KNOXVILLE, TN — Dewey Roberts II received the Whitney Young Jr. Lifetime Achievement Award from the Knoxville Area Urban League. The award, named after Whitney Young Jr., the fourth National Urban League director, honors those individuals who, throughout their lifetime, have modeled the league’s mission of advancing diversity, equity, inclusion, economic self-reliance, and civil rights. For over 70 years, civil rights icon Roberts has lived, fought, and stood in the trenches for his brothers and sisters in the movement to be treated fairly.
Roberts, a quiet and humble man, is not one to raise his voice. In fact, he speaks softly at a level that commands your attention. His walk has always been on the front lines of the battle, regardless of the possible danger to his own life, which in the sixties he and others in the battle knew was very possible. He pushed forward because the price for standing still and doing nothing was too high. Roberts said, “We picketed, we marched, and there was just that constant thing, that your life was in danger, you just knew that, but it didn’t deter you.” Roberts remembers the constant death threats he received but said, “You just keep going.”
From his youth and over the last 70 years, Dewey Roberts II has made an impact that will last for eternity. Born in 1945, he lived the years of segregation, lynchings, and disrespect; he lived the days before the Voting Rights Act was passed and has remained a passionate voice for the importance of voting. Roberts marched and picketed for civil rights, which he sees as in danger of being lost in the present season. In his early years, Roberts co-founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and also the Committee for Development of the Black Community.
Roberts led the Knoxville NAACP for over 15 years during its most turbulent and dangerous time. He filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, successfully proving the school system violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by discriminating against teachers and students and the transfer policy allowing hundreds of students to transfer out of their school zone. He and other local civil rights leaders pushed to form a police advisory review committee after the deaths of four young Black males in the city at the hands of the police over a seven-month period, and over the years has remained accessible to others in times of leadership needs, helping others like Dan Brown get elected as Knoxville’s first Black mayor and providing guidance over the years to other leaders like Reverend Renee Kesler, director of the Black Cultural Exchange Center. Dewey Roberts II is an example to others of how to stand and fight for what is right and just, no matter how long the journey.
-A believer in persevering, Roberts has been known to say, “We are actually going to come out in the end.”
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