Roy Wilkins: The Quiet Revolutionary and the NAACP

Conclusion

197 Conclusion The obituaries and eulogies that appeared after Wilkins’s death spoke of his steady leadership; his quiet, calm, and reasoned persona; and his long dedication to the cause. Some made reference to his productive working relationship with President Johnson. Others referred to his early journalism and his arrest in 1932 as evidence that this urbane, reserved man had, at one point in his life, borne some of the marks of the firebrand activist . Of course there were the inevitable comparisons with Martin Luther King. One editorialist said that King was the heart of the movement, while Wilkins was its mind; another offered a similar observation when talking about the March on Washington, saying that although “the day belonged to the dreams of Martin Luther King, Jr., the agenda belonged to Roy Wilkins.” Joseph Rauh, who worked with Wilkins at the LCCR, encapsulated the difference between the two leaders most succinctly: “I guess you can say Martin was the front man who changed public opinion. But Roy was the one who was able to use that shift in public opinion to bring about legislation and legal rulings that benefited blacks, as well as any number of other people. . . . Roy wasn’t the . . . one out front. He was the one in the back who got things done.”1 Unlike Martin Luther King, for example, Roy Wilkins was not sustained by a deep religious or philosophical belief, nor was he wedded to any particular political principle. His single guiding conviction was simply that integration was right and it was achievable, and his dedication to that conviction was all encompassing. The tools he had most faith in to achieve that aim—litigation and lobbying—demanded patience and tenacity as well as an instinct for politics and a willingness to play the long game. Wilkins was far more comfortable walking the corridors of power than demonstrating on sidewalks. In his view, the path to securing equal rights led from the White House at one end of Pennsylvania Avenue to Capitol Hill at the other, rather than the streets of Selma or Birming- 198 ROY WILKINS ham. Wilkins had a politician’s grasp of congressional procedure, and he was able to judge which members of Congress were open to persuasion, which were vulnerable at an election, whose seats were safe enough to allow them some latitude, and which were beyond any coaxing. Working in collaboration with Clarence Mitchell, head of the NAACP’s Washington Bureau, and Arnold Aronson, the secretary of the LCCR, the coalition devised a series of lobbying strategies that relied on a detailed knowledge of the intricacies of congressional power. He could exercise this knowledge within the LCCR with the support of a powerful and broad coalition. Wilkins found his natural home at the LCCR: if he was a bureaucrat at the NAACP, the LCCR allowed him to be a strategist. The LCCR liberated Wilkins from the constraints and rules of the NAACP. The agenda of the LCCR was very specific: to secure civil rights legislation. It required no resolutions, no votes by members, and no approval by any board of directors ; and the coalition reinforced Wilkins’s belief that strength in numbers was of crucial importance in securing societal change. In fact, Wilkins often appeared more comfortable leading the LCCR than the NAACP. But the alliance with the LCCR also had benefits for the NAACP. August Meier and John Bracey, whose studies of the Association remain among the most comprehensive, argued that the NAACP’s leadership of the LCCR marked a “radical transformation” of the Association’s lobbying efforts, that it moved from a strategy that made use of personal contacts to one that mobilized the available resources of the many groups and organizations that participated in the LCCR’s programs.2 While Wilkins was reluctant to collaborate with other civil rights groups unless the NAACP was able to control the program, the LCCR allowed him to forge a broad alliance of sympathetic groups that supported the Association ’s goals and had no wish to dominate its program. It is understandable , then, that Wilkins was one of the driving forces behind the LCCR, and through his leadership the organization was able to gather together a powerful lobby of diverse groups, that collaborated to bring significant pressure on Congress to pass civil rights legislation. If navigating the white power structure was his greatest skill, what was Wilkins’s greatest failure? His nephew, Roger Wilkins, suggests that it was his failure to...