By CHRISTOPHER WOODARD
Staff Reporter
As a young man, Joe Hicks was a gun-toting black nationalist who believed that armed struggle was the only way African Americans could seize any significant power in this country.
He ridiculed early civil-rights leaders as sellouts, and preached hate at political gatherings, referring to whites as “devils.”
“The rhetoric was that power (was never given up) without a struggle. We saw America as a very violent place where you had to meet violence with violence,” said Hicks. “So we packed a lot of guns and really tried to live up to that image of being tough and revolutionary.”
But a funny thing happened on the way to the revolution.
Hicks changed. He evolved first from a militant separatist to a communist. And finally, after reading the works of Martin Luther King Jr. for the first time, he evolved into a civil-rights activist.
Hicks, who now heads the Los Angeles Human Relations Commission, believes the much-anticipated revolution did take place only it happened slowly, and right under his nose.
“Just in the last 20 years or so, L.A. has exploded into this incredibly diverse place,” he said. “In 1960, 80 percent of the city was white, now it’s down to about 35 percent. There have been a lot of changes, but I would offer, a lot of progress, too.”
Rabbi Gary Greenebaum, Western regional director of the American Jewish Committee, has a hard time picturing his longtime friend as an unbending extremist.
“He’s such a thoughtful, good thinker and a reasonable guy,” he said.
When Hicks looks at Los Angeles, he sees a huge melting pot, where African Americans, Latinos, Koreans and other groups are increasingly sharing in and contributing to the city’s economic prosperity.
“I’ve lived my whole life here, and before the mid-’80s there was no sizable Korean community. Now they are an extremely viable political and economic entity in this community,” he said. “When you look at the last 20 years in this city, you see an amazing growth in the black middle class. There’s almost no part of Southern California where you can drive where you won’t find families that are African American, Asian, Latino.”
Some have accused Hicks of being naive, but the 58-year-old’s faith that people can learn to live together is born of his own experiences.
Hicks was a family man working for the gas company in 1965 when the Watts riots thrust him into political activism. He was sitting on his front porch when white National Guardsmen ordered him into his house, and pointed a 30-caliber machine gun at his head when he took offense at a racial epithet.
Hicks didn’t argue with the big gun, but the experience left him seething, and a couple of days later he signed up with US, a black nationalist group that advocated armed revolution.
“We thought the civil-rights leaders of the time were just beneath contempt. I thought people like (Martin Luther) King and Thurgood Marshall, all these great historical figures, were sellouts, that they were soft, that they were tame.”
Hicks found himself leading a double existence, working as a gas company employee by day and a fiery, speech-giving radical at night. But all the talk of whites being devils rang hollow. “It just seemed too neat and formulaic,” Hicks says.
His quest for answers, and his admiration for people like Vladimir Lenin and Mao Tse-tung, led him toward communism during the height of the Cold War in the mid-’70s.
“I wound up going to Moscow,” Hicks said. “There were clandestine meetings, train rides between Moscow and Leningrad. This was serious stuff. You could get locked up for the kind of stuff I could have been involved in at the time, and wouldn’t admit now.”
Hicks remembers standing at an intersection in Russia when disillusionment set in.
“Here was supposed to be Nirvana, where socialism made the ultimate sense, and I’m looking around and thinking, ‘This is the drabbest, most forlorn-looking society I’ve ever seen. If this is what it looks like in practice, I’ll be damned if that makes a lot of sense.'”
It was then that Hicks picked up the writings of King and other civil-rights leaders, and for the first time began to study the movement. He rejected race as a criterion for judging people, and for the past 20 years has dedicated himself to labor and civil-rights issues.
He worked for the Service Employees International Union, Local 660, and later for the American Civil Liberties Union as communications director. In 1991, he became executive director of the local Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the group King founded, and in 1995, became executive director of the Multicultural Collaborative, a group he co-founded to help mend the rift between L.A.’s ethnic groups following the 1992 riots.
In December 1997, Mayor Richard Riordan appointed Hicks to the $83,000-a-year job of heading the Human Relations Commission, a city agency that seeks to teach L.A.’s diverse population to live together.
Hicks came out forcefully against Prop. 187, the state ballot initiative that sought to eliminate public assistance for immigrants, despite encountering flak from some segments of the African-American community who supported the measure.
Hicks is optimistic about the next 20 years. He believes the city has an opportunity to create a truly multicultural society, one that will act as a model for the rest of the nation and world.
“I’m thankful every day I wake up alive that I didn’t end up dead or spending 25 years to life in some godforsaken penitentiary because of some of the stuff I was involved in,” Hicks says. “But I’ve seen the dark side. I’ve seen the violence and brutality. I participated in it. I outlived it, and I’ve chosen to view humanity in a very different light.”
