[1][2] And in 1969 Wilkinson was the first African-American woman to become a full-time faculty member at University of Kentucky when she joined the Department of Sociology.
[2] She was also the first African American woman to be in a full time faculty position at a college, the University of Kentucky.
She also created the Carter G. Woodson Lecture Series for untenured faculty, the Black Women's Conference, and was a founder and director of Black Studies which she also renamed the African American Studies and Research Program.
In 1968, she earned her doctorate's degree in Medical Sociology from Case Western Reserve University.
[1] Wilkinson enrolled in University of Kentucky in Lexington in 1954 a few months after the United States Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education ruling.