Charles W. Hicks entered Girard College in January 1969, a 12-year-old frightened about being one of a handful of black students to integrate the all-white boarding school.
"We had received bomb threats and hate mail at our home," Hicks, 47, recalled yesterday. "That stigma, I thought, would follow me through the whole process."
But his mother, Marie, and Cecil B. Moore, who led the Philadelphia chapter of the NAACP as it fought to gain admission for black students, counseled him.
"They gave me a charge - not to get into any trouble and not get kicked out," Hicks said in an interview. "That was not something I could afford to do because I was there on the shoulders of other individuals who had gone to jail for me."
Twenty years after the Supreme Court's 1954 landmark school-desegregation case, Brown v. Board of Education, Hicks finally became the first African American to graduate from Girard.
To mark the 30th anniversary of his graduation, Hicks returned to campus yesterday as Girard prepares to open an exhibit documenting the long struggle to desegregate an unusual school created for "poor, white male orphans."
"I didn't think that the gates would ever open for me to enter Girard," Hicks told Girard's 611 students during a program in the chapel. "You are the legacy of that 14-year lawsuit."
The campaign to integrate Girard involved two trips to the U.S. Supreme Court, more than seven months of round-the-clock picketing by civil-rights protesters, and a visit by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
It's all depicted in the State Museum of Pennsylvania's exhibit, "Overcoming Barriers: The Integration of Girard College." The collaborative project of Girard and the museum made its debut in Harrisburg earlier this year. It opens to the public tomorrow in Founder's Hall at Girard College.
"On a September day of 1968, four boys walked together through the gates toward Founder's Hall," Girard president Dominic M. Cermele said yesterday. "Their story is the story of Girard College, and we are privileged to share it with each other and with the larger community."
Yesterday's program was a reunion for many people who had played key roles in the sometimes tumultuous effort to desegregate the school.
Invited guests included lawyer William T. Coleman, a former U.S. secretary of transportation, who shepherded the winning suit through the federal courts to gain admission for several African American boys, including Hicks and his younger brother, Theodore.
