An Appreciation: Roger Wilkins, Journalist
He desegrated editorial boards, shared a Pulitzer Prize for Watergate coverage, and spoke civil rights truths in places Black perspectives were not heard. What can we learn from him today?
This week, on July 2nd, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 turns 61. I turned 61 years-old this year as well – in fact, the same day Michele Obama turned 61.
Though I served in the Reagan Administration as a young speechwriter, the former First Lady and I share something else in common – we are both indebted to the civil rights leaders of our childhood.
To celebrate this anniversary of the Civil Rights Act, I write about a leader who is too often overlooked, and this article is my small contribution to changing that. I’ve come to greatly admire Roger Wilkins through his lively autobiography, A Man’s Life.
When Mr. Wilkins is remembered today, nearly a decade after his death, it’s usually as a civil rights leader who worked inside the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations. His uncle, Roy Wilkins, was more visible and vocal in his leadership of the NAACP.
In his 1982 autobiography, Roger Wilkins is open about his mental and emotional struggle with not joining MLK, John Lewis and others on the frontline in the streets, lunch counters and bridges. His place instead was as the only black person in important rooms in New York City and Washington, D.C., where policy was being made. He was, after all, the University of Michigan-trained attorney with lighter dark skin, white diction, and crisp business attire. He served in the Kennedy Administration’s Agency for International Development (AID) and then in the Johnson Administratio’s Justice Department as assistant attorney general.
He was misunderstood by Blacks and whites alike.
Once, on a secret mission for President Johnson to get a closer look at the riots in LA, he was pulled over by the police and felt threatened until his travel partner convinced the tough cop’s partner they worked for the President of the United States. He survived rough treatment in other cities as well, including Detroit.
Wilkins knew his role as an inside man and used that access with what later became apparent -- journalistic strengths that would help him share a Pulitzer with Woodward and Bernstein at the Washington Post as an editorial writer and then as a columnist for the New York Times.
For example, in the fall of 1962, a little more than a year before the Civil Rights Act was introduced in Congress, Wilkins writes that he was furious about the administration’s civil-rights posture. It was slow, lethargic and unresponsive.
He used his sources to get a meeting with Ralph Dungan, one of President Kennedy’s two special assistants. When they met, Wilkins let him have it.
“Okay, Roger, look. This isn’t my area, as you know (Dungan was a foreign policy advisor). But if you write a memorandum laying out what it is you think we ought to do, I’ll see that it gets to the President, okay?”
Wilkins went back to his little office and began to write, he tells us.
The memorandum started with the premise that life in the United States was unequal and unfair and that the only power in society strong enough to force change was the federal government. It went on to argue that the moral leadership of the Kennedy administration on this issue had been flabby despite John Kennedy's splendid campaign rhetoric on the subject. It then urged the administration to draft and send to Congress a civil rights bill that would desegregate publicly owned facilities and places of public accommodation and would also make provision for equal employment enforcement by the federal government.
Finally, it stressed the urgent need for Blacks to obtain the best educational opportunities available and said that school desegregation efforts should be pressed firmly wherever there was resistance.
Today we can appreciate this memo as the work of a future journalist inside a powerful organization. It was quiet and subversively powerful.
Later, in 1963, he was asked to join the head of AID to see what American dollars were accomplishing around the world. Wilkins ended up in Vietnam, where he was pulled aside, away from the high-level officials, to hear from more junior sources about how the war effort was going. It was not going well despite assurances to the contrary. He developed sources in Vietnam and asked them to visit him in DC as well. His insights lead him to share an unvarnished opinion about the war.
He put everything he had learned into two memos — one a compilation of facts; the other an essay on those facts with recommendations.
“I was sure that the whole enterprise was a loser. I think we underestimate the enemy. And I think we underestimate him because of racism.”
Roger Wilkins was and should be remembered as a historically important journalist and a civil rights leader.
He was also a complicated man, as I learned one long afternoon sitting with Professor Patricia King, his widow, a highly respected emeritus Georgetown law professor and former deputy assistant attorney general. June’s warm sun brightened her welcoming apartment where they lived together until his death in 2017. Art, books and several of his framed newspaper clippings fill the comfortable living room overlooking the Potomac and Anacostia.
We spent several engaging hours together reviewing the timeline of his life, the stories, characters, highlights and lowlights.
After leaving the Johnson Administration in 1969, he briefly joined the Ford Foundation in New York City. In early 1970, he received an inauspicious invitation to the Gridiron Dinner in Washington, D.C., which led to his first appearance as a writer in The Washington Post.
Editorial page editor Meg Greenfield caught wind that he had some strong feelings about what he experienced at the dinner, a who’s who of DC elites, all white, of course. He agreed to pen an op-ed, “A Black at the Gridiron Dinner.” In the article, he writes of his horror at the laughter, pranks, and jokes he witnessed during the dinner about President Nixon’s so-called Southern strategy, a Republican effort to increase political support among white voters in the South by appealing to racism against African Americans.
“Black people don’t think it's funny at all. That strategy hits men where they live in their hopes for themselves and their dreams for their children. We find it sinister and frightening. And let it not be said that the Gridiron Club and its guests are not discriminating about their humor.”
After the article appeared, the Post’s editor, Ben Bradlee, sent Wilkins a personal note: “I’d be damn proud to work on the same newspaper with you.”
And that’s exactly what happened, Wilkins became an editorial writer for the Post and then went on in 1974 to work on the New York Times editorial board. He was asked to chair the board of the Pulitzer Prize, joining as a member along with fellow columnist William Raspberry. He then had stints at the Washington Star, NPR, a think tank, and taught at George Mason University.
“He hurt a lot,” Professor King told me.
His father, a newspaper man and the brother of Roy Wilkins, died when Roger Wilkins was young. His mother, a senior executive with the YWCA in New York, travelled constantly, so much so that he was mostly raised by his grandmother in Michigan. He felt abandoned. He also struggled with his identity as a Black kid in mostly white schools.
Professor King told me that the intensity of this experience was more difficult for him than anyone knew.
“I carried my race around me like an open basket of rotten eggs,” he writes. “I'm so ashamed of that shame now that I cringe when I write it.”
Sometimes he lay on his back and stared up at passing clouds and wondered “why God had played such a dirty trick by making me a Negro.”
It became clear to him that the white men he worked with didn't take him seriously. It was also clear that he carried in his soul a powerful amount of deference for powerful white people.
He was married and divorced twice when he met Patricia in December 1979 after leaving New York to return to DC. They were married in February 1980, and it was only then she realized the extent of the emotional distress he was under. He drank heavily but managed to get it under control when she threatened to leave.
There in the sunny apartment where we sat, she said that life became good. They had a daughter, Elizabeth, whom he doted on. He doted as well on his daughter Amy from a previous marriage.
He e began to write for himself, first A Man’s Life, and then a slimmer volume, Jefferson’s Pillow: The Founding Fathers and the Dilemma of Black Patriotism.
After reading both books closely as well as many of his editorials and columns, I wondered aloud with Patricia about her husband’s life trajectory.
Early in life, he wrote that he wanted to be white or at least respected by whites.
By mid-career he worked to become the Black person in the room where policy was being made for people of color. In Jefferson’s Pillow he writes, “I contemplate the tall straight figure of Jefferson and think of his colleagues. I am truly in the conundrum they present to me, and people like me.” He was struck by the deep conflict they have laid on my soul, the “twoness” as WEB Dubois called it – Black and American.
Late in life he writes that he had become comfortable as an American first, working toward a more perfect union.
Professor King said his writings leave us with a philosophy that emphasizes justice and holding America to a high standard. He was patriotic, believing America was capable of doing more, so long as we got our house in order.
As a white writer, I don’t believe I am the ideal person to bring forth the definitive life of Roger Wilkins. But I sure would like to read one, and I think the world deserve (and needs) to read one.
At the moment, leading cultural figures from the 1960s and ‘70s are producing an impressive number of books and documentaries to bolster their legacy and correct impressions they disagree with. In documentaries, Paul McCartney and Jimmy Page have re-emerged as guiding lights for the Beatles and Led Zepplin. Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward have recent memoirs. Murray Kempton and Walter Lippman have stepped out of darkness and into the limelight again with new books about their work. Publishers Tina Brown and Graydon Carter tell us of their successes in gossipy memoirs.
I believe it’s time to revisit the work of Roger Wilkins and his contributions to a better America.