[News] Robert Hicks, Leader in Armed Rights Group, Dies at 81

[Anti-Imperialist News]

April 24, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/25/us/25hicks.html


Robert Hicks, Leader in Armed Rights Group, Dies at 81



By 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/douglas_martin/index.html?inline=nyt-per>DOUGLAS 
MARTIN

Someone had called to say the 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/k/ku_klux_klan/index.html?inline=nyt-org>Ku 
Klux Klan was coming to bomb Robert Hicks’s 
house. The police said there was nothing they 
could do. It was the night of Feb. 1, 1965, in Bogalusa, La.

The Klan was furious that Mr. Hicks, a black 
paper mill worker, was putting up two white civil 
rights workers in his home. It was just six 
months after three young civil rights workers had 
been murdered in Philadelphia, Miss.

Mr. Hicks and his wife, Valeria, made some phone 
calls. They found neighbors to take in their 
children, and they reached out to friends for 
protection. Soon, armed black men materialized. Nothing happened.

Less than three weeks later, the leaders of a 
secretive, paramilitary organization of blacks 
called the 
<http://www.blackpast.org/?q=aah/deacons-defense-and-justice>Deacons 
for Defense and Justice visited Bogalusa. It had 
been formed in Jonesboro, La., in 1964 mainly to 
protect unarmed civil rights demonstrators from 
the Klan. After listening to the Deacons, Mr. 
Hicks took the lead in forming a Bogalusa 
chapter, recruiting many of the men who had gone 
to his house to protect his family and guests.

Mr. Hicks died of cancer at his home in Bogalusa 
on April 13 at the age of 81, his wife said. He 
was one of the last surviving Deacon leaders.

But his role in the civil rights movement went 
beyond armed defense in a corner of the Jim Crow 
South. He led daily protests month after month in 
Bogalusa ­ then a town of 23,000, of whom 9,000 
were black ­ to demand rights guaranteed by the 
1964 Civil Rights Act. And he filed suits that 
integrated schools and businesses, reformed 
hiring practices at the mill and put the local 
police under a federal judge’s control.

It was his leadership role with the Deacons that 
drew widest note, however. The Deacons, who grew 
to have chapters in more than two dozen Southern 
communities, veered sharply from the nonviolence 
preached by the Rev. Dr. 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/k/martin_luther_jr_king/index.html?inline=nyt-per>Martin 
Luther King Jr. They carried guns, with the 
mission to protect against white aggression, citing the Second Amendment.

And they used them. A Bogalusa Deacon pulled a 
pistol in broad daylight during a protest march 
in 1965 and put two bullets into a white man who 
had attacked him with his fists. The man 
survived. A month earlier, the first black deputy 
sheriff in the county had been assassinated by whites.

When James Farmer, national director of the human 
rights group the 
<http://www.core-online.org/>Congress of Racial 
Equality, joined protests in Bogalusa, one of the 
most virulent Klan redoubts, armed Deacons provided security.

Dr. King publicly denounced the Deacons’ 
“aggressive violence.” And Mr. Farmer, in an 
interview with Ebony magazine in 1965, said that 
some people likened the Deacons to the K.K.K. But 
Mr. Farmer also pointed out that the Deacons did 
not lynch people or burn down houses. In a 1965 
<http://select.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=F30A15FD3C5A157A93C7A81783D85F418685F9>interview 
with The New York Times Magazine, he spoke of 
CORE and the Deacons as “a partnership of brothers.”

The Deacons’ turf was hardscrabble Southern towns 
where Klansmen and law officers aligned against 
civil rights campaigners. “The Klan did not like 
being shot at,” said Lance Hill, author 
of<http://www.amazon.com/Deacons-Defense-Resistance-Rights-Movement/dp/0807857025> 
“The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and 
the Civil Rights Movement”(2004).

In July 1965, escalating hostilities between the 
Deacons and the Klan in Bogalusa provoked the 
federal government to use Reconstruction-era laws 
to order local police departments to protect 
civil rights workers. It was the first time the 
laws were used in the modern civil rights era, Mr. Hill said.

Adam Fairclough, in his book 
<http://www.amazon.com/Race-Democracy-Struggle-Louisiana-1915-1972/dp/0820321184>“Race 
and Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in 
Louisiana, 1915-1972” (1995), wrote that Bogalusa 
became “a major test of the federal government’s 
determination to put muscle into the Civil Rights 
Act in the teeth of violent resistance from recalcitrant whites.”

Mr. Hicks was repeatedly jailed for protesting. 
He watched as his 15-year-old son was bitten by a 
police dog. The Klan displayed a coffin with his 
name on it beside a burning cross. He persisted, 
his wife said, for one reason: “It was something that needed to be done.”

Robert Hicks was born in Mississippi on Feb. 20, 
1929. His father, Quitman, drove oxen to harvest 
trees for the paper mill. He played football on a 
state championship high school team and later for 
the semi-professional Bogalusa Bushmen.

He was known for his generosity: at the Baptist 
congregation where he was a deacon, he bought new 
suits for poor members. As the first black 
supervisor at the mill, he helped a young man 
amass enough overtime to buy the big car he 
dreamed of. Children all over town called him Dad, his son Charles said.

A leader in the local 
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/national_association_for_the_advancement_of_colored_people/index.html?inline=nyt-org>N.A.A.C.P. 
and his segregated union, Mr. Hicks was the 
logical choice to head the Bogalusa Civic and 
Voters League when it was formed to lead the 
local civil rights effort. He was first 
president, then vice president of the Deacons in Bogalusa.

Besides Valeria Hicks, his wife of 62 years, and 
his son Charles, Mr. Hicks is survived by three 
other sons, Gregory, Robert Lawrence and Darryl; 
his daughter, Barbara Hicks Collins; and many 
grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

By 1968, the Deacons had pretty much vanished. In 
time they were “hardly a footnote in most books 
on the civil rights movement,” Mr. Hill said. He 
attributed this to a “mythology” that the rights 
movement was always nonviolent.

Mrs. Hicks said she was glad it was not.

“I became very proud of black men,” she said. 
“They didn’t bow down and scratch their heads. They stood up like men.”




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