'Dr. Pat' tireless in effort to make the world right
ULL director is teacher, mentor and civil rights activist
Pat Rickels, the director of the Honors Program at ULL, Rickels has been teaching at the school for 47 years. "Dr. Pat" has been a local pioneer in the civil rights movement.

LOUISIANA La. -- Place a call to Honors College at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and there is a good chance the director will personally answer the phone.

For Pat Rickels, Ph.D., English, standing on ceremony is not only a cliche, but it also is foreign to her nature.

"I gave my secretary the afternoon off," she said casually. "I can handle the phone."

This is vintage "Dr. Pat," as she's called.

Though a tough taskmaster in the classroom, she is revered by her students. As Honors College director, she is a beloved mentor. Off-campus, throughout the community she adopted, she is honored as a tireless and dedicated supporter of civil rights.

Seated in her office, surrounded by decades of memorabilia, she is quick to deny rumors that she is a candidate for canonization.

"I won't pass all of St. Peter's tests when I arrive at the Pearly Gates," she said. "My virtues have been exaggerated."

The rumor she once marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is a favorite.

"I love that legend. I wish. I did walk with folks here in Acadiana. I met my husband here, and the two of us became active right away with the early civil rights efforts."

But she is quick to add, "I don't believe the struggle has been won yet."

Though her husband, Milton, died in 1997, she continues their pioneering efforts through the Lafayette Human Relations Council that formed in the early 1960s. The council's mission is to offer aid to the poor through peaceful methods. The Acadiana chapter was founded in 1962 by J. Carlton James, James R. Oliver and Rev. Alexander O. Sigur.

"Mr. James was an African-American educator and longtime civil rights worker. Dr. Oliver was a Caucasian administrator at Southwestern Louisiana Institute. And Father Sigur was a Caucasian chaplain of the Catholic student center on campus," Rickels said of the diverse group.

The Oliver-Sigur Humanitarian Award is given annually to recognize achievement of the council's mission. The 2004 recipients are author Ernest J. Gaines and environmental chemist Wilma Subra of New Iberia.

Gaines, author of celebrated novels including "A Gathering of Old Men" and "A Lesson Before Dying," has served as writer in residence at ULL.

Subra has been involved in a variety of environmental cases in Acadiana.

Rickels said it was through the efforts of these people that SLI was successfully integrated in 1954. That integration allowed Christiana Smith, a transfer student, to become the first black SLI graduate in 1956.

Smith, whose portrait hangs in ULL's Dupre Library, died in July 2003.

SLI became Southwestern Louisiana University in 1960 when it achieved university status. In 1999, the state's second-largest university was renamed UL-Lafayette.

Rickels noted it was "a rare moment of sanity," when the Louisiana legislators granted permission for SLI to integrate based on the Plessy-Ferguson decision."

The cost of building an "equal but separate" facility was prohibitive, she explained.

Homer Adolph Plessy v. The State of Louisiana was a late 19th-century Supreme Court ruling that ruled "separate but equal" facilities were constitutional. This doctrine soon extended to various public facilities such as restaurants, theaters, restrooms, and public schools. It was overturned by Brown v. The Board of Education in 1954.

"In Lafayette, integration went peacefully, without much publicity," Rickels remembered. "And students were "Jim-Crowed" in the classrooms, forced to sit in the back. Though it was customary then for professors to address students formally, if black students were called upon, they were called by their first names."

Doris White, professor of history at Southern University, was an undergraduate student then.

"As a professor, Dr. Pat made sure that African-American culture, history and literature were part of the curriculum. Whether it was American folklore, American literature or the African-American literature course she introduced, students were not permitted to ignore or forget their African-American culture or neighbors," White said.

Her husband, Marion White, an Opelousas attorney, came to know Rickels through his involvement with the HRC.

"She keeps the inhabitants of this planet civilized," Marion White said. "She is the greatest lady this side of the Mississippi."

Rickels said it took courage for Sigur to open the Catholic Center at Our Lady of Wisdom to all students, regardless of race. "He horrified many in the Catholic community."

She said she believes his courage also alienated the church hierarchy because he never rose to the status of bishop.

"And Dr. Oliver? He was a chemist, a mathematician and a dedicated Catholic layperson. He was quite outspoken about institutional racism, and he paid the price, too. Both men did the right thing at a time when it was more than just unpopular," she said.

Rickels also embraced the civil rights cause early; at 14 her father accepted an engineering job on the Panama Canal project.

She remembers the World War II period as "a lovely time when servicemen came through the Canal Zone by the hundreds of thousands.

"Now, I know that's a teen-age girl's thing to say," she apologized, "but the Red Cross dances were great fun."

What was not so lovely, however, is her recollection of the racial segregation.

"Either you were a gold person -- white --- or you were one of the silver people -- Panamanians and other races who worked there. I guess I was born with a gene that despised discrimination. How can you deny people their basic dignity?" she said.

She said the work zone was a "gated community" long before that term was coined.

"Silvers working inside the gate were searched when they exited each evening. They were never permitted to use inside bathrooms either."

She confessed that she secretly dated some Panamanians. She recalls being the only one in her family troubled by the discrimination.

Meanwhile, her lifelong passion for folklore was developing, and she searched for books on black history and literature. After she obtained her master's degree in English, she arrived in Lafayette in 1957 as a single mother in desperate need of a job. During her first semester, she met Milton Rickels.

Here was a man from California who shared her passion for both literature and civil rights. Rickels said she married her "rebel with a cause" the next year.

"Milton was the first person in his family to register as a Democrat. Only Mexicans were Democrats in California then."

She laughed, recalling he intended to register as a Socialist. "He couldn't shock the little old lady that took his registration."

The couple was surprised and encouraged to find black students at a small Southern college.

"Soon we began to discover how precarious their situations were. Still, we thought the race thing could work here better than in other Southern towns, so we decided to stay and try to make a difference.

"We each taught five classes, so we gave 10 parties each semester. We're talking hot chocolate and cookies -- nothing fancy. We'd ask the students, 'Do you have a ride?' Then we'd ask white students to pick up the black students."

She reminisced about the nervousness of their young black students.

"This was before mugs became popular. You'd hear this jingling noise from the saucers rattling under their cups. Eventually everyone got quiet and listened to Robert Frost poetry and such. They all got to know one another. It was a small thing, really," she said.

Hardly, said Joe Dennis, HRC president.

"Dr. Pat is a fantastic and dedicated lady. The Rickels shared their belief in fairness and civil rights for everyone in the years before it became popular to do so," Dennis said.

In their early work for the HRC, Dennis said he often feared the repercussions of a black man driving with a white woman in the front seat of his vehicle.

"When we'd head to north Louisiana, I used to tell her she should get in back and let me look like I was chauffeuring," Dennis said. "Nothing doing -- she has always been fearless."

The rest of the story

By MADELAINE LANDRY
Special to The Advocate