Benjamin L. Hooks, was executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which seeks to achieve equal rights and to eliminate racial prejudice. Hooks was unanimously elected president of the NAACP in 1977. Hooks, an ordained Baptist minister, was born in Memphis to a middle-class family. He studied at LeMoyne College in Memphis and at Howard University in Washington, D.C. In 1949, he received his law degree from DePaul University.