J. Ernest Wilkins Sr.

Jesse Ernest Wilkins Sr. (February 1, 1894 – January 19, 1959) was a U.S. lawyer, labor leader, assistant secretary of the United States Department of Labor in the Eisenhower administration and both the first African-American to be appointed to a sub-cabinet position in the United States Government and to attend White House cabinet meetings as the representative of a government department.

Public service In 1954, Wilkins was appointed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower as Assistant Secretary of Labor for International Labor Affairs thus becoming the first African-American to attend cabinet meetings as the representative of a department in the absence of his superiors, Labor Secretary James Mitchell and Undersecretary Arthur Larson. Wilkins had previously served the Eisenhower administration as acting chairman of the President's Committee on Government Contracts at the request of Val Washington.

During his tenure with the administration he was a member of Equality Committee, working with E. Frederic Morrow, Val Washington, Joseph Douglas, James Nabrit Jr. and Samuel Pierce. Still earlier he had been a member of Eisenhower's President's Committee on Governmental Employment Policy (PCGEP) board when he was with the Labor Department.

When Wilkins did not immediately resign, Mitchell applied pressure. He pushed back against a position paper that Wilkins proposed to deliver to the 1958 meeting of the U.N.'s International Labour Organization, then announced three days before the conference that Wilkins would be excluded from the meeting. Three days after the US delegation left for Geneva without him, Wilkins had a heart attack that hospitalized him for three months. Returning to work in July, 1958, he no longer had a full-time secretary.

After resigning from his sub-cabinet post, Wilkins continued to serve on the Civil Rights Commission until his death two months later from another heart attack.

Other achievements In 1953, Wilkins became the first African American to serve on the nine-member Judicial Council of the Methodist Church (which one, there are several, the United Methodist Church did not then exist and never has been the only one), when he was elected its secretary. The body is Methodism's nominal and administrative head.

From 1954 to 1957, Wilkins served as U.S. representative on the governing body of the International Labour Organization.

He also served as the Grand Polemarch (national president) of Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity.

Wilkins married Lucille Robinson (b. 1899 (?) - d. November 1964, Brooklyn, N.Y., aged 65), who taught school in Chicago, was secretary to the women's division of the Methodist Church, and who also practiced law with her husband for 33 years.

Wilkins died as a result of a heart attack in Washington, D.C., in late January 1959, at the age of 64. In 2010 Wilkins' granddaughter, Carolyn Marie Wilkins, a Professor at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, wrote of her grandfather and her family more generally in her biography Damn Near White: An African American Family's Rise from Slavery to Bittersweet Success.