(News Terupdate) - With the Tennessee House canceling its activities so lawmakers can attend the funeral, civil rights icon Benjamin L. Hooks will be buried Wednesday in Memphis, Tennessee, his hometown.
The 85-year-old Hooks, who led the NAACP from 1977 to 1992, died last week after a lengthy illness, according to NAACP officials.
Hooks, who grew up in the segregated South, was "a vocal campaigner for civil rights in the United States," the NAACP said in announcing his death.
Hooks was a lawyer and an ordained Baptist minister who joined the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and led the NAACP for 15 years.
The organization "was suffering from declining membership and prestige when Hooks assumed his role as executive director," a University of Memphis biography says. The NAACP added several hundred thousand new members during his tenure, it says.
The civil rights organization worked with Major League Baseball on a program that expanded employment opportunities for African-Americans in baseball, including in positions as managers, coaches and in franchise executive offices, the NAACP said.
He also worked with colleagues to set up a program in which more than 200 corporations agreed to participate in economic development projects in black communities, the NAACP said.
President George W. Bush awarded Hooks the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, in November 2007.
"As a civil rights activist, public servant, and minister of the gospel, Dr. Hooks has extended the hand of fellowship throughout his years," Bush said.
"It was not an always ... easy thing to do. But it was always the right thing to do."
Source : CNN
Saturday, April 24, 2010
Civil rights leader Benjamin Hooks to be buried Wednesday
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