\"Civil Rights Leader\" Benjamin Hooks Hand Signed FDC Dated 1950 For Sale

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\"Civil Rights Leader\" Benjamin Hooks Hand Signed FDC Dated 1950:
$90.99

Up for sale "Civil Rights Leader" Benjamin Hooks Hand Signed First Day Cover Dated 1950. 

– April 15, 2010) was an American civil rights leader. 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, and throughout his career was a vocal campaigner for civil

rights in the United States. Benjamin Hooks was born in Memphis, Tennessee.

Growing up on South Lauderdale and Vance, he was the fifth son of Robert B

& Bessie White Hooks. He had 6 other siblings. His father was a

photographer and owned a photography studio with his brother Henry, known at

the time as Hooks Brothers, and the family was fairly comfortable by the

standards of black people for the day. Still, he recalled that he had to wear

hand-me-down clothes and that his mother had to be careful to make the dollars

stretch to feed and care for the family. Young Benjamin's paternal

grandmother, Julia Britton Hooks (1852–1942),

graduated from Berea College in

Kentucky in 1874 and was only the second American black woman to graduate from college.

She was a musical prodigy. She began playing piano publicly at age five and at

age 18, joined Berea's faculty, teaching instrumental music 1870–72. Her

sister, Dr. Mary E. Britton, also attended Berea, and became a physician

in Lexington, Kentucky. 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 youth, he felt a

calling to the Christian ministry. His father, however, did not approve and

discouraged Benjamin from such a calling. Benjamin was a member of the Omega Psi Phi fraternity. In 1952 he married Frances

Darby, a 24-year-old science teacher. Hooks enrolled in LeMoyne-Owen College, in

Memphis, Tennessee. There he undertook a pre-law course of study 1941–43. 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. "I wish I could tell you every time I was on the

highway and couldn’t use a restroom," he would later recall. "My

bladder is messed up because of that. Stomach is messed up from eating cold

sandwiches." After

graduating in 1944 from Howard University, he joined the Army and had the job of

guarding Italian prisoners of war. He found it humiliating that the prisoners

were allowed to eat in restaurants from which he was barred. He was discharged

from the Army after the end of the war with the rank of staff sergeant. After

the war he enrolled at the DePaul University College

of Law in Chicago to study law. No law school in his native

Tennessee would admit him. He graduated from DePaul in 1948 with his Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree. 

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