LIers remember the work of NAACP's Benjamin Hooks

In 1984, the president of the Central Long Island branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was trying to boost membership in her Amityville-based branch.

So she asked for help from a Baptist preacher from Memphis who had become executive director of the national NAACP seven years earlier.

The director, Benjamin L. Hooks, came to a reception at the local president's Amityville home, then attended a membership drive held at a nearby church.

Hooks, 85, who took over the national NAACP in 1977 and revived its flagging membership and prestige, died early Thursday in Memphis.

Thursday, people from across the country - including community leaders and the U.S. president - lauded Hooks as a champion for justice.

"Being a Baptist minister, he had a captivating way of speaking, so you would sit and listen to every word he said," the branch president, Myrna Taylor, said. "This is a big loss."

President Barack Obama, whose 2008 election as America's first African-American president likely would have been impossible without civil rights achievements pressed by the NAACP, released a statement honoring Hooks for "his extraordinary place in our American story."

"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," Obama said.

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

"Dr. Hooks was a calm yet forceful voice for fairness, opportunity and personal responsibility," Bush said then. "He never tired or faltered in demanding that our nation live up to its founding ideals of liberty and equality."

Hooks took over as the NAACP's executive director in 1977, at a time when the organization's stature had diminished.

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.

"The civil rights movement is not dead," he told Ebony magazine soon after his induction. "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."

By the time he left in 1992, the group had rebounded, with membership growing by several hundred thousand.

Hazel Dukes, who served as national NAACP president during part of Hook's tenure, credited him with helping to build the organization's future by attracting younger members.

Dukes said she would often find Hooks in the national NAACP's offices, which were in downtown Brooklyn until a move to Baltimore in 1986 - well past 9 p.m.

"He would just be getting his second wind," Dukes said. "We would stay until 11:30 or midnight, talking about what the NAACP could do."

Among other achievements, Hooks created an initiative that gave more employment opportunities to blacks in Major League Baseball, and launched a program in which corporations supported development projects in black communities.

Hooks' inspiration to fight social injustice and bigotry stemmed from his Army experience guarding Italian prisoners 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.' "

His 1965 appointment to the Tennessee Criminal Court made him the South's first black trial court judge since Reconstruction.

President Richard Nixon made Hooks the Federal Communications Commission's first black commissioner in 1972. Minority employment in broadcasting grew from 3 percent to 15 percent during his five-year tenure.

In the waning years of his leadership of the NAACP, Hooks pressed then-President George H.W. Bush for action on a string of gasoline bomb attacks in the South that killed a federal judge in Alabama and a black civil rights lawyer in Georgia in December 1989. The same month, another bomb was intercepted at an NAACP office in Jacksonville, Fla.

"We believe that this latest incident is an effort to intimidate our association, to strike fear in our hearts," Hooks said at the time. "It will not succeed."

In his last keynote speech to an NAACP national convention in 1992, Hooks urged members to never forget those less fortunate, saying "Remember that down in the valley where crime abounds . . . where babies are having babies, our brothers and sisters are crying to us, 'Is anyone listening? Does anyone care?' "With AP