Longtime civil rights leader and Reverend Benjamin L. Hooks, who worked with Martin Luther King, Jr. during the Civil Rights Era, has died after a long illness.
State Rep. Ulysses Jones (D-TN), a member of Hooks’ church, said the Reverend died early Thursday morning, according to the AP.
Hooks, a World War II veteran, served as President of the NAACP from 1977 to 1992, helping the then-struggling organization get out of debt and expand its membership by several hundred thousand people.
Hooks said shortly after he took over at the NAACP:
Black Americans are not defeated. 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.
Before the NAACP, Hooks worked with King in the 1960s, and was present for his “I Have A Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial, which Hooks said “will last as long as the Gettysburg Address.”
Hooks was also the first black judge in the South since Reconstruction, appointed to the Tennessee Criminal Court in 1965, and the first black board member of the FCC, appointed by President Nixon. In 2007, President George W. Bush presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his work.
When President Obama was elected, Hooks said: “In a nutshell, I am proud and happy to have lived to see this day. Amen. Amen. Aaay-men!”
Hooks had also said of Obama:
How can he avoid race when every time he stands up, every time he brushes his teeth or catches a plane, it is there? When you are black, it is with you every moment of your life. But I think he played his cards just right. He tried to say, ‘I understand how bad America has been but I’m not gonna spend all day talking about what you didn’t do. Let’s talk about what you can do.’
Hooks was 85, and is survived by his wife, daughter, and two grandsons.
