Benjamin Hooks, pioneering civil-rights leader, dies at 85

Benjamin Hooks, who as executive director of the NAACP for 16 years championed minorities in an increasingly conservative political era, died Thursday at his home in Memphis. He was 85.

Leila McDowell, a spokeswoman for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said Mr. Hooks had died after a long illness.

While best known for his leadership role with the nation's oldest and largest civil-rights group, Mr. Hooks had a varied career. He was a Baptist minister who headed two churches. He was a lawyer and a criminal-court judge, the first black man to be appointed to the bench in his native Tennessee. He was the first of his race to be named to the five-member Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

"Most people do one or two things in their lifetimes," said Julian Bond, a former head of the Atlanta branch of the NAACP. "He's just done an awful lot."

President Obama said Thursday, "Our national life is richer for the time Dr. Hooks spent on this earth. And our union is more perfect for the way he spent it: Giving a voice to the voiceless."

Mr. Hooks had his share of disappointments. Under his leadership, the NAACP found itself repeatedly fighting the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush to preserve the gains minority groups had made in the 1960s and '70s.

At the same time, the organization foundered under the weight of declining membership, shaky finances and an image of being outmoded and increasingly irrelevant. His own business career — he owned fried-chicken franchises in Memphis for a time — was damaged by bankruptcy.

For some who watched the NAACP over the years, Mr. Hooks came to symbolize one of its major problems: leaders from an older generation unwilling or unable to adapt to modern times and changed political circumstances.

Despite the setbacks, Mr. Hooks felt he had succeeded in advancing a just cause, to improve the lot of African Americans. "I have fought the good fight," he said in his valedictory to the NAACP in 1992. "I have kept the faith."

In 2007, President George W. Bush presented Mr. Hooks with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country's highest civilian honor.

Benjamin Lawson Hooks was born Jan. 31, 1925, in Memphis. With his father's photography business providing a stable middle-class grounding, Mr. Hooks attended LeMoyne College in Memphis.

His 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 opened a law practice in 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.' "

In 1965 he was appointed to a newly created seat on the Tennessee Criminal Court, making him the first black judge since Reconstruction in a state trial court in the South.

In 1951, while working as a lawyer in Memphis, he wed Frances Dancy.

Mr. Hooks earned the nickname "Jacob" as a teenager because of his keen interest in Bible studies. An ordained Baptist minister, he had long been the resident minister at two churches, one in Detroit and the other in Memphis. He insisted on preaching a sermon at some church — his own or someone else's — every Sunday, regardless of what job he held.

President Nixon appointed Mr. Hooks to the FCC in 1972. He was its first black commissioner, serving for five years before resigning to lead the NAACP.

At the FCC, he addressed the lack of minority leadership in media and persuaded the commission to propose a new rule requiring TV and radio stations to be offered publicly before they could be sold. Minority employment in broadcasting grew from 3 percent to 15 percent during his tenure.

Replacing Roy Wilkins, a guiding figure of the civil-rights movement, at the NAACP in July 1977, Mr. Hooks tried to steer the association through some of its most difficult years.

Twelve of his 16 years as executive director of the association coincided with the presidencies of Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

"I've had the misfortune of serving eight years under Reagan and three under Bush," Mr. Hooks said in 1992. "We've had to get rid of a lot of programs we had hoped for, so we could fight to save what we already had."

In a departure from past NAACP policies, he sought to forge closer ties with U.S. corporations. He testified before Congress on behalf of measures to limit imports, which he saw as a threat to jobs held by blacks, and he increased the amount of money raised by the NAACP from corporate donors, to $3.7 million in 1993 from $696,000 in 1978.

Despite his achievements, many friends and detractors alike said Mr. Hooks only held the line, failing to modernize and build the NAACP into a more effective organization that could better cope with the increasingly contentious environment that surrounded civil-rights issues in the 1980s and '90s.

Distrustful of modern research techniques such as polling and focus groups, Mr. Hooks was widely seen as failing to come up with a strategy to make the NAACP more relevant to the large numbers of younger, college-educated African Americans who had attained middle-class status in the 1970s and '80s.

As a result, membership stagnated at about 400,000, revenue from memberships declined and the average age of members increased.

Reflecting the social conservatism of his Baptist roots, Mr. Hooks for years resisted entreaties to have the NAACP take a strong position on preventing the spread of AIDS. In was not until basketball star Magic Johnson said in 1991 that he was infected with the AIDS virus that Mr. Hooks relented and allowed the organization to support programs such as condom distribution in schools and health clinics.

He is survived by his wife and a daughter.

Material from The Associated Press is included in this report.