Civil Rights Activist 1950 -2008

Civil rights activist reflects on fighting racism

FREDERICK, Md. (AP) “A little bit of everything in here,'' said Lord Nickens as he ambled slowly with a cane acquired months ago after a spill that left his hip sore.

Nearly every inch of his bedroom walls is taken up with awards, photographs and certificates. Unlike sports fans who surround themselves with posters and trophies or teenagers who like to show off pop-culture icons, Nickens' collection has been culled from a life spent fighting for civil rights.

A copy of the letter a judge sent in 1985 to Nickens and the local branch of the NAACP, after they sued the Frederick County government in federal court for issuing the Ku Klux Klan permits for public rallies - a case they won - hangs next to his night stand.

“I was called crazy, a nut,'' he said. “I was told it would never happen in Frederick County, that the Klan would still be around. But you don't see the Klan around, do you?''

Nickens, 95, served as president of the Frederick chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People from 1972 to 1994, was one of the first Frederick residents to join the Army in 1940 under the Selective Service act, shook hands with Martin Luther King Jr. and received a plaque from Rosa Parks.

Lord Dunmore Nickens, the seventh of 13 children, was born Aug. 6, 1913, in White Post, Va. That was 50 years after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

Activists in their own right, his parents, Rueben Lawyer, a preacher for 89 years, and Mary Frances, railed against the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson doctrine of “separate but equal'' public accommodations for blacks and whites.

At 6 years old, Nickens was unable to read and write. His parents moved to Maryland to avoid excessive poll and school taxes on blacks in Virginia.

Standing that day in the Point of Rocks train station, Nickens searched for a bathroom. Two rooms with signs above their entrances were options, but he chose the wrong one, the one that read “White.'' A conductor spotted him, shouted him down and gave him a swift kick in the rear.

Nickens said his normally cheerful and sanguine mother jumped on the conductor. Another conductor who was there had to pull her off of the man. Trying to console Nickens, the conductor told them that someday it would be better.

Despite a lifetime spent struggling, Nickens said much remains to be accomplished in the civil rights movement.

“When it peaks, that'll be the end, we'll all be brothers and sisters together,'' he said.

The Nickens family moved into a corner house at South and Telegraph streets. Many of his neighbors were white, and treated his family with respect and trust. But scraping by with the pennies he earned from odd jobs such as shucking corn, Nickens began to get a feel for the difficulty of finding work as a black man in Frederick.

Frustrated with the lack of local opportunities, Nickens volunteered for the Army. He was initially rejected, but when the Selective Service Act was enacted in 1940, he was one of the first five Frederick residents drafted.

“When we went into the service, black was less than dirt off the street,'' Nickens said. “We had people that really believed God put them on Earth to control, and there are still some who believe that and that was a faction that the Ku Klux Klan came from,'' he said.

During the Klan lawsuit, and when he spoke out against blacks selling drugs in the community, his life was threatened.

“You just don't give a damn about your own safety or freedom; that your body don't mean nothing because you're giving it to the movement,'' he said. “I have tried my darnedest, all my life, to make that better so that everybody, regardless of color of skin, would have the same frame of mind, that there is one god that we all look to for a helping hand,'' he said.