![]() He joined Martin Luther King Jr., and other leaders, at the initial January 1957 Southern Negro Leaders Conference on Transportation and Nonviolent Integration, which organized itself, by August, as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), with whom he became an active participant in the NAACP-sponsored restaurant sit-ins and other boycotts of consumer items and services. Hooks always felt drawn to the Christian church, and in 1956 he was ordained as a Baptist minister and began to preach regularly at the Greater Middle Baptist Church in Memphis, while continuing his busy law practice. 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. 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. Howard, the head of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL), a leading civil rights organization in Mississippi. 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. ![]() "Usually it was just ‘boy.’ the judges were always fair. "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. Fighting prejudice at every turn, he passed the Tennessee bar exam and set up his own law practice. By this time he was thoroughly committed to breaking down the practices of racial segregation that existed in the United States. Upon graduation Hooks immediately returned to his native Memphis. He graduated from DePaul in 1948 with his Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree. No law school in his native Tennessee would admit him. He was discharged from the Army after the end of the war with the rank of staff sergeant.Īfter the war he enrolled at the DePaul University College of Law in Chicago to study law. He found it humiliating that the prisoners were allowed to eat in restaurants from which he was barred. Stomach is messed up from eating cold sandwiches." Īfter graduating in 1944 from Howard University, he joined the Army and had the job of guarding Italian prisoners of war. "My bladder is messed up because of that. "I wish I could tell you every time I was on the highway and couldn’t use a restroom," he would later recall. 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. There he undertook a pre-law course of study 1941–43. Hooks enrolled in LeMoyne-Owen College, in Memphis, Tennessee. In 1952 he married Frances Darby, a 24-year-old science teacher. His father, however, did not approve and discouraged Benjamin from such a calling.īenjamin was a member of the Omega Psi Phi fraternity. In his youth, he felt a calling to the Christian ministry. 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. Britton, also attended Berea, and became a physician in Lexington, Kentucky.5 She began playing piano publicly at age five and at age 18, joined Berea's faculty, teaching instrumental music 1870–72. 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. 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. 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. Growing up on South Lauderdale and Vance, he was the fifth son of Robert B & Bessie White Hooks. Early life īenjamin Hooks was born in Memphis, Tennessee. ![]() 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). 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. Benjamin Lawson Hooks (Janu– April 15, 2010) was an American civil rights leader and government official. ![]()
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