Marie Hicks, 83, the Rosa Parks of Girard College

Marie Hicks, who in 1965-66 led thousands of pickets, including the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., around the wall that stood between two of her sons and entry into Girard College because they were black, died Thursday of complications of Parkinson's disease at Willow Terrace in Germantown. She was 83 and lived in Germantown.

The 10-foot wall and what it symbolized at Girard College inspired one of the most dramatic civil rights confrontations in Philadelphia history.

"Mrs. Hicks was our Rosa Parks," Girard president Dominic M. Cermele said yesterday. "In 2004, when the Pennsylvania Museum put up the exhibit 'Overcoming Barriers: The Integration of Girard College' at a state luncheon with the Hicks family, something clicked," Cermele said.

"I told Mrs. Hicks, 'On behalf of Girard College, I apologize to you. I am sorry you had to fight so hard and wait so long for your children to be admitted. And this is long overdue.' We hugged each other."

Cermele said, "If I were them, I would have been resentful. I applied to Girard in 1947 and got in the next year without any hassle. I graduated in 1959."

The journey to Girard began in 1965, when Mrs. Hicks wanted two of her sons, Charles and Theodore, to be admitted to the whites-only school.

Her husband, Junius Hicks Sr., a World War II veteran who worked in a knitting mill and was a pilot, motorcyclist and watchmaker, died of cancer in 1964. Girard College had relaxed founder Stephen Girard's orphans-only ban and accepted fatherless white boys.

Mrs. Hicks had gotten a peek behind the wall during a Boy Scout ceremony when her eldest son, Junius Jr., received a badge in front of Founder's Hall.

"When I saw how beautiful everything was, it made me even more angry that no black boys were allowed in. I figured that I would never get in there again," she told the Philadelphia Daily News in 1985.

Cecil B. Moore, president of the Philadelphia NAACP, who had already thrown up picket lines at Girard in June 1965, learned of Mrs. Hicks and her sons. He and lawyer William T. Coleman thought Mrs. Hicks was the kind of trailblazer they were looking for to join three other parent plaintiffs in a federal discrimination suit against the school.