Roger Wilkins Audio Transcript

I thought of Martin and Roy 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 actually get the legislation through without the sophisticated lobbyists up here. So Roy did the stuff up here. And people in the Kennedy administration used to tell me, "Your uncle's really the one. He's the pro." I mean they listened to him. He could get them to do stuff that Martin could never get them to do. They didn't understand Martin, because Martin was a preacher.

As far as for people like Patricia and me, [not audible] and who were born into segregation, it's just a different world. Whatever pain life has given me throughout life, I have lived a life far beyond any expectations that my parents ever had for me when I was a child.

He was the only black journalist who got Franklin Roosevelt and John Nance Garner, his running mate, to talk about race in the '32 campaign. And he died in 1941. For what? And if somebody had told him in 1941, "Your little boy is going to grow up and he's going to be this at The Washington Post and he's going to be these things at the New York Times. He's then going to be a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board and ultimately he'll be chairman of the Pulitzer Prize Board," my father would have said, "Yeah right."

It's a life I could not have imagined, having a life this satisfying and being as free as I am now.

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