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Biographical Details of Leadership
Contemporary Lens on Black Leadership
Historical Focus on Race
BOND: Roger Wilkins, welcome. Thank you very much for agreeing to do this.
WILKINS: My pleasure.
BOND: I want to try to run through your life, if we can.
WILKINS: Do it fast, run as fast as you can.
BOND: We don't have sufficient time to focus as well as I think our eventual viewers would like. But we're interested in the development of leadership and black leadership, specifically. And of course, that leads to questions about consciousness of race. You write in your autobiography that you're conscious of race and conscious of segregation, as other black children are at an early age. What are your memories of Kansas City and race and childhood?
WILKINS: My first memory is that we lived in a very small black enclave in Kansas City called Roundtop. And you walked two blocks in either direction and you were in a white neighborhood. And I said to my grandmother, who lived with us, "Gram, why do all the people, on this side of 22nd Street, say, all smile and say, 'Hello Roger,' and then we cross the street and everybody looks mean." I didn't see it in terms of color but I saw it in terms of warmth and friendship. There is a family store that my grandmother took me shopping. And this is my first civil rights activity. I was maybe two, I suppose. And we are on the top floor of a department store in downtown Kansas City, and I told her I had to go bathroom. She asked the woman where the ladies' room was – sales clerk – and she said, "There is none on this floor. The one for colored is in the basement." And I was doing a little dance that little kids do when they need to go. And my grandmother said, "Can't you see this little boy cannot wait until he gets downstairs?" And she said, "Go downstairs. That's for colored." And my grandmother said, "All right, Roger, just let's unbutton your fly here and we will do it right here." Whereupon I integrated the ladies' room on the top of that store. That's a story they told all along.
But my first memory was a one-room segregated school house, my first school. And immediately after we started, you know, six or seven months they closed it. And I was still in kindergarten and I was bussed across town – way across town – to Crispus Attucks School, black school. And it is interesting, nobody said, "Oh, those are the poor black children. They have to bus them. They are so small and cute. It will hurt their psyches." Nor did people say it would hurt our psyches when people called us "monkey," "nigger," and stuff like that. But then that made the idea of race acute, and from that time on, I had no questions about it.
BOND: Now you write about your father's funeral, was buried at a black cemetery. Does that summon up any consciousness, that there's this separation even after death?
WILKINS: Well, it has stuck with me. I loved my father very much, and my memory of him is made more acute by the fact that most people – he died so young, most people didn't know him. And so, so many people assume that [my uncle] Roy Wilkins was my father. And it has pressed a consciousness of my father into me, but he cared about me very much. He tried to help me read and helped me to love writing. And some of my happiest childhood moments are times when he and I were home alone together. So, when he died, even though I couldn't fully comprehend the finality of death, it was a moment of great trauma for me. And I remember, the idea that he was not good enough, even dead, to be buried with white people, enraged me, even in my sadness. And it's been an issue for me all the rest of my life. I constantly refer to it. I've talked about it, I've written about it. I just, you know, when a man dies, a very talented man dies at thirty-five, virtually everything is unfair. And for his life to have been unfair and for the end of it – that assault on his dignity still makes me angry. And this is now sixty-one years later.
BOND: Your father is a journalist for a crusading newspaper. Your mother is a civil rights activist in her own right. And after your father's death you moved to New York, where a neighbor in the building is your uncle, Roy Wilkins, who is a famous civil rights figure. Do you have now memories of how this militance of your father's profession, the aggressiveness of your mother's activism, and the example of your uncle's profession – how all this affects you?
WILKINS: It was gradual. It just grew into me. I can't tell you any specific moment when there was a great awakening. This was the family business. This is what we did. This is who we were. And I was, I guess, most influenced by my mother, who is a very mild-appearing person – very, very determined. And she would never stop. And she kept pressing, and she kept pressing, and she is well-educated. She was a Phi Beta Kappa at the University of Minnesota, and she used her education and she used her social polish as weapons in her struggle to open up opportunities. And so, I think of all those people – my father lit the flame and my mother gave me the style. But I don't really think that I had any choice but to be associated with the movement.
BOND: You said last night at a public forum that your father had given you an appreciation of words. And I wonder how much that appreciation of words came to you as an example of just how everybody ought to be. Or as an example of how you, a black kid, ought to be if you were going to make it in this world. Was there a distinction made between these things?
WILKINS: My father loved to read the dictionary.
BOND: Really?
WILKINS: He had an extraordinary vocabulary. He didn't go around showing it off but he really loved words and he loved – he would have been a wonderful professor of English, I think. He also – I think the happiest night of my childhood was the night that my mother and grandmother went out and he said, "We are going to be guys together. We are going to have a night together." What we did was we both sat down and chose our favorite books and read about English kings. He was reading King Lear and I was reading King Arthur. And I just remember that as the warmest, most companionable night. But before I went to school he had me learn ten words a day from a little child's dictionary. And he said, "You are going to have to know words. This world is not fair. You're going to – " So it was – he was arming his black child. And at some level I understood that.
BOND: And for your mother, I imagine, it's only gradually, as you get older, that you understand precisely what it is that she does.
WILKINS: Right. Right.
BOND: But is it some consciousness – when do you have a consciousness that she is fighting for the race, that she is making civil rights activism as her life – when do you understand this?
WILKINS: When I understood her – when my father was out of the picture, and all of a sudden, she is the central figure in my life, and she is traveling all the time, and she is going to the South. And she is in her early thirties – thirty-one, thirty-two – and she was a very good looking widow. And I understood the South to be a place of peril. And I understood that she was going down there to change it. And I worried about her. I worried that bad things would happen to her. So, I got the sense that this was something you had to do, even though it was perilous. And that you used your brains and your charm to get it done. So, all of those lessons were packed into me young, by the time I was twelve.
BOND: So, her example sets a standard for you?
WILKINS: Right.
BOND: And even though you may not do precisely exactly what she does, you are going to do something like what she does.
WILKINS: Exactly.
BOND: Whatever you do is going to be somehow connected to what she does.
WILKINS: I did not make the conscious decision, but it was there. As I said, it had grown into me.
BOND: Okay, now what kind of example does Uncle Roy, whom you describe as not a warm, close person, but he is in the building. You have to see him all the time.
WILKINS: Well, he is down the street. There were two big buildings in Harlem that were big, middle-class buildings. One was at 160th and Edgecombe, and one was at 155th and Edgecombe. So, he was right down the street. Roy was a distant man because his whole life had been marked by emotional loss. My grandmother died when he was about six or seven. My grandfather kind of left the family, left the kids to be raised by my grandmother's sister and her husband. He had a beloved sister, Armeda, who died when he was in the – when she was in college. And then his brother, my father, who was – they were like this [making a hand gesture to symbolize closeness] – died when he was about forty. In addition, he had loved a woman, my Aunt Marble, and she had left him. So, his whole – and I think he was really – by the time I came into his life, he was just afraid to get too close to anybody. However, he used to take me around to NAACP meetings when I was kid. And, you know, around when he spoke in the New York region. And this was when I was nine, ten, eleven, twelve years old, and I watched him talk. And he was one of the most graceful and most fluent men that I've ever seen, even to this day. And obviously I admired [him] even though I felt this distance. I felt it was my fault that somehow there was something wrong with me that I could not approach him. But even though there was that distance, I admired his style and his commitment. And when I grew up, I didn't want the world to think that I was trading on his name to become whatever I was going to become. But the admiration never left. I was very proud of him and was glad he was my uncle.
BOND: Although we can't know, and we do not want to engage in psycho-babble here – it is easy to imagine that you might have gone in an opposite direction and said, "Gee, my father worked at this job and it killed him." Although that's not precisely what happened. "My mother is traveling all the time when I am a young kid and my uncle, whom I admire, is a distant figure. All of them do this kind of stuff. I'm not going to do it." What – ?
WILKINS: Well, two things happened – three things. Jack Roosevelt Robinson became a Brooklyn Dodger in 1947, the first acknowledged black person to be in modern major league baseball. And I was fifteen and Jack just captured my imagination. And in my fifteen-year-old's view and my sixty-nine-year-old view there was – everything was right with Jack in '47 and in subsequent years, and he was a wonderful ball player. He was brave. He had internal fortitude and stood up to all kinds of viciousness and played brilliant baseball. He never forgot that he was a black person. He always pushed back when people were trying to encroach on either his own interior space or black race generally. He was physically beautiful, and he was black – black and physically beautiful, rejecting the idea that black is ugly. And the whole country was looking at him. So, I think that if there had been any wavering in my soul, Jack certainly helped drive it out. And then, of course, there was the Brown decision, which I guess was in some way like winning World War II.
BOND: But before Brown and even before Jackie Robinson, your family has moved to Grand Rapids. And rather than living in a black enclave as in Kansas City or in the middle of the biggest collection of black people in the country, as in Harlem, now you find yourself living in a white neighborhood, surrounded on all sides by whites and going to a school where you are the only black kid. What is that like?
WILKINS: Hell. It was psychic hell, because it was – you know, I went there when I was twelve. Five years between twelve and seventeen are pretty crucial years. And you're all mush, you're plastic, and the world just – and you're bumping up against a whole bunch of other people who are plastic – and the world, the culture is telling you who you are. Well, what does a culture tell a black kid he is in 1944, '45, '46? That's one of the reasons I guess I love Jack so, because he came along when I was – when I needed a psychic jolt. But it was horrible. The culture makes black people ashamed of themselves, I was ashamed of myself. I wanted to be one of the guys. Well, I wasn't one of the guys. I was non-standard. And then, you know, when the hormones kick in and you start falling in love every seven minutes. Well, you know – well, maybe some people do, but I did not fall in love with the appropriate color-coded girl across town. I fell in love with the girl – I'm in my locker, here, you know, I was fishing around for my books, and all of a sudden, there is a girl next to me and she is stretching for something, and you see her budding form and you see the little hairs – [gasp] – and you know, it was, "You can't touch. Don't even come close. Don't even think about it." And then, you know, there were – even though I ultimately developed – at first nobody would talk to me, and they would spit on my bike seat and all that stuff, and then they would call me "nigger" and they would chase me home. It was really quite ugly. But after a while, I formed a group of friends, one of whom is still a friend of mine. He is a retired judge. We walked to school together every day. His parents have died, and he treats my mother as if she is his mother. And he calls her "my second mother." And when he takes her out to lunch around town about once every two weeks, and people will stop by the table and say, "Hi Don" or "Hi Judge." And he will say, "I want you to meet Helen Claytor (ph.), she is my second mother." But even then, when I had a group of friends, there – it would split on social lines. They'd have hay rides, I didn't go. So, I would say that psychically, it was just painful as it could be. But it taught me the most valuable lesson of my life, which was that all of this stuff about the white super race was baloney, that white people were just people, and some of them were smarter than I was, and a lot of them were dumber than I was. And some of them were better athletes, and some of them worse athletes and so forth. And I think that my ability in later life to go into major American institutions and to effect change was a combination of imitating my mother's style unconsciously and that ease with white people that very few blacks have the opportunity – at least of our generation – had the opportunity to acquire.
BOND: You anticipate – you write, "Grand Rapids is a place where I would become more Midwestern than Harlemite, more American than black, and more complex than was comfortable or necessary." Is that what you are describing?
WILKINS: Yeah.
BOND: This personal transition that Grand Rapids puts into you, or the circumstances Grand Rapids puts into you?
WILKINS: Yeah, and I go back now, and I see it as – having lived all my adult life on the East Coast – I see it as, you know, hopelessly Midwestern. And I look at my Midwestern roots and think how far psychically I've traveled, although I still love the University of Michigan football team and I still wear a Creston High School t-shirt around in the summertime.
BOND: But you also write that when you're in school in Grand Rapids and you're student council president, recognized by your peers as a leadership figure, a model student, a leader. But deep down, as you write, "I guess I was also trying to demonstrate that I was not like those other people, that I was different. My message was quite clear: I was not nigger."
WILKINS: Right.
BOND: So, describe the feeling that you have to demonstrate you are not like this despised other group of people, that you are different from and better than they.
WILKINS: Well, you don't simply get the concept of shiftless nigger only from white people, although the culture surely was full of that. But there was a – as you know – a very sharp class consciousness among blacks, and although my parents [and] none of the adults around whom I grew up expressed those views, there was plenty among other black people. And of course, you knew – you knew and you saw poor black people, just up from the South, who didn't behave in a way that was acceptable to white culture, and I didn't want to be – I just didn't want to be like that. And I didn't want people to think I was like that – that I was different. I could – well, the old folks used to have a saying, old black folks, they'd say, "Oh, you know, he is just up from the country, he doesn't know how to do." I wanted people to know that I knew how to do.
BOND: Now if you didn't know "how to do," how was that? Did that effect you personally? Or did you have a consciousness that this was a group thing, that you somehow represented a larger group, and that you had "to do" in order to demonstrate that the larger group was okay, too?
WILKINS: Well, as a teenager, I was much more concerned with my own personal development than –
BOND: Sure.
WILKINS: – I was in being a member of the group. Although I surely had a race consciousness because I did go to NAACP meetings in Grand Rapids when I was a teenager. And so, I always felt that I had an obligation to the group. But I also wanted to be –
BOND: Separate from the group.
WILKINS: I wanted my own personal exemption. But I think that, you know, as I look back, I think that is not very different from a lot of what was going on in the heads of a lot of people in the NAACP when they sought desegregation. Because I think a lot of them felt, "Well, if the white folks can only see us and so how we can use our forks and we speak standard English and we use deodorant, that they would find out that there is no difference." Now, just as the founding fathers when they said to the British lords, "All men were created equal," they were not talking about the slaves, and they were not talking about landless white people. They were talking about us dealing with you. And I think a lot of middle-class black people who were seeking desegregation in the same way, they were looking up and saying, "Me too, not them." And I have to admit, as a young person trying desperately to find my place in the world that I had some of that.
BOND: A sense of separation between yourself and this class of people –
WILKINS: Right. Right.
BOND: – uneducated, unskilled, unlettered, not dressed properly.
BOND: Skipping ahead, you go to the University of Michigan and you are assigned two black roommates – which you hope Michigan wouldn't do today – and what's that like? You are in this great big school, 20,000 students, 250 of them black.
WILKINS: Well, it turned out that those two guys and I, we just didn't like each other. So that didn't work. But I guess we accepted the – we noticed it, we accepted the segregation. But very quickly the blacks, the black students at the University of Michigan had created a life for themselves.
BOND: Fraternities?
WILKINS: Well, fraternities, and you just knew everybody. And when a fraternity had a dance it wasn't just the Kappas who came to the dance. Everybody on campus came to the dance. It was the black dance. Most of the time I was there none of the other Greek letter organizations had houses, so you always had your function in a University place and everybody came. It was always open. I mean it was a scandal once – I don't remember who did it, I just don't remember – one of the Greek letter organizations decided it was going to have a closed affair. That was the talk of the community. Boy, and we talked about those guys really badly. But it became quite clear, very early, that the University of Michigan, even though it was different from the other – from the Southern places – but when I got there in 1949, there had never been a black basketball player in Michigan. There had never been a black baseball player. And the first black baseball player was a member of my class – a guy named Frank Hall from Muskegon. The first black basketball – there was only one black basketball player in all of the Big Ten. Not one starter – one. And it was so extraordinary that I remember his name – Bill Garrett, from Indiana. He played forward and he was pigeon-toed and we always – when Indiana came, all the blacks would go and would hoot for Michigan, for Garrett to score thirty-five points, and Michigan to win by one. And the first black basketball player didn't come to Michigan until a kid named Don Eaddy from Grand Rapids came in my junior year. So we knew. There were no black professors, there were no black administrators. When I was – I loved the University of Michigan, but this is what I say about affirmative action. It is so much better a university now then it was when I went there. I never had a black professor, or a woman professor either for that matter. I never was assigned a book, a play, an essay, or a poem written by a black person or that suggested that a black person had ever done anything useful in the whole of recorded history. Nothing. As a matter of fact, the only thing that I read about blacks doing anything was in Constitutional Law when I was in law school when we were assigned Brown v. Board of Education. So, we understood that that was a white place and that the powers that be were saying to us, "This is our university. We have done you a favor to let you in here." And of course, I opposed that and fought against it. And they said, "Well, look at you." And this is always the answer, you know. And they're playing on this kind of thing, that separation that I had developed in high school. Well, by the time I was a junior in college I wasn't buying this stuff anymore. But it was their place, and we just created our own space within that place.
BOND: Now, you described, if I am not mistaken, a world in which there is this separation, some of it self imposed, in the creation of an all-black world but also a world in which whites are the civil rights advocates. Is that right?
WILKINS: No, there were not.
BOND: And blacks less likely so?
WILKINS: There were some. It is true the University's – the student legislature at the University of Michigan pressed to have the fraternities and sororities either get rid of their segregation clauses in their charters and integrate, or be tossed off of campus. And these are the white student activists. And there were also some white students who noticed that blacks couldn't have their hair cut at the Michigan Union. They tried to change that. And the first group on the student government that tried that thing about desegregating the fraternities and sororities was defeated by the administration. I was in the second group. I was, by that time, a member of the student government and the leader of the human rights committee and I proposed it, or my committee did, and it went on through all of the university processes until the regents again smacked us down. And I must say, as an educator, I still hold to the view that I formed in those years that fraternities and sororities are really anti-intellectual and against – they just cut against everything that the university stands for. We are trying to broaden kids, and we are trying to bring them in contact with ideas and people that they would never encounter but for this institution. And what do you have? Admission, at least in those days, kids would be rushing to fraternities and sororities before they had ever seen the inside of a classroom. And what do you have? You have white kids from East Grand Rapids, for example, the rich suburb of Grand Rapids, all went to school in this homogeneous mass, and then they come down to the university, and they seek a fraternity and sorority made up of people just like them. And that's how they spend their years. And they go back to Grand Rapids to take over leadership roles. And they are just as narrow socially as they were when they went to the University. I hate that. I hated it when I was a student and not just for racial reasons.
BOND: But even as a student, both in high school and then at the University in undergraduate school, you are seeking and receiving leadership positions. Now, can you remember motivation here? Is race a part of it or is it simply the desire to be in a position to make some change?
WILKINS: I liked politics. It was – part of it was just I did not think – I thought you should not just sit around and do nothing, that you should do something. And I just always wanted to make things better. And at the University of Michigan the student legislature, before we were slapped down the second time, was really a vital part in the University campus, and I found it very attractive. And so, I ran very early. All my black friends thought I was quite weird, but –
BOND: It is hard for my students to understand, but there was a time when there were much more vigorous student politics on the college campus than there appear to be today.
WILKINS: Even in the '50s.
BOND: Yes. Political parties –
WILKINS: They call this the silent generation. But yeah.
BOND: So what was your black friends' reaction? I cut you off there.
WILKINS: Well, we lived a segregated life really. You know, you talked to white people in the classroom and that's about all. And they said, "Oh, man, Roger is running for student government. That is a weird thing to do. But then, Roger is weird anyway." Because this was still – I was now making a transition from this virtual white person, who I had become in high school, back into a black person and that weirdness was apparent. And so, you know, my black friends loved me and they teased me for it. But they, you know, they thought I was kind of weird to do that.
BOND: And obviously, they supported you, I'm guessing –
WILKINS: Oh, yes.
BOND: – or you might not have won.
WILKINS: When I ran for president of the class in my junior year, for the president of senior class, I mean, they were just proud. I mean, they just thought this was wonderful.
BOND: Then you go to law school. And it is the year after you get to law school that Brown is decided.
WILKINS: I think it was first decided my freshman year.
BOND: Okay. And what is law school like? I imagine the black percentage is even smaller than in the undergraduate college.
WILKINS: I think there were only three or four – three black people in my class, I think.
BOND: Now, did you get from the faculty members, all of whom were white, that you are expected to use this tool to become a leadership figure?
WILKINS: Yeah. Because I was not a good student in undergraduate school. And I didn't expect to go to graduate school. I think I expected to become a journalist. But there was a girl who was still there at Michigan. Well, I went to – the Korean War was still on when I finished college. And nobody knew when it was going to be over. The stalemate was on. And I was either going to get drafted or I was going to do something else. Well, I was a hot rodder, still am. And so I wanted to fly airplanes. And it was really hard to get into the Air Force as a pilot. But I went – I volunteered, I went down to Chanute Air Force Base in Illinois and there were a hundred guys, all trying to get into the Air Force and fly. And the first day, they gave us a physical exam. At the end of that fifty guys were gone. The second day, they gave us a mental exam. At the end of that another forty-four guys were gone. That means ninety-four percent of this group is washed out. The next day was just easy Link trainers – do you have coordination and stuff like that. Well, as kind of a half-athlete, that was easy for me, except that they could only take five at a time. My name was last on the list, by alphabet. And so the first guys had to go. And by now we're bonded, you know, I mean, we're the survivors. And so, I just teased them to death because I had gotten an extra hour's sleep. They got there at 6:30 and they got through. I got there, I was supposed to be there at 7:30 and I got there at twenty-eight after seven. Sergeant in charge says, "What do you want?" And I said, "I am here for my – " The guys had finished and I met them on the way. And he said, "You're late." I said, "I'm not late. It's 7:28." There is a big clock on the wall. He said, "You are, too, late. I am not doing it." And I said, "Well, when can I do it again?" Thinking maybe 9:30. He said, "Next Wednesday." This is Saturday. I said, "What?" I said, "I am not late. It is now [7:29]." "You're late," he says. And so we argued some more. And I can see another guy is there, he's really uncomfortable with this – a white guy, corporal or something. And then by that time it is 7:31, and we're still arguing. He looks at the clock. He says, "You're late, see." He said, "Leave. I am not doing this for you." And so I leave and I hear the other guy saying something to him. And the guy says – and I am now thinking, "Will I stay on this base by myself until – " The guy says, "I am not going to run this thing just for a nigger."
That was it. The television cameras are around, I will not say what I said you could do to your Air Force. But I left and then I went – since this girl was still back there, I went back to Ann Arbor and said, "Well, can I be a – go to graduate school or law school?" And I took the test and they admitted me both into graduate school and law school and I went to law school. I was angry. I mean, that anger – but I had not intended to go to law school. I hadn't gotten the grades for law school. I did very well on the LSAT. And at some point, I was not figuring out things very well, and I went to my contracts teacher and asked him. Well, he explained what was going on in class that day. And then I, just for reassurance, I said, "Well, Professor Harvey – " You know, he was the admissions officer. "I think probably I have one of the lowest GPA's in the class," hoping he would say, "Oh, no." He said, "Yes, Mr. Wilkins, that is true." Well, now I got indignant. I said, "Well, what did you let me in here for?" And he said to me, "Because the University of Michigan has – we think, here at the law school, we have a responsibility to educate black leaders because the black race needs leaders. And so, we were able to check with people in the undergraduate school and they told us if you hadn't done all these other things you could have been a superb student. So we let you in. But you have to do the work. If you don't do the work, we'll flunk you out." But that was explicit. The University of Michigan feels a responsibility to educate black leaders.
BOND: And you were selected, by virtue of your applying, as a potential leadership figure.
WILKINS: Right.
BOND: And this law school training would certify you or give you the equipment, the tools you need to be this leadership figure.
BOND: Skip ahead. Brown is decided. You're in law school. This is, among things, a great legal victory. What was your – do you remember your initial reaction when you heard about it on the radio?
WILKINS: I didn't hear about it. I was walking through the hall and a white student came up to me who had never talked to me. I think it was Dick [Richard] Riordan, who is now the mayor of Los Angeles. I really do believe it, I can kind of see a face. And he says, "Congratulations." I said, "For what?" And he said, "The Supreme Court decision in Brown." At first it's annoyance. Why is he congratulating me, you know? But then it just kind of dawns on me, "Good Lord, this is gigantic, this is huge."
BOND: So you knew the case was pending? You knew it had been argued, you knew – ?
WILKINS: Oh, sure.
BOND: Now did you know because your uncle was Roy Wilkins and because you knew Thurgood Marshall, or did you know because everybody black knew? Or most black people knew?
WILKINS: Well, we knew in my house, you know. I mean, my mother and my stepfather talked about it. But I had a political science course – Poli-Sci 90 – which was essentially a current events course, where they got us in the habit of reading The New York Times. So from the time when I was junior in high, I mean in college, I've read the New York Times every day. So, sure, I knew.
BOND: So Riordan tells you and what's your reaction?
WILKINS: Oh, I was ecstatic. And I found my buddy Larry Sperling, who is still my buddy. His son was in the White House – the Clinton White House – Gene Sperling. I found my buddy Larry, and we found a couple of other buddies with whom we always drank coffee, and we went off to a coffee house and we sat there and we talked about this new country we were going to have.
BOND: What did you mean by new country? What was your anticipation on hearing this good news? What was the outcome going to be beyond the immediate cases?
WILKINS: I thought we were going to have a country of laws. And I thought that – look, Plessy against Ferguson was such an assault of the dignity of black people. It said that the Constitution of the United States says that all men really aren't created equal, that you are inferior. Well, now Plessy was gone. And I thought the law was a great teacher. And I thought the American people would fall into line behind this. And I thought, at the time, that prejudice was an individual thing. I didn't – I don't think I was familiar with the concept "racism." And so I thought it was a one-by-one process, you teach people and they would see the light because after all, we do believe that all men are created equal and now that this veil has been lifted from their eyes, they will – that's what I thought.
BOND: And did you recall thinking, gee, maybe five years, ten years this will all be over – or less time, perhaps?
WILKINS: I thought maybe ten. I don't know, I mean, if I had an idea. I'm not sure I did. I knew that they had to go back and reargue. And so – and I wondered what would happen in the South. But I thought that this meant massive change. Like in baseball, you know – Jackie came, and then –
BOND: And then the gates are open.
WILKINS: Yeah, right. That's what I thought.
BOND: Well, then a year later in Brown II, they say "all deliberate speed," which means any conceivable delay. But when you heard that, do you recall thinking, "Gee, maybe this will not happen as quickly as I thought it would?" Or had the year between sobered you?
WILKINS: Well, the year between there was a lot of dilly-dallying, and the South was beginning to resist. So, at that point, I realized that more effort would be needed. And I called Thurgood and I asked him could I come work for him that summer? My reaction was, "Well, work needs to be done and I'll volunteer to do the work."
BOND: And did you do the work?
WILKINS: Yes.
BOND: And what was the work?
WILKINS: Well, that was sobering, because the work was to research the teacher tenure laws in all of the eleven segregating Southern states because Thurgood and his staff correctly anticipated that when the desegregation orders came down, the first thing they'd do was start to hire other – to fire black administrators and teachers. So I researched all those teacher tenure laws and wrote a memo on each one of them trying to provide guidance for the lawsuits that were sure to come. But then, at this point, you know, having done that and thought about it and talked to lawyers in the office, I knew we were in for a long haul.
BOND: So, that summer experience, working there with the people most immediately concerned, made you know this was not going to be a slam dunk?
WILKINS: Well, yeah, and there was another thing. I expected somehow, something like, I suppose, the exuberance of a successful athletic team, that you go in, and say, "Okay, we are going to get the bad guys today. Okay, let's go. Let's do it," you know. And here were just day-to-day lawyers slogging it out, and it's going to be a long time. Oh, that was a big dose of reality. And so, at that point my timeline became much longer.
BOND: Now, Thurgood Marshall, is he – I'm sure he shares the sentiment, this is going to be a long, long, long time. But do you get any impression from him about how long he thought it might take?
WILKINS: No. Years later, I read in Simple Justice that he thought that desegregation would occur in five years. And that by '63 – the hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation – that we would have an integrated society. And Simple Justice was not written until the '70s, and I think I did not read it until 1980. And from that vantage point, that looked hopelessly, hopelessly naive. But it's funny, we didn't – in those days, most of the white people we knew were really terrific people. Because what white people would you know? You didn't know white people who were racists, right? So you knew white people who were decent, had generous spirits, believed in an America that could be shared by everybody. And so we believed that if the government – if you learned the lesson, that pretty soon, you know, the country would be full of more people like that. And so we overestimated white people because we only knew a small – and then we thought there were evil people, like [Theodore G.] Bilbo and those Southern people.
BOND: [Herman] Talmadge.
WILKINS: But they were really kind of walled off. We did not know that racism was so at the core of the American culture and a big part of the identity that so many white people in the country needed.
WILKINS: I think, Julian, that we lived in a little box, and we didn't – from where we lived in that box and what we were permitted to see in our education, we had a very skewed view, a limited view of America. And black people in the movement were among the most idealistic people in the country.
BOND: Do you think we were done in by our idealism?
WILKINS: Right. I mean, somebody who knew Thurgood said, "Thurgood Marshall really believed that there's no problem in America that can't be solved by the Constitution of the United States properly applied." And these people were all American patriots. They believed in the American dream. And they believed in the promise of America. And so – and as I say, virtually all the white people there were terrific people. So –
BOND: And it must have been all the more disappointing and disillusioning as they become aware, as we become aware, that these things are not going to happen like that. It's not going to be '63. It's not going to be the hundredth anniversary [of the Emancipation Proclamation]. It has got to be a rude shock.
WILKINS: Well, it was rude then. For me, the shock was – it animated me, because the shock – every fall, there was at least one violent hideous outbreak in this evolving morality tale. And I remember with Clinton, Tennessee, and a guy named Kasper blowing up stuff.
BOND: Yes, John Kasper.
WILKINS: Right. There was, of course, Little Rock. There was Plaquemines Parish right outside New Orleans.
BOND: Some little town in Texas the year before.
WILKINS: Right. So, all of sudden, you're energized because there really was good and evil. And of course, in that period, you also had the Montgomery Bus boycott and the emergence of Martin King. So all of a sudden, instead of getting depressed, what you are seeing is a morality tale in which black people are becoming energized.
WILKINS: Now in that time something really important happened to me because my draft board was nutty. I had a year in which I had to wait to determine whether I was going to get drafted – this was right after law school – or not. So, I worked for the Cuyahoga County Welfare Department in Cleveland, Ohio. And I had my first taste of government dealing with poor black people. And I had my first taste of dealing intimately on a long continuum with the lives of poor black people. And I think that was one of the critical junctures in my life. Because I knew welfare was – I mean, you didn't have to do it very long to know welfare was just terrible, debilitating. And so, I made it my job from the time I was there to put three people to work. I mean, just – and the resistance to hiring these poor people. And of course I picked the people who were most job-ready. And I got one woman a job. And the rest of my efforts on these other two – the rest was just maintenance, you know, just making sure the checks got out and stuff. But I just, I learned volumes about black poverty in big urban centers.
And so, that began for me a very strong effort to be involved in civil rights in the North. It was really glamorous, what you guys were doing in the South, but I understood that the people in the North had all the rights on paper that you guys were fighting for and they were still the last hired. Their poverty rates were awful. Their schools were awful. They were beset by crime and official indifference. And when officialdom did deal with them, they dealt with them in a calloused, non-caring way. So, I, even at one point, I wanted to quit. Before I quit my law firm and went to work for the government, I put it to my law firm: I was going to quit my law firm and I was going to go open up a practice in Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, where I lived in Brooklyn at the time. Because I really wanted to be able to do something. And these guys dissuaded me and said, "We will make it possible for you to do some of that practice there." So I didn't do that then. But – and I remember, I wrote about it at the time, even though I wasn't a writer, I was able to place some things. And it carried through. When I took over the community relations service later in the 60's, in 1966, up until that time it had really been staffed by white Southerners and the idea was, something breaks out in a little town and all of a sudden, you send these experts from Washington, put them on a plane and send them to McComb, Mississippi, to stop the bombing. A, I thought that they were stupid because I didn't think that was ever going to work. And B, I thought that the North really needed attention and nobody was paying attention. So I shifted the whole focus of the agency and you know, this is eight years after I worked in Cleveland, but by now, I've really – I know a lot more. But I was starting to try that even before the riots in the summers broke out. So I was always much more focused on trying to affect systems and power arrangements in the North in order to alleviate the problems of the poor.
BOND: But immediately you take a little detour. You go to work for Delson & Gordon. And you're doing international law. And you describe yourself in this as an ersatz white man. What's that?
WILKINS: I don't know. I wore suits and ties. I even bought a hat, once. Just one in my whole lifetime. And you know, I had a briefcase and I just was a fellow with a briefcase and a suit and just like the white boys, except that I had brown skin. But I still did stuff. Even then I worked on problems of emerging countries. We represented Ghana. We did some work for some of the emerging politicians in Nigeria. We did some work for India, Burma, and a lot of work for Indonesia. So it was new countries, it was the brown and the black countries that were emerging on the world stage at the time.
BOND: And did you feel any – conflict may not be the right word, but – tension between this concern you had for people overseas and what was not happening here within the United States?
WILKINS: Oh, yeah, and now the movement in the South was really beginning to occupy a larger and larger portion of my psyche. And I think that that's part of why I began to feel that law practice in any form was just not relevant.
BOND: You know, I heard you say something like that at the public forum where you spoke. And it struck me as –
WILKINS: It was in response to a question by a brilliant lawyer.
BOND: It struck me as odd in a way because you have this Thurgood Marshall example. He's a lawyer, and he's winning these victories because he is a lawyer. The law is a tool that can be used. And I am surprised that you sort of rejected it.
WILKINS: That I rejected working for Thurgood?
BOND: No, that you rejected the law as a tool.
WILKINS: Well, in part it had nothing to do with race. I just didn't like the law. I could do it, but it was just tricks. I mean, there is nothing mysterious about the law. If I were a lawyer now, I'd be – and had just gone the commercial route – I'd be very rich. I mean, first of all you have to be able to stand up and talk. Secondly, you have to remember what the person said. Thirdly, you need to be able to read statutes and understand them. Fourthly, you need to be able to manipulate this and that and the other thing to make meaning what you wanted to say instead of the plain reading. Well, that's just all tricks. And I didn't enjoy the tricks. And besides, the overall problem of doing law is that somebody pays you to think about what they want you to think about. And I figured out very early on that a large part of your life is thinking. And I wanted that part of my life to be thinking about what I wanted to think about and not what somebody else was paying me to think about.
BOND: But you have this Thurgood Marshall example. Somebody's paying him to think about –
WILKINS: Yes, but I am not going to go to work for Thurgood.
BOND: Well, and there was no alternative?
WILKINS: No.
BOND: No complementary alternative to the NAACP or – ?
WILKINS: Except the Justice Department. But Bobby Kennedy was not hiring black lawyers to work on civil rights issues, so again I went into an international setting where I was dealing with Africa and –
BOND: You go to AID.
WILKINS: Go to AID. And I had Africa and Asia. So I still had the same interests that I had had in my law firm, except now I am really dealing with it in a more profound way because I'm dealing with problems of developments rather than their legal problems at the UN.
BOND: So, what makes you go from the AID – this focus on international, Africa, Asia – to the community relations service where it is exclusively domestic? How does this – ?
WILKINS: Well, it partly was the Vietnam War. I opposed the Vietnam War. I went to Vietnam in '62, '63 and I just saw it was a loser. I saw something that the white people did not see, that it was a racist war. Not so much that we wanted to kill people of color but that we couldn't fully appreciate the tenacity, the ingenuity, and the power of the dream that these people had. And so we undervalued them as an enemy. And so we made all these really, wildly stupid prognostications. [Robert] McNamara was then saying that the war would be over by the summer of '65, end of '65 at the latest. Well, you just go on the ground and you see that that was not true. And so I came back and I opposed it, and I opposed it feverently. And I lost. I mean, the whole consensus – and I was a kid, you know, so -- and black to boot. And my career then if I were – you know, there was some thought that maybe I would transfer into the foreign service. But my career would've had to have gone through Vietnam. And I was not going to go and be involved in an effort that I thoroughly believed to be wrong and mistaken. Meanwhile, you guys were stirring it up in the South, and I just felt that it was time for me to get back into what was really most relevant to me.
BOND: So you go to the community relations service, and, in short order, bam, Watts explodes. You go there. What do you see when you go there?
WILKINS: I guess Cleveland to the tenth power. I see an isolated, despised, cut-off black community, underserved by every measure. I remember my first trip to Watts by myself, or without my boss, was with the head, the top staff man in the Los Angeles Human Relations Commission – black guy, and who subsequently worked for me at AID. And we were driving and he said, "I am glad to be able to take you down here." He said, "You know, I haven't been to Watts in ten years." You couldn't even get any place on the bus. If you wanted to go to a clinic, it would take you three-quarters of a day. No health services in the community, schools were lousy. I mean, just an island of nothing. And I'd been to Selma and I'd been to other Southern towns, and this was the same pattern repeated in Northern cities. So, it deepened my conviction that we really had to pay attention to the North. And so now, by the end of Watts, I am fully engaged in the whole idea that there has to be a Northern wing to the government's civil rights efforts.
BOND: Something that strikes me as all this conversation has continued. Last night, you said you did not think of yourself as a leader, but a helper. But it just strikes me that in high school, in college, in law school, and in these subsequent professional positions – welfare department, law firm, now the government – that you've been expressing and acting as if you were a leader.
WILKINS: Well, I didn't –
BOND: Now, I am not denying that you are also a helper.
WILKINS: Now, I didn't really think of myself as a leader. I thought of myself as a – in my evolving conception of myself, I saw myself as a very fortunate black person. I mean, very few people born in the '30s – black people – had two parents who went to college. We weren't – my mother says we were poor, I did not realize that we were poor. But we weren't poor in aspiration. We did not think of ourselves as people who were powerless. And that was great good fortune. And the values that I got from my parents were that you used whatever talents you had to help people, and that there was no option but to do that. So – and I never aspired to be a leader. I never aspired to be a famous activist. I mean, to leap ahead, we went – when Randall Robinson and Eleanor Holmes Norton and Mary Francis Berry went and sat in at the South African Embassy in 1984, I did not know anything about it. I was just struck by the audacity of what they had done. And so they had a press conference. I went to it. And as they were walking out I said to Randall, "Gee, if there is anything I can do to help you guys, let me know." And about two weeks later, Mary called me and said, "Come have lunch with Randall and me." And I did, and they said, "We need some media savvy, would you help us?" And I said, "Sure." And I helped. Well, ultimately, I became to be known correctly as one of the four or five leaders of that movement. But I didn't go to the movement to be the leader.
BOND: No, I understand that.
WILKINS: I just went to help.
BOND: But nonetheless you became recognized as one of the leaders of that movement and were a leader of that movement.
WILKINS: That's true. But I didn't go to be the leader.
BOND: No. No, no. So, whether sought or not, you became a leadership figure in this earlier phase of your career and subsequently later in your career.
BOND: Now the department, the Community Relations Service becomes a part of the Department of Justice, and Ramsey Clark is the Attorney General. And then the Detroit riot breaks out. Not to say that there are no other mini riots between these two, and what's that like?
WILKINS: That was one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life, because Detroit was a city I had known. It's close to Ann Arbor, lots of my buddies had grown up there, and I had done some courting there. All of a sudden, there's real fire fights. You could drive around the city at night and you can hear guns. There was a complete curfew. It was eerie, it was like being in a war. And my job was, at night, to go out and see – we did not believe all the reports that were coming in. Governor Romney was really useless. And my job was to go out at night and to see how much violence there actually was, because we had the Army there. And the question was how – and we wanted to get the Army – the President wanted to get the Army out of there quickly, because he did not want his Army to kill any people. And so I would go out at night and I was in places where there were shootings, and I was in a place where there was an awful police incident. And part of the problem was that you saw the National Guard was kids. And they were kids from out of state. This was the first time they had been to Detroit. They are scared to death, but they've got loaded guns. Well, I'm telling you, that was dangerous. And one night we were – my assistant and I – and he was another black guy because the white guys just couldn't go out at night – my assistant and I were out someplace and we got to the corner of Grand River and Joy Road. I will never forget this. And all of a sudden, a convoy just surrounds us. There were state police, there were National Guardsmen, there were local police, there were sheriffs and everything. And I had fancy credentials as a federal official. And they were here, in my inside coat pocket.
"Out of the car," they screamed. "Out of the car. Out of the car." And you emerge from the car and you're two black guys and you're surrounded by like twenty or thirty white men with guns, all of them pointing them guns at you. And they're all scared, too. And so I just say, "Scream 'Justice Department' at the top of your lungs." And we screamed, "Justice Department. Justice Department. Justice Department." And they're screaming at us, you know. And I really at that point, I think I'm going to die. And I was thirty-five years old. Same age as my father when he died. My father's last words were "Thirty-five and through." And I said "Thirty-five and through at the corner of Grand River and Joy Road." I wasn't afraid. I just said, "Damn." You know? Disappointed, really. But I kept on screaming and I couldn't, you know, no way am I going to pull out my identification. Finally one guy heard. And he said, "Wait a minute, wait a minute." And he obviously was an officer and he walked over and he opened my jacket and he took it out. He said, "Okay, okay, put the guns down." But that was close.
The other thing that struck me about Detroit – well, there was black militance. I really saw for the first time the real – there was theoretical working, intellectual work on blackness, black separation, black power, black – but it was more than just a slogan. It was really serious work on the conception of blackness and a separate identity and the power and the humanity of blackness. That I saw for the first time very clearly in Detroit.
The other thing I saw was, every night we were sent out by the President we would eat together. We were all doing other stuff all over the place. And you could not get a drink in the town, the town was dry. But Mayor Jerry [Jerome] Cavanagh sent a whole bunch of booze. So we would go up to Cyrus Vance's office, have a drink – I mean, his room – and go down and have dinner. But one of the people we wanted to see was Walker Cisler. He was the mover and shaker of the city, the head of Consolidated Edison or Detroit Edison. And John Doar, the head of the Civil Rights – legendary head of the Civil Rights Division, and I had been up interviewing people who had been arrested and who are these people who had been in the prison? We came back and I was downstairs filling out some reports and John called me and he said, "Roger, we have located Walker Cisler and he has invited us to dinner at the Detroit Yacht Club. I just thought you'd want to know that." I said, "What? We are going to the Detroit Yacht Club to dinner?" I couldn't believe it. The Detroit Yacht Club was a segregated institution. Now, we were not there – we're there because black people were rioting. And the former Deputy Attorney General of the United States – I mean, the former Deputy Secretary of the Defense of the United States, a future Secretary of State, the then-Deputy Attorney General, a future Secretary of State, the legendary white civil rights hero, and a flag from the Defense Department are all going off to this segregated joint, and are going to leave me, which they did. It was quite a lesson about our country. And Cy Vance never, ever, ever explained it to me, [never] said, "I'm sorry." All the little minions came and said – tried to make me think it never happened, "Mr. Vance would never do that." You know, the guy was not man enough to come to me and say, "Roger I am really sorry that this had to happen, but it was really important for us to see this guy."
BOND: Yeah. "We had to – "
WILKINS: Nothing.
BOND: Roger, moving very quickly through the last forty years, you leave the Department of Justice, you go to work for the Ford Foundation, you are in New York for a couple of years, and then in 1972, you come back to Washington and you go to the editorial board of the Washington Post, and in very short order, you write almost all of the editorials about the Watergate scandal and you get a Pulitzer Prize. And I'm going to suggest to you that...that is the beginning of a career as a writer. Even though you are now a professor, that I think the larger world knows you as a writer, as an opinion writer, not only for the Post and later for The New York Times, but as an opinion person, somebody who puts his opinions out there, this is what I believe and so on and so on. We talked a lot about how those opinions may have been developed. But just very quickly about the writing. It is interesting that when you were at the Ford Foundation you mentioned associations you have with Gore Vidal, with Norman Mailer, with Leonard Bernstein who is not a writer but part of that artistic, cultural world. And I am wondering if those associations in any way affected this later writing period in your life?
WILKINS: I think the writing period was entirely attributable to my father. When he was dying, he died at home. And he was in bed. And he wanted to help support the family. And he sat in the bed with the Royal portable typewriter in his lap. And he wrote pieces that he sent out to magazines. I didn't know he was dying but I knew he was very sick. And I knew he was determined to help the family. And then he died. It was just in my mind that was what brave, strong people did, that you wrote, that you tried to part the fog and you wrote because you were strong and you cared. And so I – if there had been a journalism job available to me when I graduated from college, I would have gone straight into journalism. So it wasn't all of those people. But by the time I went to the Post obviously I'd had all these experiences that we've talked about. And so – and I was almost forty – so by this time I am pretty clear about an engaged kind of blackness being at the core of my work.
BOND: Yes, that is what I am curious about, because it is obvious your father, by the very nature of what he did – believed that words had the power to transform events. He wasn't writing kiddy stories. He wasn't writing romantic novels. He wasn't that kind of writer. He was this kind of writer. And so, that's the example that you have been held up to. So when you actually become a writer, that's the example you are going to follow.
WILKINS: And I wanted to help make the Post speak more precisely and more powerfully to the needs of the poor and the outcast, whoever they were. But I got into this Watergate thing almost – it was two months after I got there. I did have a law degree. I had been in the Justice Department. I did know about foreign, of domestic policy and politics. But it was almost by default. Because no one really realized it was going to be a big story. So I got it and then it ran through the summer when everybody else was gone. A rookie – no matter who that rookie was – normally would not have gotten that. By the time everybody came back and the thing was growing, it was mine. Now I didn't win a Pulitzer. What happened was the Post put in the work of Woodward, Bernstein, Herb Block, and me as a package. So the Post was awarded the gold medal for public service by the Pulitzer board. And it cited the work of the four of us. But it was certainly a heck of a way to break into journalism.
BOND: That sounds like winning a Pulitzer to me.
WILKINS: Well, I am just saying it –
BOND: There were others involved.
WILKINS: Yes.
BOND: Now, is it fair to say that Watergate represented a detour from the kind of journalism you wanted to do? And at the New York Times you get the opportunity? Now did you go to the Times because you would get that opportunity or...?
WILKINS: No, I went to the Times – I went to the Times because I had pushed the Post. That was a time when you were the first black to do this, the first black to do that. And it was very difficult being the first and the top black in a place. And there was a lot of pressure on you from blacks who were less fortunate to help them solve these problems of racism that were occurring in the institution and also retain enough credibility with your bosses to continue to push. So it was as if I had two jobs. And the job of helping to fix the Post was traumatic, and the writing was the easier part. But I had pushed very hard. And Watergate was such a hard thing that you felt like you were in a closet all the time because you were writing about the same thing and talking about the same thing all the time. And I have to admit I was in terrible shape. I mean, as you know, Julian, those '60s and into the early '70s just took a lot out of virtually everybody who was involved. And I was depleted psychic-ly. I think I was going through a depression at the time, delayed – they tell you now – delayed grieving, when you lose a parent when you are a child. So I went through that depression and drank too much. My marriage was over. So I was really screwed up. The only thing I had…I could continue to write well. So I had had it with the Post and knew the Times wanted me, and so I went to New York.
BOND: So you go from the Times editorial board to becoming an opinion columnist for the Times and write a number of pieces for them and then leave them, but in leaving them, join the editorial board of the Nation. Now the Nation and New York Times are very different publications. With the Nation having a much more pointed point of view, not to say that the Times does not have one, but they are very, very different. How did you go from the one to the other?
WILKINS: Well, I was always more left than these mainstream papers. And so, I had a lot of fights over a lot of editorials, and I was more left than...you know, I was writing at the time of emergence of the gay and lesbian movement in New York. And I supported that movement, sympathetic to it and wanted to write about it and got columns spiked. The only stuff I ever had spiked was on issues of gay and lesbian.
BOND: Nothing on race?
WILKINS: Only one thing on race. When Pat Moynihan first ran for the Senate and he ran in a primary and I did not like Pat Moynihan, do not like Pat Moynihan. Thought he used black people as stepping stones. And my editor on the editorial page didn't like him either. And so, when I said I wanted to write an anti-Moynihan thing, said, "Go ahead, my boy." And I did it. It would have appeared on election day. And the publisher pulled it.
BOND: Was it an editorial urging people to vote against – ?
WILKINS: No, it was a column. It just said Moynihan shouldn't be a Senator and these are the reasons why – that he was anti-black, essentially. The publisher pulled it.
BOND: Because the paper's opinion was that Moynihan ought to be elected?
WILKINS: The publisher had forced into the paper an editorial supporting Moynihan, that the editorial – the editorial board was against Moynihan and nobody on the editorial board would write a pro-Moynihan editorial. So the publisher produced one. And it was his paper, so if he wants to do it. So in order – the editorial page editor said, "Well, we'll get a different opinion on the opinion page, the Op-Ed page," and that was mine. And the publisher sent him a note after he pulled it and said, "I agree that Roger Wilkins' column is perceptive and eloquent and informative, and it can run in the New York Times any day after election day." And so, it ran the following day. And so, somebody asked [Arthur] Sultzberger, "Well, why did you pull it?" This is Sultzberger, who was the current publisher, who is the father of the current publisher. And he said, "Because I wanted Pat to win." So that is the only other time I got something pulled.
BOND: And so, you are at the Nation and then go the Washington Star, which eventually folds.
WILKINS: Well, the Nation really isn't a paying job. It is just an ornamental job and I, every once in a while, write something for them.
BOND: And the Star folds, you're on the editorial aboard of the Star, and the Star folds. Then you are at the Institute for Policy Studies, which is a left think tank, in effect.
WILKINS: Right.
BOND: Roger, moving very quickly through the last forty years, you leave the Department of Justice, you go to work for the Ford Foundation, you are in New York for a couple of years, and then in 1972, you come back to Washington and you go to the editorial board of the Washington Post, and in very short order, you write almost all of the editorials about the Watergate scandal and you get a Pulitzer Prize. And I'm going to suggest to you that...that is the beginning of a career as a writer. Even though you are now a professor, that I think the larger world knows you as a writer, as an opinion writer, not only for the Post and later for The New York Times, but as an opinion person, somebody who puts his opinions out there, this is what I believe and so on and so on. We talked a lot about how those opinions may have been developed. But just very quickly about the writing. It is interesting that when you were at the Ford Foundation you mentioned associations you have with Gore Vidal, with Norman Mailer, with Leonard Bernstein who is not a writer but part of that artistic, cultural world. And I am wondering if those associations in any way affected this later writing period in your life?
WILKINS: I think the writing period was entirely attributable to my father. When he was dying, he died at home. And he was in bed. And he wanted to help support the family. And he sat in the bed with the Royal portable typewriter in his lap. And he wrote pieces that he sent out to magazines. I didn't know he was dying but I knew he was very sick. And I knew he was determined to help the family. And then he died. It was just in my mind that was what brave, strong people did, that you wrote, that you tried to part the fog and you wrote because you were strong and you cared. And so I – if there had been a journalism job available to me when I graduated from college, I would have gone straight into journalism. So it wasn't all of those people. But by the time I went to the Post obviously I'd had all these experiences that we've talked about. And so – and I was almost forty – so by this time I am pretty clear about an engaged kind of blackness being at the core of my work.
BOND: Yes, that is what I am curious about, because it is obvious your father, by the very nature of what he did – believed that words had the power to transform events. He wasn't writing kiddy stories. He wasn't writing romantic novels. He wasn't that kind of writer. He was this kind of writer. And so, that's the example that you have been held up to. So when you actually become a writer, that's the example you are going to follow.
WILKINS: And I wanted to help make the Post speak more precisely and more powerfully to the needs of the poor and the outcast, whoever they were. But I got into this Watergate thing almost – it was two months after I got there. I did have a law degree. I had been in the Justice Department. I did know about foreign, of domestic policy and politics. But it was almost by default. Because no one really realized it was going to be a big story. So I got it and then it ran through the summer when everybody else was gone. A rookie – no matter who that rookie was – normally would not have gotten that. By the time everybody came back and the thing was growing, it was mine. Now I didn't win a Pulitzer. What happened was the Post put in the work of Woodward, Bernstein, Herb Block, and me as a package. So the Post was awarded the gold medal for public service by the Pulitzer board. And it cited the work of the four of us. But it was certainly a heck of a way to break into journalism.
BOND: That sounds like winning a Pulitzer to me.
WILKINS: Well, I am just saying it –
BOND: There were others involved.
WILKINS: Yes.
BOND: Now, is it fair to say that Watergate represented a detour from the kind of journalism you wanted to do? And at the New York Times you get the opportunity? Now did you go to the Times because you would get that opportunity or...?
WILKINS: No, I went to the Times – I went to the Times because I had pushed the Post. That was a time when you were the first black to do this, the first black to do that. And it was very difficult being the first and the top black in a place. And there was a lot of pressure on you from blacks who were less fortunate to help them solve these problems of racism that were occurring in the institution and also retain enough credibility with your bosses to continue to push. So it was as if I had two jobs. And the job of helping to fix the Post was traumatic, and the writing was the easier part. But I had pushed very hard. And Watergate was such a hard thing that you felt like you were in a closet all the time because you were writing about the same thing and talking about the same thing all the time. And I have to admit I was in terrible shape. I mean, as you know, Julian, those '60s and into the early '70s just took a lot out of virtually everybody who was involved. And I was depleted psychic-ly. I think I was going through a depression at the time, delayed – they tell you now – delayed grieving, when you lose a parent when you are a child. So I went through that depression and drank too much. My marriage was over. So I was really screwed up. The only thing I had…I could continue to write well. So I had had it with the Post and knew the Times wanted me, and so I went to New York.
BOND: So you go from the Times editorial board to becoming an opinion columnist for the Times and write a number of pieces for them and then leave them, but in leaving them, join the editorial board of the Nation. Now the Nation and New York Times are very different publications. With the Nation having a much more pointed point of view, not to say that the Times does not have one, but they are very, very different. How did you go from the one to the other?
WILKINS: Well, I was always more left than these mainstream papers. And so, I had a lot of fights over a lot of editorials, and I was more left than...you know, I was writing at the time of emergence of the gay and lesbian movement in New York. And I supported that movement, sympathetic to it and wanted to write about it and got columns spiked. The only stuff I ever had spiked was on issues of gay and lesbian.
BOND: Nothing on race?
WILKINS: Only one thing on race. When Pat Moynihan first ran for the Senate and he ran in a primary and I did not like Pat Moynihan, do not like Pat Moynihan. Thought he used black people as stepping stones. And my editor on the editorial page didn't like him either. And so, when I said I wanted to write an anti-Moynihan thing, said, "Go ahead, my boy." And I did it. It would have appeared on election day. And the publisher pulled it.
BOND: Was it an editorial urging people to vote against – ?
WILKINS: No, it was a column. It just said Moynihan shouldn't be a Senator and these are the reasons why – that he was anti-black, essentially. The publisher pulled it.
BOND: Because the paper's opinion was that Moynihan ought to be elected?
WILKINS: The publisher had forced into the paper an editorial supporting Moynihan, that the editorial – the editorial board was against Moynihan and nobody on the editorial board would write a pro-Moynihan editorial. So the publisher produced one. And it was his paper, so if he wants to do it. So in order – the editorial page editor said, "Well, we'll get a different opinion on the opinion page, the Op-Ed page," and that was mine. And the publisher sent him a note after he pulled it and said, "I agree that Roger Wilkins' column is perceptive and eloquent and informative, and it can run in the New York Times any day after election day." And so, it ran the following day. And so, somebody asked [Arthur] Sultzberger, "Well, why did you pull it?" This is Sultzberger, who was the current publisher, who is the father of the current publisher. And he said, "Because I wanted Pat to win." So that is the only other time I got something pulled.
BOND: And so, you are at the Nation and then go the Washington Star, which eventually folds.
WILKINS: Well, the Nation really isn't a paying job. It is just an ornamental job and I, every once in a while, write something for them.
BOND: And the Star folds, you're on the editorial aboard of the Star, and the Star folds. Then you are at the Institute for Policy Studies, which is a left think tank, in effect.
WILKINS: Right.
BOND: As I said a moment ago, I think the larger public view of you is as a writer and a thinker – a public intellectual. A phrase we didn't have until you became one.
WILKINS: I think Noam Chomsky and others who got there first.
BOND: Yes, they were. But you see this amazing rise of black public intellectuals, the most celebrated of which of course is Henry Louis Gates. But there are many, many others – Cornel West and many, many others. And you've continued this role as a television commentator, as a writer, as an opinionist, if I can make up a word. And a couple of themes that we've seen throughout your writing I want to talk about. One is the relationship between this growing black middle class of affluent, educated, well-fixed people, not multi-millionaires, but just solid citizens – two-income families, two college-educated, graduate school perhaps – people making it for all intents and purposes. And the relationship between them and this underclass. This stubborn, persistent underclass which, despite best efforts of government and private sources, just won't go away. Talk about the relationship – what it ought to be, what it is, and what you've argued for.
WILKINS: Well, it certainly comes – my concern about the underclass comes from my parents and my experience as a welfare worker in Cleveland and then my work in the U.S. government. I think it's a continuation of the civil rights movement. I don't think the civil rights movement ever died. It never – didn't accomplish everything that it wanted to accomplish. And I don't think that just because you make some money and are lucky that you can sign a separate peace. The people in the worst precincts in this society – their ancestors came over in the same slave ships that my ancestors came on. The only difference is that I'm luckier. And if I go through my ancestry, I can look at the points at which – from my great-grandfather, who was born in slavery in Mississippi – in which the Wilkins family just, my strand, just lucked out. And all of a sudden, here I am on this earth no better than some of my cousins who were left back in Mississippi except that we were lucky and they were not. Well, I might have used that good luck just for me. I don't think so. I don't think that is the right thing to do. I think that you use your leverage that your good fortune gave you to help save other people. And my judgment is that there are a lot of white people that do not like the inner-city people at all and use them as reasons to cut back on social programs. If black people aren't seen to be really in there struggling on behalf of those people, you cannot expect to move the consciences of whites at all, ever. So then you'll have the creation of a permanent, untouchable caste in this society, and I think that's just hideous. I just think that's – I think it's sinful. And I do not think you can – and we're destroying children. We have let children's potential atrophy by inattention and by providing the worst in our society for them to grow up in. And I live here. This is my country and I can't just sit by as a fat, happy witness to it.
BOND: Here you are arguing that others like you in your circumstance ought to be engaged like you. This is a Progressive in 1988. And you write, "As successful blacks are increasingly integrated into mainstream America, their interests and energies come to resemble those of the dominant society." On the one hand, that's expectable. That's natural. As you do better, you are better educated, you are able to escape some of the vicissitudes of poverty and the harsh life that all that entails, then you do begin to consider yourself – and should – consider yourself part of the larger society, and your interests become that of the larger society. What's wrong with that? Let me be the devil's advocate. What's wrong with that? Isn't that the way America is supposed to work?
WILKINS: Well, there are two answers to that. I don't believe you have to wear a hair shirt. I drive a big, expensive European-made sedan, which I love driving. My wife and I own a beach house on the Delaware shore. It is not poor. I don't think I have to live a life of poverty. I enjoy middle-class American life, and I enjoy it very much. But I also think I must spend a part of my energy and effort in reaching into those places where my conscience tells me it is essential for me to be engaged if we're ever to expect the change that you and I were engaged in when we were young to continue to occur.
BOND: Let me be Shelby Steele and answer – go ahead.
WILKINS: Let me talk about the young people and what I really meant. We struggled to change Harvard, Michigan, all those places, so that the opportunities for younger black people would be greater. I'm delighted when I go to these places and see young black people. Then they come out and they go to law firms. And they get focused on making it in the law firm. And they do what their neighbors, their white contemporaries do, and they get themselves a mortgage. And then they get themselves a spouse. And then they get themselves a private school bill. And they don't have the advantage that we had when we were growing up – a weird advantage, but of segregation to make us conscious of racism, of the struggle – to make us conscious and want to be involved. And what I am trying to do in that piece is to provide a kind of a discussion, and generate – lead, if you will – a discussion that tries to substitute for the things that gave us the consciousness. Because my argument is the job isn't done. We are not close. And it will not get done if the best and the brightest of the black community, instead of forming SNCC, instead of going to the U.S. Government and doing civil rights, now gives all of their energies to create American corporations, AOL or to big financial –
BOND: But isn't that what we want, is people to work at AOL or General Motors?
WILKINS: Yes, we want them there, but we also want them giving money to the NAACP. We also want them clamoring to get on the board of the NAACP to get rid of that old fossil leadership, you know. And we want them to mentor kids. We want them to give money to start charter schools. We want them to be involved in church programs that are trying to help young, poor blacks learn about responsible sexuality. All of that stuff. They can be as rich as they want to be if they will also give a part of their energy to the part of our community that is left behind.
BOND: Well, why don't we just follow the advice that Shelby Steele, I think – and I'm sort of back and forth with you to another column – why don't you just tell those people who have been left behind to pick themselves up, clean themselves up, go to school, get a job, stop living on the street, join the society? Why don't they just do that?
WILKINS: Why don't I be like Shelby Steele? Because I am not stupid. That's number one. And number two, the structures of opportunity for these people are totally clogged. I'm on the school board in the District of Columbia now. And I go out into the far reaches of Southeast Washington, across the Anacostia River, where progress of the city has consigned the poorest blacks. Their schools are lousy. Their streets are lousy. Their city services are lousy. There are no jobs anywhere in sight. Masses of these kids are going through the schools and coming out illiterate.
BOND: And Shelby Steele would say, "Well, hey, the schools are run by black people, the teachers are all black, the students are all black, you know, these are not white racists having done these things. These are black people doing these things to other black people. You can't be shouting racism and Jim Crow like you could twenty or thirty years ago."
WILKINS: I do not think that I have said racism and Jim Crow in this conversation, or in that piece.
BOND: No, you did not. But he'd bring it up anyway.
WILKINS: Well, my answer to that is two-fold. That the demoralization of the people who run the school system – that the disintegration started when the white people were running it, but the demoralization of the people who are in the school system is, in fact, a part of the depression that a lot of black people have as a result of being black. It is true that there are black slackers in the school system, which is one of the reasons I went on the school board at my advanced age to see if we cannot change and revitalize that. I do not accept – I do not accept black slackers who destroy poor black people with any more warmth – with really, a great deal more hostility – than I do white people who fail to serve those people. And I believe that black people who have been exposed to excellent places like Brown and Amherst and places like UCLA have a responsibility to bring back the passion for excellence into these institutions that are failing. Because sometimes black people who have come to those places have only come for a paycheck and not for the kids.
BOND: Let me go to a different subject, and another that's been a theme of yours fairly constantly, and that's black leadership. You wrote a series of wonderful pieces, I saw, about the trauma the NAACP was going through, and a celebratory column when Myrlie Evers was elected chair, and condemnatory columns when the previous administration was bankrupting the organization – taking the NAACP and its leadership to task, celebrating them when they made a turn for the better. And here is a column about Vernon Jordan from, I think, 1981, called "Black Leaders and Needs." It's from the Times. And it celebrates Vernon Jordan for combining success of the kind we're talking about – enormous financial success – but with a commitment to civil rights and justice all along. And I guess that's what you were talking about in our previous conversation a minute ago about the lack of the melding of these two.
WILKINS: Right.
BOND: Why is that? Why do we not have more Vernon Jordans? People who – we have a lot of people making a lot of money right now. But why don't we have people who combine his social conscience? Where is that going?
WILKINS: Well, two things. Vernon was born poor and black in segregated Atlanta. And he grew up in the movement. A lot of the people who are now becoming affluent, as I said, don't have that advantage. But there's another thing. And that is that powerful American society, American capitalism at its upper reaches, at least, is very, very seductive. It has been said to me many times, "If you just go along, you will get along. If you don't – If you just accept our values – and our values are that we gotta make a lot of money and we will do things for black people when it is convenient to us, that if we can round off the hard edges of these problems, we will slide by them. And if you do that, your salary will increase, your perks will increase, you will be included in our social milieu." And they are re-creating for these people, at the upper reaches of capitalism, the same kind of feeling that I had as a teenager – "I am not going to be like those other black people. I am going to be acceptable to white people." Well, I got over that. You know, you grow out of it. I'm glad I had and understood it, began to understand when I was a teenager, and was mature enough to be ashamed of it and put it behind me. But for people who have not gone through the crucible of the Civil Rights movement, who are told often by their black parents that "what you're supposed to do is go and make a lot of money and be an American success," they don't have the defenses that we had against this separation of themselves from the black poor. They equate progress of the race with their own bank accounts. And there have not been enough countervailing lessons in this society to tell them that's not true.
BOND: How could we give them the lessons? How do you give them the lessons? I mean, you give them to them here in print. But how do we, in the larger society – how do we give people those lessons?
WILKINS: Well, I'm not sure. I'm not sure that I have very many answers. As you know, you persuaded me to become the publisher of the NAACP magazine, the Crisis. And I hope that we'll get enough members of the NAACP – which is an easy way to be, a painless way to be involved in the movement – and we will provide them in the Crisis with enough examples of people who are doing very constructive things, that we use that in our time the way Du Bois used the Crisis to mobilize people to energy in another time. So, that's one of my hopes. The other is that we do have a whole new generation of black journalists now. There is now kind of – unlike my time a quarter of a century ago – there is a critical mass. I mean, there couldn't have been a National Association of Black Journalists when I was there. There'd have been about eleven of us, six from the Post and five from the Times, and that would've been about it. But now they really do have big conventions and they really do – they're struggling to get the message, the kind of message that I tried to get out when I was writing a lot more than I do now. And a lot of people pay a lot of attention to that. We have a columnist named Courtland Milloy in Washington. And as you know a lot of people read Courtland. I am just amazed, and there is a black woman who writes – Donna Britt, people pay attention to her. And I – all over the country. Bob Herbert in New York.
BOND: Clarence Page.
WILKINS: Yeah. So that the black voices are there and the public intellectuals. I mean, you know, you can't go to a lecture by Cornel West and not come out with your blood stirred, you know? So, you know, there is the NAACP doing things. The NAACP, you, and Myrlie have really brought the NAACP back from a disgraceful place. It is a respectable organization. Black people can now again be proud to be a part of it. The activism of the NAACP, during the election and afterwards in Florida when the lawsuits [were] breaking out, made people say, instead of the old days when people said, "Well, the NAACP is doing nothing," now they see it as an active, vital part of American life. So, I think revitalizing the movement, giving it higher profile. I wish the Urban League had a higher profile. If people – because there are parents all over this country, black parents who care. They are engaged in the issue of their kids – or kids that they have kind of adopted – getting a decent education. And if national movements can somehow hook into that, it would be wonderful.
BOND: One thing that seems to be missing now as opposed to thirty, forty years ago is the ability to engage people who do not read The New York Times, who don't subscribe to the Progressive and who probably don't read Crisis, either. The '60s movement, which really is an aberration –
WILKINS: Right.
BOND: – if you go over the long twentieth century – but the '60s movement engaged people who weren't connected to these organs of influence who didn't, wouldn't have come to hear Cornel West speak. How do you connect these different parts of the black body politic: the middle class, the intellectual class, and this working class and even poorer class? How do you make these connections?
WILKINS: I would say that the best vehicle we have is the NAACP. It is imperfect. It is not as large as it ought to be. But it is the one nationwide vehicle where we have a high enough profile, so that its leaders – when its leaders speak, they often get national press attention. And if we can improve our internal conversations and communications with our branches so that there is cross-fertilization and people feel truly – not just at convention time, but all the time – that they're part of a national movement that is doing something that's real, I think that is our best chance. There is no other organization in the black community like it. And it's our jewel, really.
BOND: I obviously feel that way. But I also know from the past and from the present that not everybody is organizationally-minded. And no matter how good the NAACP gets, there are always going to be some people saying, "Well, not for me. Nothing wrong, but not for me."
WILKINS: Right. Right.
BOND: There has got to be some way to get those people doing something.
WILKINS: Well, obviously, I believe in education. Everything I've said to you about how I developed. And two of my three children are "cause people" and are able to do it because of education. One of my three children was learning disabled. He's had a terrific life in another field. And I think, you know, somebody criticized us recently about – criticized the NAACP about – not dealing with barber shop issues. One of the things that black people talk about in the barber shops all the time still is education. "These schools," "This school in my neighborhood – " I think that education and the criminal justice system are the two issues that are national issues that you can reach virtually everybody in the society. And I think that if you can't do it through us, you can do it through the churches. And I think the church is still what it has always been, our main social and religious institution. So, I think those two organizations are the best opportunities that we have to reach and rekindle.
BOND: As you sit here and think about tomorrow, the next day, the next year, and so on, and think about the black condition, are you hopeful? Optimistic? Pessimistic?
WILKINS: Well, I am wiser than I was when I was young. And I understand the capitalistic system in ways that I didn't as a young person. And capitalism really doesn't have social conscience at the core of its – it's there inextricably responding to the laws of the market and economics. And it does social things as is useful. And the globalization of capitalism has taken away a big asset that we had in the '60s. That is, powerful local business entities that had stakes in local communities. You know, the Chrysler Corporation, which you used to be able to get to do things in Detroit, is now a German corporation, essentially. And they are all looking abroad so that it's much harder to get powerful local – and the people who run these corporations are not necessarily people who grew up in the community and have a stake in it, so it's much harder to persuade the local business leaders to become involved in making changes. And they're the people who can drive change more easily than other people. And they were, for a time, some of our best allies in the '60s.
On the other hand, I live in a country that is just so different than the one that I was born into in 1932. And it's better in so many ways. The number of black people who are born into misery is much smaller now than it was. We see how powerful the economy can be. So, I believe in struggle and I believe that struggle produces change. So I am optimistic that my seventeen-year-old child, who will be about the age I am now in the middle of the next century, will have participated in struggle and have participated in change that will make the country more just. However, the problems that I see – the ancillary but very real problems – are very difficult. Population. I mean, we have got twice as many people in this country now than when I was a kid. And we see crowding most vividly in automobile congestion on the highways. But the brownout in California, the water shortages, just pressure of population against resources is going to be very great. Globalization will continue with less and less loyalty to localities. And an economy that more and more favors quick and nimble intellects is going to be less and less caring about people who are stuck back in a pre-industrial age education. So, the problems are daunting.
But I guess the experience of my lifetime tells me that Douglass, Frederick Douglass, was right. That struggle is necessary. That struggle has to be real. That you have to really clash and upset things. But if you do that, and you do it persistently enough, and you do it intelligently enough, you can make change. And there is, in my judgment, a larger and larger cadre in this society of decent and caring white people. And even though the coalitions between blacks and Hispanics, particularly, are very difficult to make and sustain, the fact is, it's going to be much harder over the years to keep up the fantasy that this is a white country and that all benefits should naturally flow to white people. So I think we are moving toward a more just, multi-cultural society. I just hope that we don't leave that little cluster of poor black people behind in places where they can't be reached.
BOND: So we could end this by saying, "It's been nice to talk to Roger Wilkins, cautious optimist"?
WILKINS: That's fair. That's fair.
BOND: Thank you.
WILKINS: You are welcome.