Eric E. Vickers, the provocative, complex and controversial attorney and civil rights activist who defended causes and clients on both sides of the Mississippi River, died on Friday, April 13 after a battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 65.
His mantra was “litigating, agitating and negotiating.”
In 1999, Vickers orchestrated an event that required plenty of agitating and negotiating. He helped shut down Interstate 70 to protest the dearth of African Americans hired to work on highway projects.
Vickers, the Rev. Al Sharpton and approximately 300 other protesters halted morning rush hour traffic. They got the attention of then-Gov. Mel Carnahan, the Missouri Department of Transportation and area contractors.
Negotiations quickly ensued, and on July 22, 1999, 10 days after the blockade, protesters celebrated the inclusive agreement that had been hammered out, an agreement that still stands.
“I have learned to use public protest for the benefit of the weak and downtrodden,” Vickers wrote.
His cases needed to be equally meaningful; activism and law were inextricably linked.
“I never wanted to be just an attorney. I wanted to be a lawyer fighting for justice where it most mattered, inside its very core,” Vickers said in a 2001 RiverFront Times profile.
“He practiced what I call ‘guerilla law,’” laughed his longtime friend, Virvus Jones, the former City of St. Louis comptroller and current member of The St. Louis American’s editorial board.
Vickers was filing lawsuits almost until he died.
The negotiator
When Vickers and other organizers shut down I-70, the Missouri Department of Transportation was a $1 billion-plus agency that had awarded 3 percent of its contracts to minority firms.
The protest and subsequent negotiations caused the State of Missouri to change the way it does business and cemented Vickers’ reputation as a man to be reckoned with.
An agreement was reached with MoDOT to initiate a construction program that trained more than a thousand minority workers. It also created a 10 percent set-aside of construction contracts for minority firms and 25 percent of construction jobs for minority workers.
The set-asides became common practice not only in highway construction, but in many other major capital projects.
S. Lee Kling, then chairman of the Missouri Highway and Transportation Commission, called Vickers “an amazing negotiator.”
The victory celebration drew Sharpton back to St. Louis, along with Martin Luther King III. King told an assembled crowd of about 500 that the movement was restarted in St. Louis.
Vickers had achieved a similar victory in the City of St. Louis a decade earlier during the time Jones was comptroller.
Vickers represented minority contractors in a federal lawsuit against the city that resulted in minority businesses receiving 25 percent and women businesses receiving 5 percent of all St. Louis contracts. The “25/5” deal was established in a consent decree and executive order in 1990.
“He worked the outside, I worked the inside,” Jones said. That minority agreement still exists for minority contractors, and a version of it will enter city law when Mayor Lyda Krewson signs a minority inclusion bill passed by the St. Louis Board of Aldermen days after Vickers’ death, which she told The St. Louis American she will sign.
Testing the ‘establishment’
His hometown of East St. Louis was a teeming industrial city when Vickers was born on February 16, 1953. By the time he entered high school, the city’s most prosperous days were behind it. His parents moved the family to University City where he got his first taste of civil action – and its power.
He participated in a student-led sit-down at University City High School to protest the lack of black teachers and staff. The tactic worked.
“There was a real sense of power, and once you realize the power of organizing, you never lose that sense,” he said in his RFT profile.
He wanted to get started on his activism full-time after graduating from high school in 1970, but his parents insisted that he go to college.
He first attended St. Louis Community College at Forest Park, then Washington University, from which he graduated in 1975 with a political science degree. He later earned a master’s degree from Occidental College in California. After doing a year-long internship in the CORO Foundation Fellows program in St. Louis, Vickers entered the corporate world.
It was not a good fit. He immediately began to upset the apple cart, advocating on behalf of black employees. When he got the opportunity to represent a black Monsanto employee at a union hearing and won, he knew he’d found his calling. He headed to law school at the University of Virginia, from which he graduated in 1981.
Upon returning to St. Louis, he joined Bryan Cave, one of the city’s largest and most prestigious law firms. But it was another form of the corporate world, and he wanted to defend the underdog.
In 1983, he and two others established their own firm, Vickers, Moore & Wiest. He took on difficult criminal and civil rights cases and was soon working on behalf of minority contractors.
At the time, Eddie Hasan, who led the St. Louis Minority Contractors Association and later the minority contractor advocacy group MOKAN, called Vickers “the missing link” in the contractors’ efforts to gain contracts.
Throughout his life, his Muslim faith and his activism remained at his core and sustained him.
He converted while in law school and it became part of his activism. Following the terrorists’ attacks on 9/11, Vickers defended Islam. He twice met privately with President George W. Bush.
He served as executive director of the American Muslim Council and on the board of the American Muslim Alliance. In his leadership roles, Vickers appeared on television programs, including a panel discussion on C-SPAN that included then-FBI director Robert Mueller.
Civil rights by any other name
He fought for economic issues, but was unafraid to explore any area of injustice.
He waded into the debate on police brutality with the “Jack in the Box” killings on Hanley Road in north St. Louis County in 2000, when police shot two unarmed black men. St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert P. McCulloch called Vickers and a fellow activist “phonies.”
Later investigative reporting by the Post-Dispatch proved that Vickers’ suspicions about the killings were well-founded.
After the Ferguson Police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson on August 9, 2014, he exhorted black leaders to again practice civil disobedience, as he did. One of his fellow protesters and a client, state Sen. Jamilah Nasheed, D-St. Louis, went to jail during the protests.
He and Nasheed had been together as his foray into politics grew. He was her campaign manager when she first ran for the Missouri House of Representatives. He was returning a favor; she had worked on his bid for the U.S. House of Representatives in 2000. She began serving in 2007, and Vickers became her chief of staff.
Last year, in an open letter to his daughter, Erica, (whom he affectionately called “Puddin”), he told her and his granddaughters (“Pumpkin” and “Peanut”), published in The St. Louis American, he wrote how his photo came to be included in the Missouri History Museum’s exhibit #1 in Civil Rights.
The picture was from a protest at the offices of the St. Louis County government. The St. Louis Minority Contractors, an organization Vickers incorporated, was demanding that the county enact a law requiring inclusion of blacks in all county contracts.
“The picture shows me in the dual role I performed: attorney and activist,” Vickers wrote.
He also leaves a more extensive written legacy, a book titled And Men Don’t Talk, a collection of short stories and poems about his upbringing among men who were “about action, rather than talk.”
Inherited wisdom
Eric Erfan Vickers was the second-born of Claire Lee and Robert Vickers’ four children. His mother worked for the federal government; his father was superintendent of schools in Venice, Illinois.
He was born February 16, 1953 at Peoples Hospital, an all-black hospital in St. Louis. His mother had refused to have her child at St. Mary’s Hospital in East St. Louis because black children were delivered in the hospital’s basement.
Atop his blog is posted some of his mother’s words of wisdom: “Your smart mouth will get you in trouble.” They were words he respected — and occasionally heeded.
His marriage to Judy Gladney ended in divorce.
Services were held on Saturday at Darul-Islam Masjid in Ballwin.
Survivors include his son, Aaron Vickers of St. Louis; his daughter, Erica Cage of Shiloh, Illinois; his father, Robert Vickers of University City; his sister, Vikki Deakin of Ogden, Utah; his brother, Steven Vickers of University City; and three grandchildren.
A memorial service will be held 1-3 p.m. Saturday, April 28 at Brittany Woods Middle School, 8125 Groby Rd.
Steve may you RIP 🙏