(WASHINGTON POST) — Roger W. Wilkins, a ranking Justice Department official during the 1960s who 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, died March 26 at a nursing home in Kensington, Maryland. He was 85.
The cause was complications from dementia, said his daughter, Elizabeth Wilkins.
In a career that traversed law, journalism and education, Wilkins made matters of race and poverty central to his work as an assistant attorney general in the Johnson administration and later as one of the first black editorial board members at the Post and the New York Times.