"Roy Wilkins"(August 30,1901-September 8,1981)

his planned Was a prominent civil rights activist in the United States from the 1930s to the 1970s.Roy most notable role was in his leadership of the NAACP.Born in St.Louis Missouri,Roy graduated from the University of Minnesota with a degree in sociology in 1923.He worked as a journalist at The Minnesota Daily and became editor of St.Paul Appeal an African-American newspaper.After he graduated he became the editor of The Call(Kansas City).In 1929,he married social worker Aminda "Minnie"Badeau;the couple had no children.Between 1931 and 1934 Roy was assistant NAACP secretary under Walter Francis White.When W.E.B. Du Bois left the organization in 1934,he replaced him as editor of The Crisis,the official magazine of the NAACP.From 1949-50 he chaired the National Emergency Civil Rights Mobilization,which comprised more than 100 local and national groups.In 1950,Roy-along with Asa Philip Randolph founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters,and Arnold Aronson,a leader of the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council-founded the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights(LCCR).LCCR has become the premier civil rights coalition,and has coordinated the national legislative campaign on behalf of every civil rights law since 1957.In 1955,Roy was chosen to be the executive secretary of the NAACP and in 1964 he became its executive director.He had an excellent reputation as an articulate spokesperson for the civil rights movement.One of his first actions was to provide support to civil rights activists in Mississippi who were being subject to a" credit squeeze"by members of the White Citizens Councils.He backed a proposal suggested by Dr.T.Theodore Roosevelt Mason Howard of Mound Bayou,Mississippi,who headed the Regional Council of Negro Leadership,a leading civil rights organization in the state.Under the plan,black businesses and voluntary associations shifted their accounts to the black-owned Tri-State Bank of Memphis,Tennessee.By the end of 1955,about $280,000 had been deposited in Tri-state  for this purpose.The money enabled Tri-state to extends loans to credit-worthy blacks who were denied loans by white banks.Roy participated in the March on Washington (August 1963) which he helped organize,the Selma to Montgomery Marches (1965),and March Against Fear (1966).He believed in achieving reform by legislative means,testified before many Congressional hearings and conferred with Presidents John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson,Richard Nixon,Gerald Ford,and Jimmy Carter.Roy strongly opposed militancy in the movement for civil rights as represented by "black power"movement.He was a strong critic of racism in any form regardless of its creed,or color political motivation,and also espoused the principles of nonviolence.Roy was also a member of Omega Psi Phi,a fraternity with a civic rights focus,and one of the intercollegiate Greek-Letter fraternities established for African-Americans.In 1967,he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Lyndon Johnson.During his tenure,the NAACP played a pivotal role in leading the nation into the Civil Rights movement and spearheaded the efforts that led to significant civil rights victories,including Brown v.Board of education,the Civil Rights Act of 1964,and Voting Rights Act of 1965.In 1968,Roy also served chair of the U.S. delegation to the international Conference on Human Rights.In 1976,he got into a dispute with undisclosed board members convention in Memphis Tennessee.He announced that he was postponing postponing his planned retirement by one tear because the package offered was insufficient for his needs.Board member Emmitt Douglass of Louisiana demanded that Roy discloses the offenders and not impugn the board as a whole.Roy merely said that the offenders had "vilified his reputation and questioned his health and integrity.In 1977 he,retired from the NAACP and was succeeded by Benjamin Hooks.He was honored with the title Director Emeritus of the NAACP in the same year.He died in New York City of Heart problems related to a pacemaker implanted in him in 1979 due to his irrwgular heartbeat.