Browsing: a law professor and author of a Thurgood Marshall biography. “Read’s was a large chain and I remember going to the counter and eating at Greenmount and 32nd.”

Helena Hicks, a civil rights advocate who led a 1950s protest to desegregate the old Read’s drug store lunch counter, died of pneumonia complicated by Lewy body dementia Thursday at the William L. and Victorine Q. Adams Gilchrist Center Baltimore. She was 88 and lived in Northwest Baltimore.