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Civil rights activist
Don Hubbard, a leader of the desegregation efforts in Louisiana and past recipient of the ACLU of Louisiana prestigious Ben Smith Award, an honor reserved for people who have demonstrated a commitment to the advancement of civil liberties in Louisiana is honored by Metro Service Group.
Beginning in the 1960's, Don Hubbard led efforts to desegregate the City of New Orleans and to combat police abuses. In 1963 he helped organized a civil rights march on City Hall and was a key leader in the activities that led to the integration of lunch counters, restaurants, department store fitting rooms, and other public accommodations by their efforts through boycotts against stores on Canal Street like Woolworth's and McCrory's lunch counter, the Loews Theater and other entities.
As a founder of the New Orleans chapter of CORE (the Congress of Racial Equality), Hubbard help build the chapter to one of the strongest student chapter in the country, by 1961 many New Orleans CORE members had been in out of jail many times and were already veterans of the nonviolent techniques used in the fight to desegregate the interstate bus system and other Jim Crow laws.
Hubbard would spend many of his earlier days fighting for equal rights for Blacks alongside local civil right leaders, and Freedom Riders such as Oretha Castle Haley, David Dennis, Jerome Smith, Doratha "Dodie" Smith-Simmons, George Raymond, Matheo "Flukie" Suarez, Claude Reese, Robert Collins, Alice Thompson, NAACP Youth Council member Raphael Cassimere and others. Their efforts were instrumental in helping lead President Lyndon B. Johnson to sign the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
In 1964 Hubbard drove from White Plains, New York to Mississippi in the 1963 Ford Fairlane station wagon which the civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney were later killed.
"The drive included only one detour -- to CORE's national headquarters in New York City, where he and other CORE workers filled the back of the wagon with informational posters and pamphlets, and boxes of buttons and T-shirts emblazoned with CORE's slogans "Freedom Now" and "Vote Baby Vote."
Once they finished loading, they covered it all with a sheet. Then Hubbard took off and drove for hours, stopping only for gas.
He did well, until he neared the Mississippi border. There, exhaustion hit and his mind began to race. Here he was, a young black man driving alone in a brand-new Ford with a temporary New York license plate and controversial cargo -- stacks of barely concealed voting-rights materials. "So I had to drive the speed limit," Hubbard recalls, "because I didn't want to be pulled over and have some Mississippi or Alabama policeman say, 'What you got in the back of this car, boy?'"
Just after crossing into Mississippi, Hubbard stopped to gas up and tried to take a short power nap outside the service station. But some of the people hanging around the parking lot gave him the creeps. He pulled out onto the road again, miserable, because he couldn't keep his eyes open. "I had all kind of things on my mind -- I'm married, I got kids," he says. "I was driving along, trying to look at the sights, just trying to keep myself amused, saying, 'Keep yourself awake.'"
Then he saw the young white guy dressed in an Air Force uniform, standing next to a duffel bag. "He was thumbing a ride to the Kessler Air Force Base in Biloxi," Hubbard recalls, "and so I pulled over and said, 'I'll give you a ride, if you don't mind driving.' He said, 'No problem, man.'"
The military man got behind the wheel and Hubbard laid down flat on the backseat of the station wagon and went to sleep. "No one could see me," he says. "All they could see was a white boy driving with a uniform on."
Hubbard believes that he owes his life to that hitchhiker, who drove all the way through Jackson, Miss. A newly rested Hubbard then drove the remaining stretch to Canton, in central Mississippi, where he handed over the keys to native Mississippian and CORE worker James Earl Chaney..." - Katy Reckdahl
In the late 1960's, as leader of a broad, multi-racial coalition including the NAACP, the ACLU of Louisiana, SNCC, several community groups and local clergy, Mr. Hubbard blocked the adoption of a New Orleans ordinance that would have required a police-issued identity card and authorized police to "stop and frisk" without reasonable suspicion. His activities led to numerous arrests in Louisiana and Mississippi as he worked to advance equal rights for all.
"Hubbard remembers riding the streetcar with his mother to Canal Street, where they went to pay their phone and utility bills. He was only 8 years old at the time and wasn't aware that there were different rules for whites and blacks.
On this particular day, Hubbard said he told his mother that he wanted to sit in the front with the other children. Instead of telling her son that he couldn't because the front of the streetcar was reserved for white people, Hubbard said his mother took him by the hand and said, "Come on baby, let's sit over here," leading him to the back.
"I said, 'Why can't I sit over there?' And her response was one that still resonates with me," Hubbard said. "She said, 'Because they're waiting for you to change it. They're waiting for you to change it.'" -Richard Webster
Hubbard has dedicated his life to changing things.
Hubbard also served as leader of SOUL, a 9th Ward based political organization which rose to prominence during the late '60s and '70s and remained one of the dominant African-American political organization through about 2002.
One of Hubbard's crowning business achievements was bringing the Muhammad Ali-Leon Spinks title bout to New Orleans on September 15, 1978. Hubbard served as the fight's promoter along with Sherman Copelin. The fight was Ali's last victory; he won the title for the third and final time before an official turnout of 65,370, still the record for an indoor championship bout, and a worldwide TV audience. The live gate of $7 million was a record at the time.
Today, Hubbard continues as a mentor and advisor to leaders and activists while operating the first African-American owned business on St. Charles Avenue, the nationally-acclaimed bed-and-breakfast called the
Hubbard Mansion.
Don and the late Rose Hubbard built The Mansion over 15 years ago and modeled the facade after a Natchez, Mississippi Mansion, located on the Natchez Bluffs at the southern end of the Old Spanish Promenade Grounds overlooking the Mississippi River. It is an elegant Greek revival home which features five guest rooms with suite combinations providing modern luxuries in the spirit of historic style and elegance. All rooms are furnished with period antiques and precious heirlooms.
The Mansion is centrally located on historic St. Charles Avenue, with direct access to the interstate, the Central Business District, beautiful Audubon Park and Zoo, Tulane, Loyola and the French Quarter.
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