He had pneumonia and kidney failure, his son Gregory Nickens said.
The son of a former slave, Mr. Nickens served as president of the Frederick branch of the NAACP from the early 1970s until he stepped down in 1992. He had joined the civil rights movement years earlier and spoke out on issues ranging from fair housing to the scourges of drugs and violence.
He said he received death threats from the Klan, whose white supremacist activities he helped challenge in court and at rallies. Once, when a Klan grand dragon infiltrated an NAACP meeting and unleashed a diatribe, Mr. Nickens responded calmly: “We are all one people under one flag.”
