Mourners pay respects to ex-NAACP executive director Hooks at Detroit church where he preached

Mourners pay respects to ex-NAACP director Hooks

DETROIT — Mourners paid respects Monday to longtime NAACP executive director Benjamin L. Hooks as he lay in repose at the Detroit church where he preached for 30 years.

Hooks was pastor at the Greater New Mount Moriah Missionary Baptist Church from 1964 to 1994. He flew to Detroit twice a month to minister there even as he served as a Tennessee judge, Federal Communications commissioner and national civil rights leader.

“He was the most humble person you ever met,” longtime congregant Dorothy Henderson said after joining the line of people passing before Hooks’ open coffin at the front of the church he helped grow from several hundred to 2,900 members.

When Hooks took over as executive director in 1977, the NAACP was $1 million in debt and its membership had shrunk to 200,000 from nearly a half-million a decade earlier. He helped rebuild it, using community radiothons to raise awareness of local branches’ work and to boost membership. By the time he left in 1992, the group’s membership had grown by several hundred thousand.

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 could eat in “for whites only” restaurants but he could not.

He used the GI bill to attend DePaul University in Chicago and later opened his own law practice in his hometown of Memphis.

New Mount Moriah’s members brought Hooks in as pastor because his civil rights leadership appealed to them, said his successor, the Rev. James Flowers.

“They saw hope in Dr. Hooks,” said Flowers, who often shared the pulpit with him. Among Hooks’ greatest challenges, Flowers said, was maintaining congregations in Detroit and Memphis at the same time and keeping both happy.

“He said it was like having two wives,” said Flowers, who visited Hooks’ Memphis church frequently over the years.

President Richard Nixon nominated Hooks to the Federal Communications Commission in 1972. He was its first black commissioner and served five years before resigning to lead the NAACP.

Hooks later was chairman of the board of directors of the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis and helped create The Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change at the University of Memphis.

The 85-year-old died Thursday in Memphis, Tenn., where his funeral is planned Wednesday.