Civil-rights leader Benjamin Hooks dies at age 85

April 16, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Leadership helped revive NAACP

Associated Press

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 after 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 took over as the NAACP’s executive director at a time when the organization’s stature had diminished in 1977. Years removed from the civil-rights battles of the 1960s, the group was $1 million in debt, and its 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.

“He came in at a time the NAACP was struggling and gave it a strong foundation. He brought dignity and strong leadership to the organization,” Jones said.

State Rep. John Deberry, a fellow minister and chairman of the Tennessee Black Caucus, said Hooks’ passing is a sobering reminder that “we are losing an incredible generation of men and women who changed the world.”

“And I hope that all these young folks who accept their rights with such a cavalier attitude, those who are disrespectful to their seniors, those who go to these schools and misuse the opportunities ... realize that as these men and women move off the scene, that somebody has to step up,” Deberry said.

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.