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<font size=3>April 24, 2010<br>
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/25/us/25hicks.html" eudora="autourl">
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/25/us/25hicks.html<br><br>
</a></font><h1><font size=4><b>Robert Hicks, Leader in Armed Rights
Group, Dies at 81<br><br>
</b></font></h1><h6><b>By
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/douglas_martin/index.html?inline=nyt-per">
DOUGLAS MARTIN</a></b></h6><font size=3>Someone had called to say the
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/k/ku_klux_klan/index.html?inline=nyt-org">
Ku Klux Klan</a> 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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
Less than three weeks later, the leaders of a secretive, paramilitary
organization of blacks called the
<a href="http://www.blackpast.org/?q=aah/deacons-defense-and-justice">
Deacons for Defense and Justice</a> 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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.
<a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/k/martin_luther_jr_king/index.html?inline=nyt-per">
Martin Luther King Jr.</a> They carried guns, with the mission to protect
against white aggression, citing the Second Amendment.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
When James Farmer, national director of the human rights group the
<a href="http://www.core-online.org/">Congress of Racial Equality</a>,
joined protests in Bogalusa, one of the most virulent Klan redoubts,
armed Deacons provided security.<br><br>
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
<a href="http://select.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=F30A15FD3C5A157A93C7A81783D85F418685F9">
interview with The New York Times</a> Magazine, he spoke of CORE and the
Deacons as “a partnership of brothers.”<br><br>
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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Deacons-Defense-Resistance-Rights-Movement/dp/0807857025">
“The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights
Movement”</a>(2004).<br><br>
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.<br><br>
Adam Fairclough, in his book
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Race-Democracy-Struggle-Louisiana-1915-1972/dp/0820321184">
“Race and Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana,
1915-1972”</a> (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.”<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
A leader in the local
<a href="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.</a> 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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
Mrs. Hicks said she was glad it was not.<br><br>
“I became very proud of black men,” she said. “They didn’t bow down and
scratch their heads. They stood up like men.”<br><br>
<br><br>
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