Don Hubbard says that as a youngster he asked his parents why he could not sit in the front of city buses or use other public accommodations while growing up in New Orleans during the days of Jim Crow and segregation.

He says his mother’s reply was “Baby, they are waiting on you to change it.”

He didn’t understand it then, but “as I grew up, I realized that if I wasn’t satisfied with something, I had to get involved,” Hubbard says, adding that taking part in the Civil Rights movement just seemed natural at the time because “everybody was talking about change.”

In March, the ACLU of Louisiana will honor Don Hubbard for his role in changing things.

The ACLU's 36th annual Ben Smith Award Gala, where Hubbard will be recognized, will take place 6 p.m. Saturday, March 10, at the New Orleans Marriott at the Convention Center. The evening will also feature a silent auction. Tickets can be purchased by going to www.laaclu.org. The keynote speaker will be journalist and author James Ridgeway, who has written for the Wall Street Journal, the Village Voice, Mother Jones, and many other magazines and newspapers.

The Ben Smith Award honors individuals who have demonstrated a commitment to the advancement of civil liberties in Louisiana. It is named for the late Ben Smith, a civil rights attorney and a founder of the ACLU of Louisiana who was arrested for his work to end segregation and for participating in mixed-race gatherings.

“I’m honored to receive the award,” Hubbard says. “Not only is it an honor to be recognized, but to be recognized in the name of Ben Smith. He was such a pioneer and a person I looked up to because he was courageous enough to go against the grain.”

Marjorie R. Esman, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana says the organization could not have chosen a more fitting person to receive the 2012 honor.

“To honor a civil rights activist like Don Hubbard in the name of Ben Smith makes perfect sense,” Esman says, adding that an ACLU committee solicits nominations each year to select an honoree for its annual gala; and this year, Hubbard’s name was prominent among the nominees.

“He is just such a luminary and (someone) who really has not gotten a lot of recognition for all of the things he has done,” Esman says of Hubbard.

Beginning in the 1960’s, Hubbard led efforts to desegregate the city of New Orleans and to combat police abuses. In 1963, he organized a 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. He was also a founder of the New Orleans chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality or CORE.

To be sure, Hubbard’s role in the civil rights movement was weighty. As a leader in CORE, he was tapped to go to New York to pick up a car that entertainer-activist Lena Horne had procured from a car dealer, he says. Hubbard’s task was to deliver the vehicle to James Chaney in Mississippi so that it could be used during Freedom Summer’s voter education and registration activities.

He picked up the car in Utica, drove to New York City and loaded the car with material from CORE and other civil rights organizations, then he set out on his journey to Mississippi, he says.

“I was a city kid—20, 21 years old. I didn’t know anything, and I was driving alone,” Hubbard says reflecting on the time. After getting more than half way through the journey, Hubbard says he began to get sleepy, pulled into a service station for gas and figured it would also be a good spot to take a quick nap. But soon he could hear and see men at the station talking about and pointing at the brand new car with the New York plates and decided the spot was not a safe place for him to let his guard down. He began to feel increasingly uneasy about his situation—a Black man, alone, driving a car with plates from a northern state in the South in 1964. He drove a little farther and saw a “white boy in an Air Force uniform thumbing a ride.” He agreed give the hitchhiker, who needed a lift to Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, a ride on one condition—that he drive while Hubbard stretched out in the back seat—an arrangement that likely served two purposes, allowing him to get some much-needed rest while staying out of the site of those who viewed unfamiliar faces and out-of-town vehicles as signs of outside agitators whose presence they would likely meet with harm.

Ultimately, Hubbard successfully delivered the car to Chaney. It was the station wagon that Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman used during Freedom Summer in Mississippi. It was the car the trio were in when they were abducted and murdered by Klansmen.

He had never met Schwerner or Goodman, Hubbard says. But he remembers the day his wife brought him the news that three workers—Chaney among them—were missing in Mississippi.

Hubbard says he jumped up and started making calls. Then, he started thinking that it could have just as easily been him to go missing.

“I was alone. Nobody, except for the folks that saw me off in New York, knew where I was heading.”

Despite the risks of his active involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, Hubbard says he always had the support of his family.

“My family never questioned (his Civil Rights work),” he says. “My grandmother, mother, father—they were the militants in the family.”

Hubbard’s Civil Rights activism had a profound impact on his hometown.

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, 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.

In the 1970s, he helped found SOUL (Southern Organization for Unified Leadership), a Black political organization once considered one of the most powerful and effective machines for rallying African American voters at election time.

Today, Hubbard continues as a mentor and advisor to leaders and activists. He also owns and operates Hubbard Mansion, a nationally-acclaimed bed-and-breakfast and the first African-American owned business on St. Charles Avenue.

In a tribute video posted on YouTube more than three and half years ago when Hubbard was honored by the Urban League of Greater New Orleans, a cross-section of individuals—both Black and White, young and old—reflected on how Hubbard impacted their personal lives and New Orleans, in general.

As for Hubbard, receiving awards is nice, but he says he is most grateful that “God has allowed me to live long enough to educate my four daughters.”