Hooks Brothers Photography Established in 1907

Hooks Brothers Photography opened in 1906 and worked for 76 years, with Robert and Henry Hooks's sons Charles and Henry taking over in the 1940s. The studio recorded weddings, graduations, church life and social clubs, along with Black-owned businesses such as Universal Life Insurance Company and Tri-State Bank, the Memphis World and the Tri-State Defender, and soldiers of both world wars. W. C. Handy sat for the studio in the 1920s. The photographs are held in the University of Memphis art department. It has been said that every Black family in Memphis has a Hooks Bros. photograph.

What the plaque says

Hooks Brothers Photography Established in 1907 Side A: Established by Henry A. Hooks, Sr. and his brother Robert B. Hooks, Hooks Brothers Photography Studio was the second oldest continuously operating black business in Memphis. Located during its early years at 164 Beale Street, it next moved to Linden Avenue and finally to McLemore Avenue, where it ceased operation after a destructive fire in 1979. Side B: Covering much of the 20th century, the company chronicled and documented the history and lives of black Memphis and Memphians. Among the subjects and luminaries captured on film by the Hooks Brothers were Booker T. Washington, W. C. Handy, Robert R. Church, the beginning days of the Memphis NAACP, the Lincoln League, early high school and college graduating classes from Howe Institute, LeMoyne College, and many other activities of black society and ordinary people.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Beale Street — steps away
  The street that became the center of Black Memphis after the Civil War, home to Church's Park, W. C. Handy, Ida B. Wells and the blues, now a National Historic Landmark district.
• National Civil Rights Museum — 0.5 mi
  The Lorraine Motel, where Martin Luther King Jr. was killed on April 4, 1968, kept as a museum of the civil rights movement from the nineteenth century to today.
• 1866 Memphis Massacre Marker at Army Park — 0.5 mi
  A privately funded NAACP marker in a small downtown park, placed in 2016, that names the May 1866 attack on Black South Memphis as a massacre.
• Sun Studio — 0.8 mi
  The small Union Avenue room where Sam Phillips recorded Rocket 88, Howlin' Wolf, Elvis Presley and the Million Dollar Quartet, now a National Historic Landmark.

More markers nearby

• Danny Thomas — steps away
• Ida B. Wells — steps away
• Pee Wee's Saloon — steps away
• Rufus Thomas, Jr. — steps away