Benjamin Lawson Hooks (January 31, 1925 – April 15, 2010) was an American civil rights leader and government official. A Baptist minister and practicing attorney, he served as executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from 1977 to 1992.
Throughout his career, Hooks was a vocal campaigner for civil rights in the United States, and served from 1972 to 1977 as the first African American member of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
Early life
Benjamin Hooks was born in Memphis, Tennessee. Growing up on South Lauderdale and Vance, he was the fifth son of Robert B & Bessie White Hooks. He had 6 other siblings. His father was a photographer and owned a photography studio with his brother Henry, known at the time as Hooks Brothers, and the family was fairly comfortable by the standards of black people for the day. Still, he recalled that he had to wear hand-me-down clothes and that his mother had to be careful to make the dollars stretch to feed and care for the family.
Young Benjamin's paternal grandmother, Julia Britton Hooks (1852–1942), graduated from Berea College in Kentucky in 1874 and was only the second American black woman to graduate from college. She was a musical prodigy. She began playing piano publicly at age five and at age 18, joined Berea's faculty, teaching instrumental music 1870–72. Her sister, Dr. Mary E. Britton, also attended Berea, and became a physician in Lexington, Kentucky.
With such a family legacy, young Benjamin was inspired to work hard on his academic career, with hopes of being able to make it to college. In his youth, he felt a calling to the Christian ministry. His father, however, did not approve and discouraged Benjamin from such a calling.
Benjamin was a member of the Omega Psi Phi fraternity.
In 1952 he married Frances Darby, a 24-year-old science teacher.
Education
Hooks enrolled in LeMoyne-Owen College, in Memphis, Tennessee. There he undertook a pre-law course of study 1941–43. In his college years he became more acutely aware that he was one of a large number of Americans who were required to use segregated lunch counters, water fountains, and restrooms. "I wish I could tell you every time I was on the highway and couldn’t use a restroom," he would later recall. "My bladder is messed up because of that. Stomach is messed up from eating cold sandwiches."
After graduating in 1944 from Howard University, he joined the Army and had the job of guarding Italian prisoners of war. He found it humiliating that the prisoners were allowed to eat in restaurants from which he was barred. He was discharged from the Army after the end of the war with the rank of staff sergeant.
After the war he enrolled at the DePaul University College of Law in Chicago to study law. No law school in his native Tennessee would admit him. He graduated from DePaul in 1948 with his Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree.
Legal career
Upon graduation Hooks immediately returned to his native Memphis. By this time he was thoroughly committed to breaking down the practices of racial segregation that existed in the United States. Fighting prejudice at every turn, he passed the Tennessee bar exam and set up his own law practice. "At that time you were insulted by law clerks, excluded from white bar associations and when I was in court, I was lucky to be called Ben," he recalled in an interview with Jet magazine. "Usually it was just ‘boy.’ [But] the judges were always fair. The discrimination of those days has changed and, today, the South is ahead of the North in many respects in civil rights progress." In 1949 Hooks was one of only a few black lawyers in Memphis.
Hooks was a friend and associate of Dr. T.R.M. Howard, the head of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL), a leading civil rights organization in Mississippi. Hooks attended the RCNL's annual conferences in the all-black town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi which often drew crowds of ten thousand or more. In 1954, only days before the U.S. Supreme Court handed down Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, he appeared on an RCNL-sponsored roundtable, along with Thurgood Marshall, and other black Southern attorneys to formulate possible litigation strategies.