Benjamin L. Hooks, who as executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for 16 years championed minorities in an increasingly conservative political era, died at his home in Memphis. He was 85. Leila McDowell, a spokeswoman for the N.A.A.C.P., said Mr. Hooks, a Lemoyne-Owen College and Howard University alumnus, 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 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.
After taking over from Mr. Wilkins, Mr. Hooks instituted several programs to appeal to younger blacks, including the Academic, Cultural, Technological and Scientific Olympics, known as Act-So, an annual talent competition that involves more than 150,000 teen-agers throughout the country.
In a sharp departure from past N.A.A.C.P. policies, he sought to forge closer ties with American 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 managed to increase the amount of money raised by the N.A.A.C.P. from corporate donors, to $3.7 million in 1993 from $696,000 in 1978.
Despite his achievements, many friends and detractors alike say that Mr. Hooks only held the line, failing to modernize and build the N.A.A.C.P. into a more effective organization that could better cope with the increasingly contentious environment that surrounded civil rights issues in the 1980s and ’90s.
As a manager who hated to delegate tasks, Mr. Hooks resisted attempts, until his final two years in office, to hire a strong deputy to help with administration. Distrustful of modern research techniques like polling and focus groups, Mr. Hooks was widely seen as failing to come up with a strategy to make the N.A.A.C.P. more relevant to the large numbers of younger, college-educated blacks who had attained middle-class status in the 1970s and ’80s.
As a result, membership stagnated at around 400,000, revenue from memberships declined, and the average age of members increased.
“Ben lacked a sense of understanding of what his marketplace was, what he was selling, or how you sell in this economy,” said George Carter, who served as Mr. Hooks’ deputy for two years. “He had very little sense that there are ways to sell yourself and get high yields.”
Reflecting the social conservatism of his black Baptist roots, Mr. Hooks for years resisted entreaties to have the N.A.A.C.P. take a strong position on preventing the spread of AIDS, a growing threat in the inner cities. In was not until the basketball star Magic Johnson announced in 1991 that he was infected with the AIDS virus that Mr. Hooks relented and allowed the organization to support programs like c*ndom distribution in schools and health clinics.
Meanwhile, Mr. Hooks was battling his board over who would run the organization’s day-to-day operations. In 1978, five months after taking the job, Mr. Hooks threatened to quit when the board refused to approve his hiring of a chief aide and refused to pay the travel expenses of his wife, who frequently accompanied him.
In 1983, Mr. Hooks was suspended by the board’s chairwoman, Margaret Bush Wilson, a lawyer from St. Louis, who asserted that Mr. Hooks was mismanaging the organization. Mr. Hooks emerged the victor in the power struggle when the board voted to reinstate him and to strip Ms. Wilson of her powers.
But in 1992, Mr. Hooks again became embroiled in a fight with the board, this time under the chairmanship of William Gibson, a dentist from South Carolina, over the day-to-day running of the organization. When the board backed Mr. Gibson, Mr. Hooks resigned.
He is survived by his wife, Frances, and a daughter, Patricia Gray.
Posted By: Reginald Culpepper
Thursday, April 15th 2010 at 1:05PM
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