Benjamin Hooks : Preaching the Civil-Rights Gospel, Defending Hard-Won Victories, NAACP Leader Keeps the Faith

Benjamin L. Hooks often sounds much like the conservatives he has battled during his past 13 years as executive director of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People. His rhetoric reflects the conservatism of the small businessman--which he was for nearly 15 years--and the Southern preacher--which he remains. He places great faith in business success as integral to the prosperity of the African-American community. Again and again, this intense man pounds away at themes of strong family and moral values, personal responsibility and self-help.

Yet as head of the nation’s oldest civil-rights organization, during the past decade Hooks was a powerful defender of the 1960s civil-rights victories against the assault of Ronald Reagan’s policies. In Washington he was often the point man, advocating government aid for the poor, affirmative action and laws that allowed recourse for victims of discrimination--all of which is certain to be on the agenda when the NAACP convention begins in Los Angeles today.

The civil-rights climate in today’s Washington is warmer. Still, there are those who say the problems of African-Americans have grown far more complex since the ‘60’s civil-rights revolution led by such men as Hooks. He faces questions about whether old-line civil-rights organizations are up to the task. A class of chronically poor, undereducated and socially dysfunctional African-Americans appears to be moving farther and farther away from the U.S. mainstream. The NAACP is part of that mainstream. Many of this underclass took to the streets recently to cheer South African leader Nelson Mandela. Most of these same people would probably not even recognize Hooks.

Hooks, 65, was born in Memphis. He attended LeMoyne College, a historically black college in his hometown, then Howard University in Washington. After spending World War II in Italy, in the 92nd Infantry Division, Hooks earned his law degree from Chicago’s DePaul University in 1948.

Hooks returned to Memphis, where he co-founded a bank and served as its vice president, before he became the country’s first black criminal-court judge. He again broke new ground when Richard M. Nixon appointed him to the Federal Communications Commission in 1972--the first black to hold the job.

Hooks, called “the doctor” by his staff and often by his wife, Frances, is a gregarious man whose life seems hopelessly overbooked. Around the NAACP’s Baltimore home base, he is known to carry a cellular telephone in his pocket. Friends say he preaches a thumping Sunday sermon. He was ordained in 1956, and is now officially on leave from two churches. In what spare time he has, Hooks enjoys sports. One of his favorite players is UCLA Bruin cornerback Carlton Gray--who happens to be his grandson.

Question: Did African-Americans lose ground in the 1980s?

Answer: The ‘80s may not have been a time when we actually retrogressed so much as we didn’t make much progress. We were busy trying to keep the gains we’ve made . . . .

There has been a definite retrogression--a lack of progress among those who are the poorest among us . . . . But many black folk have not seen that one of the major problems is that this country’s undergone a structural transformation, and none of us--white or black--are prepared for it . . . . There was a time when we were making steel and tires and rubber and cars, and poor people, without a benefit of a great deal of education, were able to make decent salaries . . . .

We’re becoming, for what it’s worth, a service-oriented society. Now this is a vast transformation, and . . . (people) don’t understand that the kid on the block who, 40 years ago, could go over to Ford and make an application and have a reasonable chance for getting wages that were twice, three times, what minimum wage was, can’t do that any more. They were very good jobs. They are now, but there’s no growth. The whole industrial concept is dying right in front of us. We have a real problem of where our young people go . . . . The school system has failed all Americans--black and white.

Q: Was there some progress?

A: Blacks have made tremendous progress in business. But since we’re not isolated on one strip somewhere, we seem to think that we’re losing ground. Well, I don’t think that’s true . . . .

The black professionals--the doctors, the lawyers, the dentists, the restaurant owners, you know, who would have been on the strip and we could identify them--today those blacks may be running a big Cadillac agency, a Ford and one of the several hundred McDonald’s or Burger Kings . . . . They’re not conspicuous as they used to be.

Q: Why did the black community meet with so much resistance in the ‘80s? Did the majority community change its mind about the urgency of civil rights, or did it just perceive the stakes were different?

A: . . . . This country made some profound changes in its social structure and behavior patterns in the ‘60s and the ‘70s . . . . There was a common ground, and the demonstration of people being beaten and bitten by police dogs, tear-gassed and maced for the simple right to get a drink of water, or to use the restroom or to buy a hot dog, affected people. The simplicity of that was so beautiful in that white people were able to see starkly: “Why are we raising all this hell just to keep another people whose skin color happens to be black from eating a hot dog. That doesn’t make sense.” We had to win those elementary victories in order to move forward.

Now we’re talking about owning the hot-dog stand . . . . And some people say: “Hey, we never intended to go that far. Nobody minds your eating that hot dog. But selling is our job. And if we give you a few jobs selling don’t think that gives you the right to make any hot dogs. That ain’t your bag. We make ‘em, we sell ‘em. And if you can get some money, we’ll sell ‘em to you.” But it’s not enough that we just consume; we’ve got to start producing, and that’s a profound revolution. And some people are not ready.

Q: In retrospect, do you have a more positive view of Reagan?

A: Frankly, he was a disaster for the country. And the tragedy is that the majority community won’t admit it yet . . . . In eight short years, he’s produced more national debt than any President from George Washington to Jimmy Carter combined . . . . Where our monies ought to be used for helping the victims of AIDS, cancer and sickle-cell anemia and all of these diseases destroying our community, and to fight dope--all of that money’s being used just to pay interest. If he’d been a private businessman, he’d have been fired the first six months in office . . . .

And then he saddled this country with a backward-looking Supreme Court. So his legacy is horrible . . . .

Q: President Bush might get the opportunity to make an appointment or two to the Supreme Court. Do you think he will be able to resist pressure to appoint conservatives?

A: He’s going to appoint conservative judges. There’s no question about it. He was elected on a conservative platform and he feels that he owes it to the people who supported him. So my only hope is that they won’t be as conservative as the Reagan crowd. But I don’t expect them to be as liberal as a (Justice Thurgood) Marshall or (Justice William J.) Brennan.

Q: Do you think a lot of black Americans lost hope during the ‘80s?

A: I don’t know if they ever lost hope, really, because we never had much to hope for in terms of outside help.

Q: What does the NAACP offer people who are so disillusioned and alienated?

A: We’re not providers of housing. We don’t provide jobs. We don’t give out food stamps. What we do is try to get government policy that will enable people to live decently. And if a young man, 18, goes from Los Angeles today to Tipton County, Tenn., or to Dunkhill, Miss., he is a beneficiary right now of what the NAACP has done. He can walk the streets without the fear of white power destroying him. He can drink from the water fountain. And he’s got the money to stay in a hotel . . . .

We try to protect as we did in (court cases) that youngster’s right to have a job with the fire department or police department. We fight to get him a decent school system for him to attend . . . . We’re not able to pay a gang member more money than he’d make in a gang if he sells dope or whatever. But we’re able to tell him that his life is wasted and lost, futile, self-defeated whether that young person listens to us or not.

Q: Black communities suffer greatly from the illegal drug trade. How good a job has the government done in aiding the community by fighting the drug war?

A: I think they’ve been pitiful.

Q: Where are their efforts misdirected?

A: Well, it’s like the old expression: Too little and too late . . . . The drug epidemic started in the black community more than 40 years ago, but nobody in the power structure would do anything about it . . . . When it ended up in suburban high schools--then we got interested.

Q: You said a few years ago that some of the problems of the black community must be dealt with by the black community. Given the structural changes that you’ve talked about in America, what’s most appropriate for self-help, and what are the limits of self-help?

A: I think government has a very definite role to play . . . . Self-help should not include having to have your own school system. The government ought to provide a decent education for black and white children . . . . The government ought to provide adequate medical care . . . . Then we’ve got to find a way to provide jobs in this economy for everybody who wants to work. . . .

We (blacks) have to train people and talk about the use of dope. We have got to admit that AIDS does exist in the black community . . . . We’ve got to go back to dealing with our family structure . . . . And we have to go back to our ability to cope in the past. We shared. We had that sense of community. Every little church had some kind of little school in it. We’ve built schools and colleges, with nickels and dimes--now we have to go back to supporting that.

We were the people who had nothing and made something . . . . We discovered the chitlins in the pig . . . .

Somehow, we have got to go back, get that strength that they had and say to the young man in the public housing project, “You know, after all, boy, you got a roof over your head that doesn’t leak. You got hot and cold running water. Utilize that. The school isn’t what it ought to be but stay there and learn all you can.”

. . . . We have to interpret for the masses of the black folk, where the jobs are, where they will be and how you get prepared for them . . . .

Q. What specific programs do you have to deal with such problems of young people as teen pregnancy, poor education, joblessness?

A: We do have some special programs like ACT-SO (African-American Cultural, Technical and Scientific Olympics). We don’t have a teen-age pregnancy program; that’s not ours to do. We deal with it by supporting the institutions that can deal with it better than we . . . . But we do have a planned program in the ACT-SO competition designed to glorify the excellence of the mind . . . . Only a handful of people make it big in basketball or baseball. But there are millions of black youngsters who can do better by exercising their minds.

Our back-to-school program is designed with a simple theme: Keep the kids in school. Then we have a scholastic aptitude preparation test because we discovered that many black kids don’t do well because they’ve never learned how to take a test. And we have job resource programs that deal with getting youngsters ready for jobs . . . .

We’re saying to young people that you need to get your house in order. Somewhere, somehow in this nation with all of its problems and burdens, black folk have to take responsibility for their own lives. It’s not what the white man does to us,but how we react.

Q: Is your organization receiving adequate support from the new black middle-class, particularly the young professionals?

A: No.

Q: Why?

A: . . . . It takes generations to develop a philanthropic impulse . . . . It’s always rather amusing to me. I see an association of black journalists--great, marvelous, beautiful. When I came to FCC there were only about 200 . . . and now they’ve got 3,000 or 4,000. And nobody ever bothered to tell them how they got there; that there was a Ben Hooks helping open doors. That there was the NAACP, SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) and Urban League kicking and taking names. They don’t know that and it bothers me because people act on knowledge . . . .

We have a difficult time getting information out. We’re the largest and strongest, most successful civil-rights organization . . . the average big magazine quotes us . . . only when they have to. And the amazing thing about NAACP is the fact that we do survive in spite of what looks sometimes like a freeze-out by the white press . . . . The Yonkers (housing discrimination) case in New York was a NAACP case. You can read about it all over the country and never see the word NAACP attached to it . . . .

Q: There are a number of black conservatives getting a lot of attention these days. Is there a new black conservatism or are just certain people attracting attention?

A: I think there are white people in the media who pay dearly and don’t mind doing it to find some person of black skin who’ll say what they want said . . . . And these black conservatives are some of the biggest liars that the world ever saw . . . . They have no following . . . . They’re just a new breed of Uncle Toms as far I’m concerned, maybe with a Ph.D or something of that sort . . . . One wrote an article that black leaders ought to tell the public what they tell their children; study hard, learn good English, etc., etc. Don’t use dope or crack. And I sat there in amazement at how he lets himself be used by the white Establishment . . . .

The inference is that Jesse Jackson or Ben Hooks or John Jacob never talk about studying, staying in school, don’t use crack or dope--when that’s about 70% of our speech . . . . And to have some lowdown, dirty rascal write a big story in a white magazine . . . I resent it. I resent the editors who go out of their way to find these people, who don’t know up from down, and give them publicity.

One of the magazines . . . asked me to comment. I wouldn’t. If you want to know what’s going on in black America, then you write me and I’ll try to tell you from my perspective. But I’m not commenting on some college professor whose only identification to black kids may be the one or two in his class . . . .

Q: What is the NAACP’s most important program going into the ‘90s?

A: Our goal is to achieve what we’ve been trying to do across the years, and that’s full citizenship for all American citizens. And whatever it is that it takes to do that, we’ll be fighting for it. Whether it’s to patch up a bill; or getting people to vote rascals out of office; putting more blacks into elective office. We just don’t have a little pat slogan we can say this is what we’re trying to do. Our job has always been that we’re general practitioners and not specialists in a sense that we just work on the eyes or the ears.

COMMENTARY: A series about the NAACP, America’s premier civil-rights organization, begins today. Page 7. An editorial on the NAACP. Page 6.