On Dec. 1, 2006, Dr. Benjamin L. Hooks welcomed Memphis filmmaker George Tillman Jr. into his living room to capture Dr. Hooks’ reflections for a documentary under the working title The Million Woman March – 10 Years Later. The film project continues as a
On Dec. 1, 2006, Dr. Benjamin L. Hooks welcomed Memphis filmmaker George Tillman Jr. into his living room to capture Dr. Hooks’ reflections for a documentary under the working title The Million Woman March – 10 Years Later. The film project continues as a work in progress. The Tri-State Defender was given exclusive access to the footage of Dr. Hooks for this special tribute to the NAACP/Civil Rights Movement icon who died in Memphis on April 15 at the age of 85. His funeral is Wednesday.
“My name is Benjamin Hooks. I had the honor, the pleasure, the responsibility of leading the nation’s largest, oldest and most effective civil rights organization for almost 16 years. It was a tremendous occasion, a tremendous time.”
With that straightforward introduction, Dr. Benjamin L. Hooks left port for a journey of reflection and assessment. It was not rehearsed or written. He drew upon his life and his access to unfolding history to address the matter put before him – to put the years since the 1997 Million Woman March in Philadelphia into perspective.
The product that emerged frames an important portion of the history of African-American people, painting an invaluable portrait from Dr. Hooks’ unique vantage point.
“I watched in my lifetime progress that is difficult to describe,” said Dr. Hooks. “I was born in 1925. When I started my career in public service, I was a veteran of the Armed Forces. I had to go to Chicago to attend law school because there was not a single law school anywhere in the South that would admit blacks, unless we call Washington, D.C. a part of the South.”
Dr. Hooks choose Chicago because it was the closest city to Memphis to get the legal education he desired. In 1949, he returned to Memphis practice law.
“I shall not forget that as I began my practice I wanted a copy of the Shelby County Bar Association rules and regulations and suggestions for fees. And the first thing that struck me was this language: ‘The Memphis and Shelby County Bar Association shall be open to all white lawyers practicing in this vicinity.’”
Imagine, said Dr. Hooks, how he felt, being hit in the face by such a pronouncement.
“But by the grace of God and the hard work of many, many people, we were able by the year of 1965 to be sitting on the bench (of Shelby County Criminal Court the first black criminal court judge in Tennessee history.) That is a tremendous amount of progress in 16 years,” he said.
“Then came this tremendous (Million Woman) March of 1997. And let us not forget – and I don’t want to be accused of being prejudiced – but I have always felt that black women had to carry a double burden because this country, first of all, has not been to fair to women,” he said.
“So black women, like all women in America, suffered. But in addition they carried the badge of color, that invidious badge where people decided that because our skins were different we must be treated differently….I am a firm believer that had it not been for the strong hard work of black women that the work of achieving integration…across the board for black folks would not have occurred.”
Recalling that he had observed then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on television on the day of his videotaping, Dr. Hooks said he was proud of Rice and the job she had undertaken.
“That does not mean I approve of all of her policies, all of her thinking, all the things that she does. But I am whale proud and elephant glad – I am using two big words there, whale and elephant, to show you how proud I am of a black person, and in particular a black woman, exercising the enormous power, prestige and possibility of the Secretary of State.”
Beginning a roll call of exemplary black women that he wove through his session, Dr. Hooks made reference to Fisk University graduate Hazel Reid O’Leary (the first woman and first and only African American to serve as U. S. Secretary of Energy); Dr. Johnnetta B. Cole, the first African-American female president of Spelman College and former Bennett College president; and Dr. Carolyn R. Mahoney, a Memphis native who became the president of Lincoln University in Missouri in 2005. Then he looked back to what he called the “nightmare affair” – the 1955 murder of 14-year-old-Emmitt Till of Chicago in Money, Miss. – and the fortitude that Till’s mother (Mamie Carthan Till) showed in deciding to have an open casket to let the world “know what America had done.” The roll call continued with Dr. Dorothy Height, the 40-year president of the National Council of Negro Women; Mary McCloud Bethune, the educator and civil rights leader who did “so much during the Roosevelt Administration to hold up the banner of equality;” his wife, Frances Dancy Hooks, who with the aid of Myra and Jed Dreifus had opened up the doors for young black students in Memphis; Dr. Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children’s Defense Fund; and Elaine R. Jones, the first female director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
“I can’t help but remember that black women have been raped, pillaged, their fortitude all but destroyed, talked about, lied on, mistreated,” said Dr. Hooks, as he began a reflection on how America was built and a time when black men quite often did not have a job, depending upon their wives “even for a loaf of bread in the house.”
“This does something to a man’s psyche, destroys him in many, many ways and causes domestic difficulties. And yet black women stood that,” said Dr. Hooks.
“Who will roll away the stone?” That’s the perennial question that has dogged the footsteps of Black women and women in general throughout the years, he said.
“Who will roll away the stone of unequal treatment? Who will roll away the stones of segregation? Who will roll away the stones of trying to say that women do not have the brainpower to do this or that?”
Women discovered as men discovered that “we will roll away the stones ourselves” in conjunction with the infinite wisdom of God, said Dr. Hooks, thanking God for the fortitude of Black women and accenting his point with a reference to Maya Angelou’s poem Still I Rise.
Within the NAACP, women always have played a crucial role, he said, running through a subset of names that included Ruby Hurley, former Secretary of the Southeast Region; Hazel Dukes, President of the New York State Conference; Mildred Bond Roxborough, who held numerous positions, including directorships of operations, programs, and development; and so many others who served as presidents of branches and state conferences.
“Thank you (Betty) Shabazz (widow of Malcolm X, aka El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz), thank you Mrs. (Coretta Scott) King, thank you Rosa Parks sitting down that we might stand up, thank you Juanita Abernathy (civil rights veteran and wife of SCLC stalwart Ralph David Abernathy), thank you Frances Hooks…
“Thank you all of these. Thank you, thank you, thank you!”
Dr. Karanja A. Ajanaku is executive editor of the Tri-State Defender in Memphis.
Copyright 2010 Chicago Defender.