Nelson R. Bickley Jr.

Nelson R. Bickley, Jr. was born on February 21, 1928, in Cincinnati, Ohio and raised in Huntington, WV. After graduating from the city’s all Black Douglass High School in 1945, he attended the HBCU West Virginia State College. After graduation, Nelson enlisted in the army as an officer and spent twenty years serving in the Artillery, traveling with his young family, and serving as an air defense artillery battery commander in Germany and Korea, eventually rising to the rank of sub-post Commander in Swienfurth, Germany, before obtaining the rank of Lt. Colonel. In 1966, he joined the military science faculty at West Virginia University and went on to become the University’s director of both foreign student coordination and minority affairs. During his tenure at WVU, Bickley served as an invaluable mentor to ROTC students and more broadly to Black students at the University at that time, both informally and in his role as faculty advisor to the Black Unity Organization. After he retired from the army, but still working at WVU, he earned a Masters degree in Counseling and, in 1972, he left WVU to become the head of the Office of Counseling Services at West Virginia State College, his alma mater. A life-long learner, at 49 years of age he finally decided to pursue his life-long goal of becoming a lawyer. He graduated in 1980 at the age of 52 from West Virginia University school of law.
He practiced law at Bland, Jacobs, Bickley, and Barkus in Charleston for the next twenty years, where he developed Bick’s Laws, after seeing so many women being mistreated by their husbands. One law cautioned women to have jobs and their own income so that they would not be dependent. He was known for his compassion and sense of humor. He was inducted into the ROTC Hall of Fame at WVSU in 1982.
Nelson passed on October 9, 2021, at the age of 93.