Wilkins worked as a welfare lawyer in Ohio before becoming an Assistant Attorney General in President Lyndon B. Johnson's administration at age 33; in this capacity, he was one of the highest-ranking Black Americans ever to serve in the executive branch up to that time.
Roger Wilkins was sworn in as Director of the federal Community Relations Service on Friday, February 4, 1966, in a ceremony at The White House.[5]
He left The Washington Post in 1974 to work for The New York Times as an editorial board member and opinion columnist. In 1977, he joined other journalists of color in a lawsuit alleging that the newspaper employed racial discrimination in hiring and promotions. Although the litigation resulted in a cash settlement and the facilitation of improvements, he left the newspaper in 1979 to become an associate editor and columnist at The Washington Star in 1980-81. In 1980, he became a radio news commentator for National Public Radio (NPR). Beginning in 1982, Wilkins was a senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.
Wilkins and fellow Black journalist William Raspberry were appointed concurrently as the first non-White members of the Pulitzer Prize Board in 1979; in this capacity, Wilkins served on an advisory panel that recommended the forfeiture of Janet Cooke's Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing and as the Columbia University-based committee's chairperson during the 1987-88 academic year.
Wilkins was the Robinson Professor of History and American Culture at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia from 1988 until his retirement in 2007, becoming one of the most eminent faculty members at the incipient institution. He also retained his position at the Institute for Policy Studies until 1992. Wilkins was also the publisher of the NAACP's journal, The Crisis.
