Chuck Hicks
“We were a marked family,” said Chuck Hicks, who grew up in Bogalusa, Louisiana during the civil rights movement. Hicks’ father, the late Robert Hicks, helped found the Bogalusa chapter of the Deacons for Defense and Justice, a group whose members carried weapons in order to protect against Klan attacks.
“[Bogalusa was] a small town so everybody knew the Hicks family. They knew our car and they knew us. They had taken pictures of us and all that. Our life was just totally different [once my dad joined the Deacons],” Hicks told TheFightBack Oct. 6 in an extended must-listen-to-interview at D.C.’s Freedom Plaza, on the first day of that space’s occupation.
“He was an extraordinary man with just a high school education, but he had good common sense,” Hicks said of his father, who worked at a paper mill. “He believed in… [and] understood the Constitution. I remember one time the chief of police came down and said to my dad that he wanted to take the guns out of our house. My dad says, ‘You can’t do that. The Constitution gives every man the right to bear arms. This is my home. You can’t go against the Constitution.'”
The threats against Robert Hicks were constant. “They built a casket on the main street of town and said, ‘Here lies that nigger Hicks’… They hung him in effigy. [In] one particular case they tried to hire someone to assassinate my dad,” said Hicks, who went on to become the first black student body president at Syracuse University.
In a 2010 obituary of Robert Hicks, The New York Times noted:
“[H]is 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.”
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