Roy Wilkens – NAACP Executive Secretary

Roy Wilkens – NAACP Executive Secretary

The following are remarks made by Roy Wilkens, NAACP Executive Secretary, at the Better Race Relations award presentation.

Now this is a continuing struggle. This is a struggle for, as has been said, Jews and Gentiles, northerners and southerners, African-Americans and whites, Spanish-speaking persons, both on the east coast and in the southwest, and has been a struggle for some of our other peoples in America from the old country, who were not accepted at first when they came to these shores.

They had to fight prejudice, they had to fight restrictions, and they had to fight discrimination. Many of them had to fight to get into labor unions, even as the African-Americans have had to fight to get into labor unions. There was discrimination against so many of them and there is no need to call the roll.

But always in a free society you can make known how you stand, what you believe in, and this Local 6 has done tonight in its award to these young people from Little Rock.

I don't think we ought to become discouraged over this continuing struggle for decency because man has been working at it for many centuries. We only become discouraged when those who should speak out and can speak out, do not speak. When we adopt that kind of attitude, then democracy is on its way out. Because, never fear, the men and women who do not want democracy do not sleep. They are ever alert and have no scruples and no ethics.

We have not only the expressing of our views and the choosing of sides, but we have the actual testing in the fire of the furnaces. No movement is ever won, no philosophy is ever triumphant, and no government ever comes to full rule, without those who actually sacrifice in the heat of battle.

You know that a union fight is not won without some work on the picket line. You know this country as a democracy was never fashioned and never safe until men were ready to die when, as the expression goes "the chips were down." The philosophizing was all over and now it was time to act, and unless you have actors at that time, in the crucial spot at the right time, with the right philosophy and the right weapons, you lose.

So, in Little Rock, when the chips were down, when it wasn't a question of arguing before a judge, or passing a resolution, but the question was "Who goes up and in the door of that high school - no matter how many mobs are outside?" These kids were the kids that did it. I don't have to tell your Union, that in the final analysis, that's what counts.