Transcripts

AMANDA WILKINS: It started in his childhood, where he lived next door to a family whose parents were immigrants from Sweden. And his uncle, of course, was a migrant from Mississippi.

KATE MOOS: Roy Wilkins was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1901, but moved with his brother and sister to his Uncle Sam and Aunt Elizabeth's house on Saint Paul's Galtier Street shortly after his mother died. Amanda Wilkins says her husband's ties to Saint Paul remained strong throughout his life, and that it was here he acquired his faith in an integrated America.

AMANDA WILKINS: They all had the same ideals and the same ambitions that their children would have a better opportunity than they had. And what he saw, of course, was all-- was people of different races living together in harmony. And he saw that as a child, and he saw that it worked.

KATE MOOS: Growing up in Saint Paul, Roy Wilkins became best friends with Herman Anderson, an immigrant son and a schoolmate at Whittier grammar school. At Mechanics Arts High School, Wilkins edited the school journal, excelled in his classes, and was encouraged to write by his English teacher, Ms. Copley. He was the first Black reporter for The Minnesota Daily. It was in some ways a typical Midwestern childhood, a childhood at that time inconceivable for Black children in St. Louis and farther South.

AMANDA WILKINS: In the South, they may have lived next door to each other, but there was certainly no kind of relationship. The kids in his class were his peers in every sense of the word. This gave him a picture of-- and it made him think, this is what America is. He really never lost his belief that a system of equality and justice could work under our laws and under our Constitution.

KATE MOOS: When Wilkins left Saint Paul for a newspaper job in Kansas City, he began a career of civil rights activism and an affiliation with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People that were to last until his death in 1981. He worked with the likes of Thurgood Marshall, Medgar Evers, and Walter White. He took his first position at the New York office of the NAACP under W.E.B. Du Bois.

Those were the days of Jim Crow, polling taxes, lynching, long before the landmark Supreme Court decision of 1954 that called for the desegregation of schools, long before the Montgomery bus boycott, Rosa Parks, before the desegregation of the armed forces or the country's first substantial Civil Rights Act.

Mrs. Wilkins says her husband was a patient man, never lost his faith in gradual progress toward justice through the courts, through legislative reforms, and through nonviolent resistance. And she says he never stopped believing in the possibility of change.

AMANDA WILKINS: I think he had anger. He had anger whenever he saw an affront to human dignity. Someone said after God made Roy, he threw away the mold. There are not many people like that today. The pendulum always swings back. And I think we'll get back to that feeling of decency, feeling of concern for one's fellow beings.

KATE MOOS: Amanda Wilkins. The St. Paul Civic Center auditorium has been renamed and dedicated in memory of her husband, Roy. This is Kate moose in Saint Paul.