Benjamin Lawson Hooks (January 31, 1925 – April 15, 2010) was an American civil rights leader and government official.

A Baptist minister and practicing attorney, he served as executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from 1977 to 1992.

With such a family legacy, young Benjamin was inspired to work hard on his academic career, with hopes of being able to make it to college.

In his college years he became more acutely aware that he was one of a large number of Americans who were required to use segregated lunch counters, water fountains, and restrooms.

"At that time you were insulted by law clerks, excluded from white bar associations and when I was in court, I was lucky to be called Ben," he recalled in an interview with Jet magazine.

The discrimination of those days has changed and, today, the South is ahead of the North in many respects in civil rights progress."

Howard, the head of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL), a leading civil rights organization in Mississippi.

Hooks attended the RCNL's annual conferences in the all-black town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi which often drew crowds of ten thousand or more.

In 1954, only days before the U.S. Supreme Court handed down Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, he appeared on an RCNL-sponsored roundtable, along with Thurgood Marshall, and other black Southern attorneys to formulate possible litigation strategies.

He joined Martin Luther King Jr., and other leaders, at the initial January 1957 Southern Negro Leaders Conference on Transportation and Nonviolent Integration,[3] which organized itself, by August, as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC),[4] with whom he became an active participant in the NAACP-sponsored restaurant sit-ins and other boycotts of consumer items and services.

"[2] Hooks had been a producer and host of several local television shows in Memphis in addition to his other duties and was a strong supporter of Republican political candidates.

Hooks completed his five-year term on the board of commissioners in 1978, but he continued to work for black involvement in the entertainment industry.

He served as the Supreme Chancellor of the Knights of Pythias, Grand Secretary of the Grand Lodge of Tennessee, Prince Hall, honorary Past Imperial Potentate of the Ancient Egyptian Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine, a 33rd degree Scottish Rite mason, and was a member and received the Elks' Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award in 1989 from the Improved Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks of the World.

Hooks was determined to add to the enrollment and to raise money for the organization's severely depleted treasury, without changing the NAACP's goals or mandates.

Hooks visited President George H. W. Bush in the White House to discuss the escalating tensions between races.

"It’s time today... to bring it out of the closet: No longer can we proffer polite, explicable, reasons why Black America cannot do more for itself," he told the 1990 NAACP convention delegates.

One newspaper wrote: "Critics say the organization is a dinosaur whose national leadership is still living in the glory days of the civil rights movement."

Dr. Frederick Zak, a young local NAACP president, was quoted as saying, "There is a tendency by some of the older people to romanticize the struggle—especially the marching and the picketing and the boycotting and the going to jail."

He told the New York Times that a "sense of duty and responsibility" to the NAACP compelled him to stay in office through the 1990s, but eventually the demands of the executive director position proved too great for a man of his age.

Hooks stated that he would serve out the 1992 year and predicted that a change in leadership would not jeopardize the NAACP's stability: "We’ve been through some little stormy periods before.