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By Brandt Williams
January 24, 2001
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The likeness of one of Minnesota's most notable former citizens has been immortalized by the United States Postal Service. The late civil rights activist Roy Wilkins was honored for his decades of work with the NAACP and its mission of achieving equal rights for all Americans. The Roy Wilkins black heritage stamp was unveiled on the campus of the University of Minnesota, Wilkins' alma mater.
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WILKINS PLAYED A VITAL ROLE in the nation's oldest civil rights organization during some of America's most troubling times. He joined the NAACP in 1931, and in 1934 he succeeded W.E.B. DuBois as the editor of the organization's magazine, The Crisis.
He led the organization as executive secretary and as executive director from 1955 until 1977. Former NAACP Executive Director Benjamin Hooks attended the ceremony. He says Wilkins shared in the successes of the civil Rights movement as well as the struggles.
"Under the administration of Roy Wilkins, all the major court victories were won of the civil rights era. He presided at a time when we went into congress and received finally, the kind of treatment we were entitled to," Hooks said.
Wilkins helped organize the 1963 March on Washington. It was at that march where Martin Luther King Jr. presented his I have a dream speech. In documentary titled, Roy Wilkins: A right to dignity, Wilkins said while at first he and other organizers feared the event would be a flop, the march and rally at the Capitol was a major success.
The stamp ceremony featured tributes to Wilkins through music and poetry. A group of Franklin Middle School students performed Maya Angelou's ode to the African American struggle for civil rights, Still I rise.
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The event was appropriately held at the campus from which Wilkins graduated in 1923 with a bachelor's degree in sociology and a minor in journalism. The University of Minnesota has already named a residence hall and a research center after Wilkins, and University President Mark Yudof says Wilkins is worthy of the accolades.
"I like the idea of keeping his name alive. I'm afraid that if you ask the average 18 or 19 year old, they might not know who Roy Wilkins is. This is our effort to perpetuate the many good deeds he did throughout his life," Yudof said.
Wilkins becomes the 24th American to be honored in the United States Postal Service's Black Heritage stamp series. The Postal Service began the series in 1978 when it introduced the Harriet Tubman stamp. Since then it has immortalized the likenesses of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Sojourner Truth and Ida B. Wells.
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