Another answer came in 1961, when Hooks performed in Jean Genet’s racial exploration The Blacks, which New York Times critic Howard Taubman called it “exhilarating to the ear and eye and provocative to the mind…‘The Blacks’ makes theatregoing the adventure it should be.”

At one performance of The Blacks in 1962, the audience included Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King. As Hooks explained, “Martin had seen A Raisin in the Sun and knew what we were doing, how we were building a Black audience. After the show, we all went out to dinner, and I started apologizing for not being on the front lines with them down South during the Civil Rights marches. Martin said, ‘No, no, no. What you are doing on the stage, keep doing it. Keep doing the Black plays and building Black audiences. The movement needs this.”

Hooks followed that advice, continuing to work in theatre and raising funds with meetings and readings at the homes of the likes of Lena Horne, Harry Belafonte, and James Baldwin.

Then came Dutchman.

This incendiary play by LeRoi Jones, later known as Amiri Baraka, about Black and white dynamics was presented at the Cherry Lane Theatre. It became an Off-Broadway hit and an Obie winner, providing many Black audiences with their first glimpse of Blacks onstage in a play of explosive realism about racial relations. So charged was it with the truth of centuries of oppression that playwright Richard Wesley called it “a game changer.” It resonated for Blacks, less so whites. This is epitomized by another review by Taubman. “Everything about LeRoi Jones’s ‘Dutchman’ is designed to shock—its basic idea, its language, and its murderous rage…If this is the way Negroes really feel about the white world around them, there’s more rancor buried in the breasts of colored conformists than anyone can imagine,” he wrote March 25, 1964.

Watching a play like Dutchman, which spoke to deep feelings resulting from generations of bias, condescension, and violence, may have been difficult for many whites. But it gave voice to words Black folks said to one another that weren’t usually heard by the dominant group. Hooks knew this play was breaking ground.

During the run of the play, he spoke to an audience at the Hudson Guild about the Civil Rights movement, his life as an actor, and Black theatre in general. After the talk, 15 young Black people followed him outside, talking under basketball hoops, asking questions about how they could be part of theatre. Hooks decided to invite them to his nearby apartment on Monday evenings to talk; they soon started doing play readings. Before long the group had swelled to 35, and he ran out of space.

“We ended up with crowbars and hammers, and we knocked down a wall and built a stage,” Hooks recounted. “I knew once the landlord found out, I’d be evicted, but it was worth it to create a 30-seat theatre, to get these kids off the streets, away from gangs, to introduce them to ideas relating to the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement.”

Monday nights became so popular, Hooks brought in Dr. Barbara Ann Teer, an Alvin Ailey-trained dancer and Broadway performer, whose 1962 knee injury caused her to shift her focus to theatre. Teer later formed her own company, the National Black Theatre. Those kids in 1964 wanted to learn acting, writing, and dance, so, Hooks started the Group Theatre Workshop, named after Hooks’s all-time favorite theatre organization, the legendary Group Theatre, formed in 1931 by Lee Strasberg, Cheryl Crawford, and Harold Clurman.

Soon the Group Theatre Workshop would need another space. To the relief of Hooks’s neighbors, who thought he was up to nefarious activities in his expanded living room, Hooks was forced to evacuate his apartment. Rescue came from the Cherry Lane, which allowed Hooks and Teer to use the stage on Monday nights. They started by rehearsing a showcase, with readings from Baldwin, poetry, and a short play, Happy Ending, which was often paired with Day of Absence, both by Douglas Turner Ward. Ward was motivated to continue the legacy of W.E.B. Du Bois, and his plays use farce, irony, absurdism, and satire to show stereotypes and attitudes endemic in the environment inside and outside the Black community.

The night of the showcase, New York Post theatre critic Jerry Tallmer happened to be in the audience, and turned in a rave, mostly about the short play by Ward, who had no idea a critic would be there. Ward later told Tallmer, “You gave me a heart attack. I’m on the Metroliner to Washington and I see this headline: ‘A hilarious play,’ and it’s my play!” This success was a confidence booster. Hooks told Ward, “If Jerry Tallman is writing a review of this play in such glowing terms, and we did it with young people, why not let me produce your plays with real actors?”

After some negotiations with another producer who’d been working with Ward, Hooks got his permission. He then started his own theatre company, Robert Hooks, Inc., which produced the double bill of Happy Ending and Day of Absence. These opened November 1965 at the St. Mark’s Playhouse, on the second floor of a 2nd Avenue Greenwich Village movie theatre, and ran for 15 months and 504 performances; Obie and Drama Desk awards followed. Recalls Hooks, “It was the first Black show written by a Black writer and funded by Blacks. Even A Raisin in the Sun had been put up with white money.”