Standing Fast; The Autobiography of Roy Wilkins

New York: Viking Press, 1982. First Edition. Octavo. 24cm. Publisher's black cloth spine over black paper covered boards, titled in silver gilt to the spine. Dustjacket. 361pp. Some light wear to the edges of the boards, in a strong, clean dustjacket with some sunning to the spine panel. A very good copy. Internally clean. Inscribed by the nephew of Roy Wilkins, the late Roger Wilkins; civil rights campaigner, professor, journalist and ex-Assistant Attorney General for Lyndon B. Johnson:
"For Glenn Watts, from a man who loved Roy Wilkins, Roger Wilkins, 9/12/82"

Roy Wilkins was a lifelong Civil Rights campaigner and activist; beginning (truncated) as editor of the St. Paul Appeal, a Black newspaper he worked at while attending the University of Minnesota before moving on to run the Kansas City Call in 1923 serving the African-American population of Kansas City.
Wilkins' journalism naturally segued into his campaigning against Jim Crow laws, and in the 1930's he moved to NYC to take up a position as Assistant Secretary of the NAACP under Walter Francis White. In 1934 he replaced none other than W.E.B. Dubois as editor of the NAACP's official newspaper; "The Crisis." An autobiographical account of a man who thoroughly earned his place in the annals of the struggle for Civil Rights in the US.
"The players in this drama of frustration and indignity are not commas or semicolons in a legislative thesis; they are people, human beings, citizens of the United States of America." Roy Wilkins. (Inventory #: 82655)