Dr. Benjamin Hooks

When he took over leadership of the NAACP in 1977, Dr. Benjamin Hooks promised the civil rights organization, though its numbers then were dwindling, wasn’t nearly done agitating. Hooks, who was 85 when he died Thursday at his home in Tennessee, never tired of pushing for more on behalf of minorities and the poor. In the 1960s the lawyer/Baptist preacher was appointed to a Tennessee judgeship, making him the first black since the Civil War to sit on a state trial court in the South. Later he won election to his own term. In 1972, President Richard Nixon appointed him to the Federal Communications Commission. Five years later he took the NAACP post and helped boost its enrollment, serving until 1992. In 2007, President George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Hooks’ legacy is long on service and devotion, an exacting formula for all who aim to make the world a better place.

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