Wilson, Reginald

WILSON, REGINALD (1927-2020). A prominent African American psychologist and educator, Reginald Wilson was a prominent civil rights activist and lifelong socialist with connections to C.L.R. James and to James and Grace Lee Boggs.

Wilson was born on 27 February 1927 in Detroit, Michigan. His parents, Oliver Leon Wilson and Nancy McCrimmon Golden, were part of the Great Migration, traveling north to Detroit. His father left the family when Reginald was young, and his mother raised him and his three brothers by giving piano lessons and taking in laundry. A religious woman, she took her boys to church, and they grew up singing in the choirs of churches in Detroit and Windsor, Canada.

Wilson had dreamed, since he was a boy, of being a pilot. The US entry into the World War II in 1941 gave him his chance. At the age of eighteen, he enlisted in the Army. While stationed in Texas, he passed the test to become part of the Army Air Force. Sent to Tuskegee, Alabama to be trained, he became one of 1,000 storied Tuskegee Airmen and saw combat in Italy.

After working briefly in a Ford plant in Detroit and finding the work grueling, Wilson went to college on the GI Bill, enrolling at Wayne State University where he eventually earned a BA, MA, and PhD. He became involved in the civil rights movement and remained an activist throughout his life. While participating in all of the usual civil rights protests over housing, employment, and access to services, he helped to found the nation’s first Black ski club, the Jim Dandies.

Through his civil rights work, in 1959 Wilson connected with Correspondence, the unusual newspaper inspired by the politics of C.L.R. James, but by that time, guided by Grace Lee Boggs and James Boggs and despite its small circulation, a unique influence in Detroit. The “Correspondence” group had a small but active following in local auto plants, in the Black community, but also at Wayne State University. Wilson grew close to the Boggses, and as a staff member for Correspondence he covered the civil rights movement, traveling to Atlanta and getting to know the movement there led by Martin Luther King, Jr. In Monroe, North Carolina, Wilson connected with Robert F. Williams, the organizer of a Black armed self-defense organization and later author of Negroes with Guns (1962). In 1961, Wilson undertook the dangerous task of delivering guns to Williams and the Monroe organization. He also led the Detroit Committee to Aid the Monroe Defendants.

Wilson became a professor of psychology and director of Black Studies and eventually president of Wayne County Community College for a decade. He was the author of many articles criticizing racism in education. Into his nineties, he joined civil rights demonstrations and continued to participate in the New Politics editorial board. Wilson died at the age of ninety-three at his home in Florida.

Wood, Stephen M. In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs (Justice, Power, and Politics). (University of North Carolina Press; Illustrated edition, 2020), pp. 285-6.