Background
His father, Review Joseph A. Booker, was president of Arkansas Baptist College from 1887 to 1926.
president teacher rights leader
His father, Review Joseph A. Booker, was president of Arkansas Baptist College from 1887 to 1926.
Booker graduated from that school in 1914, received his law degree from Northwestern University in 1917 and returned to Little Rock to practice law.
In 1942 Booker, Jones, Hibbler and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (through attorney Thurgood Marshall) sued the Little Rock School District on behalf of an African-American teacher for equal pay with white teachers. He also was involved in legal action taken against a 1959 state act requiring teachers to list the organizations to which they belonged. In 1946 he contacted the University of Arkansas School of Law on behalf of a young African-American man who wanted to attend (at that time, the school did not accept black students).
Booker was a local "cooperating attorney" with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in at least five other cases during the 1950s.
In 1949-1950 he served as president of the National Bar Association. He also was an alternate delegate to the Republican National Convention from Arkansas in 1944 and 1948.
He died on July 31, 1960.
He served in the Army during World War I. Booker worked with attorney Scipio Jones in the appeal of 12 African-American defendants sentenced to death following the race riots in Elaine, Arkansas in 1919, and he was an early member of the first Arkansas branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1924.
