Robert Hicks (February 20, 1929 – April 13, 2010) was a prominent leader in Bogalusa, Louisiana during the Civil Rights Movement, whose activism helped put an end to segregation and discriminatory practices in education, housing, employment, public accommodations and healthcare.
In 1947, he graduated from the segregated Central Memorial High School, where he played both offensive guard and defensive end on the State Championship football team.
After being denied admission to the Bogalusa Vocational Tech College, she traveled to New Orleans every day to earn her degree as a Licensed Practical Nurse.
[2] Hicks began his working life in construction and was eventually hired as a shop steward at Bogalusa's leading industry, the Crown Zellerbach paper mill, at a time when few blacks were employed there.
[7][8] In 1965, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) assigned two civil rights workers, William "Bill" Yates, a former Cornell professor, and Steve Miller, an Antioch College student, to Bogalusa to help organize "testing" and protests to desegregate local public accommodations.
Bogalusa Chief of Police Claxton Knight and Deputy Sheriff Doyle Holliday had come to inform Hicks that a mob of two hundred white men had gathered, prepared to murder the entire family and burn the house to the ground if he didn't put the white activists out, adding that they should expect no help from law enforcement: "We have better things to do than protect people who aren't wanted here.
"[12] The Hicks family, including the children, went into action, phoning black men all over Bogalusa—friends, fellow mill workers, church brethren—asking them to come to the house as fast as possible with loaded guns.
In an interview, Hicks explained: "Since we can't get the local officials to protect us in our community, our neighborhood, let's back up on the Constitution of the United States and say that we can bear arms.
[15] The Deacons had been founded in 1964 in the mill town of Jonesboro, Louisiana as an armed self-defense organization of black men to protect local citizens and civil rights workers against the KKK and other white vigilantes.
[17] The Deacons were headquartered in Robert Hicks' modest home, with the family breakfast room converted into a radio communications and command base.
[2] The Hicks house also became the meeting place for the executive board members of the Bogalusa Civic and Voters League, as well as local headquarters to organizations such as CORE and SNCC, the black-owned civil rights law firm of Collins, Douglas and Elie, and Richard Sobol of the Lawyers Constitutional Defense Committee.
All the while, the Hicks family continued to offer their home as a safe haven for civil rights workers and citizens under threat from the KKK, and as a medical triage station for injured activists denied service at Bogalusa's federally funded state hospital.
Soon after they arrived, a white mob approached accompanied by local police and began indiscriminately attacking the black adults and children with clubs and leather belts.
Despite being attacked in the Livingston Parish town of Satsuma and learning that the bridge over the Amite River was wired with explosives, the marchers made it to the steps of the Capitol in Baton Rouge.
The defendants admit that the Klan's objective is to prevent Washington Parish Negroes from exercising the civil rights Congress recognized by statute."
The case findings cited the Klan's continued harassment of Bogalusa black citizens, in direct violation of the Hicks v. Knight ruling.
[31] A shotgun used by the Deacons for Defense to protect the Hicks family and civil rights activists was donated to the permanent collection of the National Museum of African American History and Culture.