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Wilkins, Roy Ottoway
4 articles on Wilkins, Roy Ottoway
Wilkins, Roy O.
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century
(b. 30 August 1901; d. 8 September 1981), activist. Roy Ottoway Wilkins was a prominent civil rights leader and former head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Wilkins led the NAACP during the tumultuous civil rights and Black Power eras of the 1950s and 1960s. Collaborating with U.S. presidents from Roosevelt through Carter, Wilkins advocated energetically for the full integration of African Americans into society. While he vigorously campaigned for a gradual, nonviolent approach to achieving equal rights for all African Americans, Wilkins was also a staunch opponent of Black Power and black militancy, leaving many Black Power advocates to see Wilkins as a sellout or, as it was said at the time, an “Uncle Tom.”Wilkins was born in a predominantly black area ...
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Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 2971901–1981
American journalist, civil rights leader, director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Before Roy Ottoway Wilkins was born, his father had been forced to flee St. Louis to avoid being lynched for refusing to follow a white man's order to get out of the road. Wilkins was reared in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he attended racially integrated schools. He became urgently aware of racial matters at the age of eighteen, when three Minnesotan black men were lynched by a mob of 5,000 whites. Upon enrolling in the University of Minnesota, Wilkins became active in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), as well as on the campus newspaper, both activities he would pursue in Kansas City following graduation. Wilkins worked for the Kansas ...
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Source: African American National Biography
Word Count: 1904 Includes: Further Reading | Obituary:(30 Aug. 1901–8 Sept. 1981), reporter and civil rights leader, was born Roy Ottaway Wilkins in St. Louis, Missouri, the son of William DeWitte Wilkins, a brick kiln worker, and Mayfield Edmundson. Upon his mother's death in 1905, Wilkins was sent with his brother and sister to St. Paul, Minnesota, to live with their aunt and uncle, Elizabeth and Sam Williams, because his mother worried that her husband could not handle raising their three children and would send them back to Mississippi. The family had fled Mississippi after an incident in which William had beaten a white man over a racial insult.Wilkins grew up in a middle-class household in a relatively integrated neighborhood. A porter who oversaw operations in the personal car of the chief of the Northern Pacific Railroad, Sam Williams taught Wilkins the virtue of education. Stressing the ...
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Source: American National Biography Online
Word Count: 2896 Includes: Bibliographycivil rights organization executive, was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the son of William DeWitte Wilkins, a minister, and Mayfield Edmundson. His parents left Holly Springs, Mississippi, for St. Louis soon after their marriage in 1900 to seek refuge from threatened racial violence against his father. His mother died while he was still quite young, and her sister Elizabeth Edmundson Williams took Wilkins and his younger sister and brother to live with her in St. Paul, Minnesota. His aunt and her husband, Sam Williams, a sleeping-car porter, provided a stable home for the Wilkins children in an integrated, ...
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