[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 8 (Tuesday, January 23, 1996)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E59-E60]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 MEMORIAL TRIBUTE TO DELORA JONES-HICKS

                                 ______


                          HON. DONALD M. PAYNE

                             of new jersey

                    in the house of representatives

                       Tuesday, January 23, 1996

  Mr. PAYNE of New Jersey. Mr. Speaker, the death of Delora Jones-Hicks 
has deprived the Nation of a woman of great magnitude and capacity. To 
those of us who knew her personally and to those who did not, there 
could be no finer example of conscientious humanity. She was a woman of 
principle. She always looked for and welcomed the good; and when she 
did not find it, she tried to encourage its development.
  Delora Elizabeth Crews was born to Lynwood Crews and Elizabeth Rogers 
Crews in Kittrell, NC, on April 29, 1937.
  The family moved to East Orange, NJ, in 1942. A graduate of East 
Orange public schools, she was educated in the fields of social science 
and health administration at Rutgers University, New Brunswick and 
Newark campuses; New Jersey School of Alcohol and Drug Abuse Studies at 
Rutgers University; Bucknell University; and C.J. Post College at Long 
Island University.
  With the late George ``Specs'' Hicks, she cofounded New Well, New 
Jersey's first private treatment center for drug addicts, with chapters 
in Newark, Passaic, Atlantic City, and Morristown. She served as a 
trustee and grants writer for the organization for more than 20 years, 
until its closing in 1989.
  Delora was director of women's training for the Business Industrial 
Coordinating Council in 

[[Page E60]]
Newark during the 1960's. She also served for 1 year as the Community 
Liaison for the Newark Pre-School Council. She was secretary for the 
Newark-Essex Congress of Racial Equality [CORE] during the 1960's, and 
was active in the Newark Black Power Conference, as well as the 
political election of Newark's first African-American mayor, Kenneth A. 
Gibson.
  In 1968, she joined the staff of Rutgers, the State University of New 
Jersey, as a writer for the department of public relations on the 
Newark campus. Delora also held the position of manager, division of 
concerts and lectures, in the early to mid-70's. As manager, she 
brought to the campus and to the larger community renowned artists such 
as Sarah Vaughn, Yehudi Menuhin, the Russian pianist O. Yablonskaya, 
and the great Count Basie Orchestra.

  Delora was an officer or chairman of the Organization of Black 
Faculty and Staff [OBFS] at Rutgers-Newark for nearly 15 years. She 
played a vital role in the naming of the campus center after Paul 
Robeson, Rutgers' distinguished alumnus. She spearheaded the annual 
celebration of Black History Month and the Martin Luther King, Jr., 
celebration, bringing to the campus such notable speakers as Amiri 
Baraka, Douglas Turner Ward, Linda Hopkins, Judge Bruce Wright, and 
Rev. Joseph Lowery.
  During her tenure as chair of OBFS, the number of blacks on faculty 
and staff as well as student enrollment increased. She was the heart 
and soul of OBFS--always vigilant, never giving up the fight to improve 
the status of blacks, women, Latinos, and the disadvantaged on campus. 
She launched the Justice William O. Douglas Award, a tribute to and 
recognition of the contribution of Caucasians to the cause of equal 
justice. With her love for knowledge and respect for education, Delora 
had an abiding affection for students, particularly law students, 
especially those who sought her out for advice, encouragement, and 
motivation to continue the journey.
  Delora briefly joined the staff of the Graduate Department of Public 
Administration at Rutgers-Newark, where she established and edited the 
first newsletter for the department, the M.P.A. Newsletter. She 
rejoined the staff of public information where she remained until her 
retirement in 1993.
  Delora was a member of the Newark Arts & Culture Committee, the 
NAACP, and served as a trustee on the Boys' and Girls' Clubs of Newark. 
Delora traveled abroad extensively in African countries such as 
Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, Egypt, Somalia, Sudan, and to Spain, 
England, Greece, and widely throughout the United States.
  Delora was affectionately known as ``Big D'' to family and friends. 
In 1955, she married the late Charles Jones, Jr., of East Orange. The 
Union produced four children, Pamela Sawab, Erica Jones, Leila Bardaji, 
and Channing Jones. In 1986, she married the late George Hicks of 
Newark. She has six grandchildren, Farrakhan, Gibran, Al-Sawab, Elyse, 
Nicole, and Cayla. She was the sister of the late Lynwood Crews, Jr., 
and the late Regina Crews. She leaves her mother, Elizabeth, her 
children and grandchildren, sons-in-law, Sergio and Sawab, and a host 
of dearest friends, Erma and Oliver Brown, Kathy Brunet, Bob Clarke, 
Mae Curtis, Evelyn Green, Hilda Hidalgo, Irene Laini James, Adele 
Kaplan, Clement Alexander Price, and Norman Samuels, among others.
  Delora and the way she lived her life should be examples for all of 
us. I would like to commend to the annals of American history these 
remarks and an article that appeared in New Jersey's statewide 
newspaper, the Star-Ledger on January 19, 1996. Columnist Robert J. 
Braun in this tribute to Delora truly captured the essence of this 
remarkable woman.

                 [From the Star-Ledger, Jan. 19, 1996]

            Newark Heroine Always Preferred the Color Human

                          (By Robert J. Braun)

       No pastels for Delora Jones-Hicks.
       They wouldn't suit her, and besides, that's what she told 
     her friends when they came to visit her in her last days.
       She wanted to be buried in a purple dress and she wanted 
     flowers in bright colors, reds and blues and yellows and 
     oranges with lots of greens to set them off. All from 
     different florists, so they would not look the same.
       Her friends averted their eyes and one would say, ``Oh, 
     come on, Delora, who's talking about a funeral?''
       That's when she gave that look. God had sculpted Delora's 
     broad face so the edges of her lips ended in dimples that 
     made her look as if she were always suppressing a smile that 
     was about to erupt in uproarious laughter.
       She knew, the look said. She fought cancer for five years 
     and it was time for her friends to help her with the funeral 
     she wanted.
       That purse-lipped expression served Delora well because it 
     served her friends well. No matter how angry they were, or 
     sad, or confused, when they came to her and saw she was about 
     to smile, they smiled, too.
       ``Oh, shush,'' Delora would say. ``It's not that bad.'' 
     Then she would laugh and things never were that bad once you 
     talked to Delora.
       She wasn't much for calling attention to herself or wanting 
     to see her name in print. Despite that, Delora did more to 
     make life in Newark livable than a dozen more familiar names. 
     She did it by being a friend.
       All right, so that sounds hokey and, in a way, there was 
     something about Delora that was hokey. Someone at her funeral 
     said she had this ``Sunday morning going to church lady with 
     the white gloves'' side to her.
       That does not explain how she defused one racial crisis 
     after another at Rutgers in Newark or how she fought to 
     ensure that the campus got its fair share from the people who 
     ran things in New Brunswick.
       It doesn't explain her leadership of the local Congress of 
     Racial Equality or an organization representing black 
     students, staff and faculty at Rutgers-Newark.
       She was eulogized by blacks and whites and Hispanics, but 
     some who spoke struggled with useless pre-packaged 
     categories. Amiri Baraka called her a ``middle-class sister'' 
     with a ``street side.'' No, that's wrong. She was bigger than 
     class, than race, than the streets.
       Historian Clement Price came close when he said she was 
     concerned ``about the state of her race and that, of course, 
     was the human race.'' She was ``fervently loyal to her 
     friends . . . and her friendship was uncluttered.''
       Uncluttered by race, by rhetoric, by obsession with slights 
     and symbols, by the armor we have fashioned to keep us from 
     seeing one another.
       Her only armor was this: Her eyes did not stop at the color 
     of skin or the texture of hair. She fought hard, but people 
     were never her enemies. They had children, just as she did, 
     she would say. They had parents. They got sick and they 
     worried about money. They might be wrong, but they were still 
     people.
       When the Rutgers administration wanted to dump her old 
     boss, Malcolm Talbott, the vice president for Newark, she 
     asked her friends to support him.
       This was strange. Talbott was a Midwest WASP, who looked 
     like a Prussian general and spoke like an Oxford don. Yet 
     Delora knew he was good for Newark. Besides, he was her 
     friend.
       So, while her bosses in Rutgers were telling the world why 
     Talbott had to go, she was in a back office on the phone, 
     telling the same people why he should stay. He stayed--and 
     the people in New Brunswick never knew the provenance of all 
     his support.
       Nor did Talbott. Her friendship was uncluttered by the 
     expectation of return. She was known for the thank-you notes 
     she sent--`` `Thank you' were her two most favorite words.'' 
     Price said--but she never expected to be thanked.
       Price said she had a ``voice from another time and another 
     place,'' a reference to an odd, lispy accent no one, not even 
     her children, could identify. Not Southern, although she was 
     born in North Carolina; not Newark, although she spent most 
     of her life here. Just Delora.
       It was from another time and place, and we don't know the 
     accent because we haven't been there yet. If the pathology of 
     how we live in a savagely divided time and place somehow were 
     cured, we might all speak with her accent.
       She died Jan. 4, and was buried in a snowstorm. Mourners, 
     faces hidden by hats, scarves and umbrellas, passed by, each 
     dropping a flower. When the last left, an uproarious 
     profusion of reds and blues and yellows and oranges laughed 
     at the blinding white of snow veined through with black 
     trees.
       No pastels for Delora Jones-Hicks.

                          ____________________