Roger Wilkins, a longtime civil rights attorney and educator, made headlines in 1973 when he and a group of Washington Post reporters won the Pulitzer Prize for exposing the Watergate scandal. Wilkins, who passed away earlier this year, was honored by George Mason University last week, where he taught for nearly two decades.
Wilkins was born January 29, 1932 in Kansas City, Missouri. After losing his father at a young age, he and his mother moved north to the city of New York where his uncle, Roy Wilkins, was the executive director of the NAACP. In the Sugar Hill section of Harlem, Roger Wilkins held court with the likes of W.E.D. Du Bois and Thurgood Marshall among other famous Black heroes.
Inspired to pursue a career in law, Wilkins graduated from the University of Michigan with undergraduate and juris doctorate degrees. After landing a good job in New York as a lawyer in a big firm, rare at the time for Black men, the civil rights movement caught his attention. Wilkins explained in an NPR interview that the “Little Rock Nine” situation and other issues across the South piqued his desire to work in civil rights. (READ MORE)
