December 21, 2023
Thom Carroll/for PhillyVoice
Marie Hicks' two youngest sons, Charles and Theodore, were among the first Black children to attend Girard College. Hicks' activism and participation in a lawsuit against the school were integral to it becoming desegregated.
Marie Hicks stood outside the wrought-iron gates of Girard College on Sept. 11, 1968, waiting for her son to walk into the massive stone building and begin his first day of school.
Over the past three years, Hicks had spent countless days picketing the 10-foot wall around Girard College in protest of the prep school's refusal to admit Black children like hers. The battle had attracted the attention of Martin Luther King Jr., who condemned the policy during 1965 visit to Philadelphia, and the U.S. Supreme Court, which had ordered Girard College to desegregate following a series of appeals. Hicks had taken up the long-simmering fight after a family tragedy left her a single parent, solely responsible for her children's futures. Thanks to her efforts and those of countless other activists, her son Charles would become the first Black graduate of the school — and her younger son Theodore its first Black valedictorian.
Hicks, who died in 2007, was born 100 years ago on Dec. 20., 1923. She was raised in Harlem, but moved to North Philly upon her marriage to Junius Hicks, Sr., a World War II veteran. The couple had a daughter, Loretta, and three sons: Junius Jr., Charles and Theodore.
Junius Sr. supported the family through work at a knitting mill and repairing watches. But after he died from lung cancer in 1964, Hicks had to provide everything for her kids. Social Security helped pay the bills. Education was another matter.
Loretta and Junius Jr. were, by that point, teenagers in high school who would go onto marriage and college in just a few years. But Charles and Theodore still had lots of schooling ahead of them, and Hicks was unimpressed with their current options. The boys attended the William D. Kelley School, which Hicks claimed was so crowded Charles could only go for half the day.
"He used to come home and cry," she told the Philadelphia Daily News in 1968. "Charles loves school."
The family was in the middle of Charles' 9th birthday party when Hicks got a call that would change their lives. It was Cecil B. Moore, the president of the Philadelphia chapter of the NAACP, and he wanted to get the Hicks boys into Girard College.
Desegregating the school had become a top priority for Moore. The private boarding school was founded in 1848 by Stephen Girard, a banker and slave owner who died one of the richest men in America. Under the stipulations of his will, the grades 1-12 students at Girard College were to be poor white male orphans. By the mid-1960s, the school had already relaxed the "orphans" requirement to allow white boys without fathers to attend. But it refused to make similar allowances for Black boys, despite the landmark 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, which declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional.
Moore and the civil rights attorney William T. Coleman decided to attack private school's segregation policy in court by suing the trustees of the Girard estate on behalf of seven academically gifted Black boys, all between the ages of 6 and 10 and all raised by single mothers. It was not the first legal challenge to Girard College's discriminatory admissions practice, but it would ultimately be the one that changed it.
Hicks had actually been to the school campus before joining the lawsuit, for a Boy Scouts award ceremony for her oldest son, Junius Jr. When she had seen Girard College from a distance on her walks — austere and surrounded by a 10-foot stone wall, tacked with "no trespassing signs" — she assumed it was a jail. Once she got inside the Founders Hall, however, her perception of the institution changed.
"I really enjoyed the ceremony — it was about an hour or so, and the Girard band played," she told the Philadelphia Daily News in 1985. "But when I saw how beautiful everything was, it made me even more angry that no Black boys were allowed in. I figured after that I would never get in there again."
As the lawsuit made its way through the courts, protestors marched outside Girard College, decrying its racist policies. Hicks was there day in and day out, emerging as a spokesperson for the families trying to gain admission. She would become known as the "Rosa Parks of Girard College," a tireless spitfire whose small stature (she was shorter than 5 feet tall) belied her "fiery, dynamic personality."
One of the visitors to "the wall," as protestors soon dubbed the school's literal barrier, was Martin Luther King Jr. The civil rights leader delivered a number of speeches during his Aug. 3, 1965, trip to Philadelphia, including one to the picketing crowds at Girard College.
"It is a sad experience at this stage of the 20th century to have to stand in the city that has been known as the cradle of liberty, that has in its midst and in its presence a kind of Berlin Wall to keep the colored children of God out," he said. "For this wall or this school is symbolic of a tragic evil in our nation. It is symbolic of a cancer in the body politic, which must be removed before our democratic oath can be realized."
The trustees sought to dismiss the lawsuit and appealed every lower court decision that sided with the boys and their mothers. When the case finally reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 1968, the justices refused to hear an appeal, and in doing so affirmed the Third Circuit Court ruling that the school immediately must end its segregationist admission practice.
The case had taken so long that only Theodore could start classes on Sept. 11, 1968. Girard College did not admit students older than 10, and Charles was by then 12 years old. But the school eventually made an exception, and Charles joined his brother just a few months later. He would be the first Black student to graduate from Girard College, and went on to become an engineer for Ford Motor Co. Theodore, the school's first Black valedictorian, would graduate from Georgetown University and into a career as a legal investigator.
In fact, every Hicks child graduated from college — and eventually, so did Hicks. While working as a maid at La Salle University, she began taking night classes and earned a bachelor's degree in sociology at the age of 58. She became a case worker at Mercy Hospice, helping homeless women get back on their feet. After she retired, she was active in the Philadelphia Senior Center, going on its organized trips to Italy and England and excitedly watching John Glenn's journey to space in 1998 from its Broad Street headquarters. She was also known for giving every child on her block in East Germantown a book on Black history for their birthday.
When Hicks died in 2007 of complications from Parkinson's disease, her funeral procession circled the wall of Girard College before journeying on to her final resting place at Beverly National Cemetery in Burlington County. Prior to her death, the school president had personally apologized to her. He also delivered a eulogy at her funeral.
Theodore told the Inquirer on that day that it was "emotional" being back on campus without his mother, who held his hand when he first walked through the gates. But Hicks had understood the costs and gravity of the battle from the very beginning, and tried to prepare her children for it. After she got that first call from Moore, she remembered sitting Charles and Theodore down to explain what was to come.
"It isn't that I want to send you away," she remembered saying, in her 1985 interview with the Daily News. "Because I would like to keep you home. But I feel we're supposed to open this door for Black boys."
Then she told them the story of her first visit to Girard College, "how I was in there, and looked around, and didn't like that it was just for whites."
"I've always been a strong person," she continued. "And I believed my children were strong and that if we were involved they would have to open that door."
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