NASHVILLE — Civil-rights leader Benjamin L. Hooks, who shrugged off courtroom slurs as a young lawyer before earning a pioneering judgeship and reviving a flagging NAACP, died Thursday in Memphis. He was 85.
Across the country, political leaders and Hooks’ peers in the civil-rights movement remembered his remarkably wide-ranging accomplishments and said he’d want the fight for social justice to continue. State Rep. Ulysses Jones, a member of the church where Hooks was pastor, said Hooks died at his home following a long illness.
“Right up to the last, he conveyed . . . the need for us to fight,” said NAACP president Benjamin Jealous, recalling a speech Hooks gave last year. Hooks “gave a speech as fiery as any he’s given 50 years earlier.”
Hooks took over as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s executive director at a time when the organization’s stature had diminished in 1977. Years removed from the civil-rights battles of the ’60s, the group was $1 million in debt and membership had shrunk to 200,000 members from nearly a half-million a decade earlier.
“Black Americans are not defeated,” he told Ebony magazine soon after his induction. “The civil-rights movement is not dead. If anyone thinks that we are going to stop agitating, they had better think again. If anyone thinks that we are going to stop litigating, they had better close the courts. If anyone thinks that we are not going to demonstrate and protest, they had better roll up the sidewalks.”
By the time he left as executive director in 1992, the group had rebounded, with membership growing by several hundred thousand. He used community radiothons to raise awareness of local NAACP branches’ work and to boost membership.
Hooks’ inspiration to fight social injustice and bigotry stemmed from his experience guarding Italian prisoners of war while serving overseas in the Army during World War II. Foreign prisoners were allowed to eat in “for whites only” restaurants while he was barred from them.
When no law school in the South would admit him, he used the GI bill to attend DePaul University in Chicago, where he earned a law degree in 1948. He later opened his own law practice in his hometown of Memphis.
“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 once said in an interview with Jet magazine. “Usually it was just ‘boy.’ ”
President Richard Nixon nominated Hooks to the Federal Communications Commission in 1972. He was its first black commissioner, serving for five years before resigning to lead the NAACP.
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