Hooks always felt drawn to the Christian church, and in 1956 he was ordained as a Baptist minister and began to preach regularly at the Greater Middle Baptist Church in Memphis, while continuing his busy law practice. He joined Martin Luther King Jr., and other leaders, at the initial January 1957 Southern Negro Leaders Conference on Transportation and Nonviolent Integration, which organized itself, by August, as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), with whom he became an active participant in the NAACP-sponsored restaurant sit-ins and other boycotts of consumer items and services.