Martin said, "Look, we think of you as the leader of the Civil Rights Movement inside the U.S. government." That's how I choose to think of myself.

An unintended consequence of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s was the other civil rights movements it spawned—women's rights, gay rights, disability rights, international human rights, and, yes, the successful American campaign for sanctions against the South African apartheid regime. Could you have imagined so many flowers blooming from that one stem?
Wilkins: Nobody could have foreseen that. I mean you couldn't have foreseen the explosive educational process that white kids went through in '63, '64, when they went down south and then came back. They built the antiwar movement. And as a matter of fact, I'll tell you, those of us who are black didn't much like it because this white youth movement was taking attention away from the concerns we had. But looking back now, it pleases me no end.

Are there places in your own life where you see the fruits of the civil rights years?
Wilkins: Everywhere. I teach in a state university in Virginia. Fifty years ago that would've been illegal. I live in an integrated neighborhood here in Washington, D.C. The other night, my wife and I were planning our holiday dinner. We could call any restaurant in this city that we could afford and just go there. When I go now to Kansas City or Mississippi, I just pick out a hotel on the basis of convenience and nothing else. I don't have to go to the "colored" place.

Sometimes still, people are not very pleasant, even in public settings. Their body language says they'd just as soon that you'd not be there—but they can't insult you the way they used to. Before the Civil Rights Movement, the insults were constant. The big thing is that legal segregation is dead. And segregation was living a life surrounded by "you can'ts."

So where are the "buts" in your analysis of the past 50 years?
Wilkins: The "buts" come when one thinks of the condition of poor blacks, which is perhaps even worse than what it was before because, by and large, white people don't want to see black poverty as a problem anymore. White people prefer to look at race through the screen of successful blacks—people like Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell and [my wife] and myself and all those rich hip-hop people.

When they look at us, they can think that life in America really is fair, and it is all about individual initiative and that the people who don't make it aren't trying or are morally defective. And that's very painful.

Do your students ever ask you, "The Civil Rights Movement, where did it all go?"
Wilkins: No. Not really. These are mostly white kids from well-to-do suburbs. I try to teach them about what happened. I teach that the country has had spurts of egalitarianism—and then, everybody goes back to make money. The last spurt was roughly 1954 to the late 1970s.

What really matters is that you keep up the struggle during these nonegalitarian/money-making times. It's important to keep the spark alive so that when there is another upswing, a new generation can grab it and carry on.