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 Editorial: Human rights hero, scholar
Dr. Ben L. Hooks: He understood that the law, religion and knowledge were awesome weapons in the fight for social change.
The death Thursday of Dr. Benjamin L. Hooks was "urgently" reported by print and electronic media services worldwide.
News bulletins about his death and obituaries chronicling the civil rights icon's many accomplishments are a testament to a man who played a leading role in helping to bring about tremendous social change.
Despite his international fame and national duties as a Federal Communications commissioner and head of the national NAACP, Ben Hooks was always Memphis.
He never lost that close connection to the city of his birth, where he talked fondly of his playmates in the South Memphis area around Booker T. Washington High School; where he pastored a church; where, as a lawyer, he fought a hateful and immoral Jim Crow, and where he served as the first African-American judge in the South since Reconstruction.
Dr. Hooks had a personal touch that endeared him to Memphians and to national and world leaders. He used his great, booming speaking voice, with its enrapturing cadence and vivid symbolism, to make a point stick with his audience. That was true whether he was preaching to his congregation, arguing a civil rights case before a judge, making a point to a national TV audience as head of the national NAACP or rallying us to answer the bell in the ongoing struggle for social and economic equality.
Those attributes were just part of a great man.
Dr. Hooks was a true religious, legal and civil rights scholar, which made it a fitting tribute to name the city's main library after him.
The impact of his scholarship also was recognized with the 1996 founding of the Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change at the University of Memphis, whose mission is to preserve the history of the American civil rights movement and to advance the legacy of that movement through scholarship and community action. Dr. Hooks really understood the adage that knowledge is power. He wielded that power for the benefit of all of us.
That understanding played a role in helping him become the first person from the civil rights era to use both the law and the church to effectively push the civil rights movement forward.
He was a member of the generation that lived an oppressive history, but fought and lived to see tremendous change in the social and economic fabric for people of color and the poor. He lived to see a man of African heritage become president of the United States.
Because of Dr. Hooks and many others, some of whom gave their lives, many battles have been won in the continuing fight for social equality and economic justice.
More battles remain. If we follow Dr. Hooks' example, they also can be won.
(2010-04-16 /Memphis Commercial Appeal )
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