Roy Innis

Roy Innis, the autocratic national leader of the Congress of Racial Equality since 1968, whose right-wing views on affirmative action, law enforcement, desegregation and other issues put him at odds with many black Americans and other civil rights leaders, died on Sunday January 8 2017 in Manhattan. He was 82. Mr. Innis led CORE through changes that mirrored his own evolution from black-power militancy in the 1960s to staunch conservatism resembling a modern Republican political platform. He came to prominence after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young and James Farmer had taken command of the civil rights movement and did not share their commitment to nonviolent civil disobedience. Nor did he embrace CORE’s pioneering roles in desegregation. Mr. Innis acknowledged that his loss of two sons to gun violence in New York — Roy Jr., 13, in 1968, and Alexander, 26, in 1982 — influenced his decision to oppose gun control and defend citizens’ rights to carry arms in self-defense. He became a life member and a director of the National Rifle Association. Roy Emile Alfredo Innis was born on June 6, 1934, in St. Croix, the United States Virgin Islands, to Alexander and Georgianna Thomas Innis. His father, a police officer, died when Roy was 6. He moved to New York with his mother in 1946. He attended Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan but dropped out at 16 to join the Army. When it was discovered that he was underage, he was sent home. He graduated from Stuyvesant in 1952, studied chemistry at City College of New York until 1958, then worked as a research chemist for Vicks Chemical Company and Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx. Mr. Innis rarely spoke of his family, about which little is known. He lived in Harlem and was married several times, and the statement from CORE listed 10 children — Cedric, Winston, Kwame, Niger, Kimathi, Mugabe, Arenza, Lydia, Patricia and Corinne — and “a host of grandchildren.”