Roger Wilkins, a historian, journalist and activist who held a key civil rights post in the President Lyndon B. Johnson administration, has died at a nursing home in Kensington, MD., at the age of 85.
Wilkins was a ranking Justice Department official during the 1960s who was chosen by President Johnson to direct the Community Relations Service. Wilkins later composed Pulitzer Prize-winning editorials about the Watergate scandal for The Washington Post and wrote unsparingly about the conflicts and burdens he experienced as a black man in positions of influence. In his 1982 memoir, he described the unconscious racism he saw as “the lead black in white institutions for 16 years.”
Roy Wilkins, who led the NAACP from 1955 to 1977, was his uncle. Decades later, his daughter Elizabeth worked in onthe presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama.
In law school, Roger Wilkins was an intern for Thurgood Marshall, then director-counsel of the NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund and later a U.S. Supreme Court justice.
Most recently, Wilkins was a history professor at George Mason University in Virginia. The cause of death was from complications from dementia, said a daughter, Elizabeth Wilkins.
