Dr. Benjamin Hooks: 'A Christian first'

Rev. Dr. Benjamin L. Hooks

By David Waters

The first person Rev. Benjamin Hooks baptized when he became pastor of Greater Middle Baptist Church in Memphis in 1956 was his father, who was not a member.

"My father was not a churchgoing man, but he was a Christian all the time," Hooks told me in 1996 as he celebrated his 40th year in the pulpit. "My father thought too many preachers he knew didn't live up to the standard. But I told him that as far as I was concerned, a preacher was no better than any other Christian. We all are Christians first."

The Rev. Dr. Benjamin L. Hooks, who died Thursday at age 85, always tried to be a Christian first -- as the first African-American judge in the South since Reconstruction, as the first African-American appointed to the board of the Federal Communications Commission, and as executive director of the NAACP from 1977 to 1992.

"Dr. Hooks was a calm yet forceful voice for fairness, opportunity and personal responsibility," President George W. Bush said in 2007 when he presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Dr. Hooks. "He never tired or faltered in demanding that our nation live up to its founding ideals of liberty and equality."

Hooks spoke to presidents and other national political leaders. He spoke to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Jesse Jackson and other civil rights leaders. He spoke to famous entertainers and athletes and business leaders. He was not a man without ego. Sometimes he even impressed himself. When Hooks got the Medal of Freedom, reporter Bartholomew Sullivan of The (Memphis) Commercial Appeal asked him what he planned to do with it.

"Martin (Luther King) used to say, 'I hate to have a wall full of medals. It looks like you're bragging or showing off.' But why get them and hide them?" Hooks said he planned to put the medal on public display, "after I get through looking at it myself real good."

Hooks didn't mind talking about his accomplishments. But other than his wife of 50 years, Frances Hooks, what Ben Hooks liked to talk about the most was "the Light of the World." Week after week he chose the pulpit over the podium. He always was more comfortable in front of a congregation than a convention or cable TV audience. His favorite form of communication was not a speech or an interview. It was a good, old-fashioned, gospel sermon about God's sweet salvation.

That's why he continued to pastor and preach, not only for 52 years at Greater Middle Baptist in Memphis, but also -- for 30 of those years -- at Greater New Mt. Moriah Missionary Baptist Church in Detroit. From 1964-1994, Dr. Hooks would preach one Sunday in Memphis and the next Sunday in Detroit, even while he was leading the NAACP.

"Ben is a preacher," Rev. Samuel Billy Kyles, another spiritual giant, told me. "That's just who he is."

"To me he was preaching all the time," former Memphis congressman Harold Ford Jr. said about Dr. Hooks several years ago in a video tribute.

Dr. Hooks, who struggled for years with diabetes and a heart condition, preached his last sermon as pastor of Greater Middle Baptist Church in January 2009. By then, his rich, booming, Delta blues voice had lost some of its vigor but none of its vitality. You can hear it in this video from This Sunday Morning, a Memphis TV show Dr. Hooks hosted for years.

"I'd like to live long enough to retire," Dr. Hooks told me in 1996. "But I don't know how long that is. Even in retirement I'd like to preach . . . You have to believe that whatever happens in this world is only temporary. "You only go crazy and nuts when you believe this is all. If you believe this is all, then some 17-year-old getting killed by a train or getting shot becomes incomprehensible. But God has eternity to write the story."

That's the story Ben Hooks devoted his life to telling and to showing, a story he believed in so deeply and thoroughly that it formed and nourished the more earthly and civic beliefs that he worked for all of his life.

"No Jesus, no justice," he told me more than once.

That's how Dr. Benjamin L. Hooks should be remembered, as a man who worked for Jesus and for justice -- as a civil rights leader, an African-American pioneer, as an attorney and judge, but first and foremost as a Christian.