KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (WATE) — Knoxville community leaders reflected on Dr. Bob Booker’s impact after he died Thursday at the age of 88.

Booker was raised in Knoxville during segregation. He graduated from Austin High School, an all-black school that later merged with East High School, an all-white school, to form Austin-East High School. He then went on to graduate from Knoxville College.

Booker was a historian, author, former state legislator and city council member, among other titles. Booker was also a key figure to the civil rights movement in Knoxville. Through that work, he met Harold Middlebrook, who is now the pastor at Canaan Baptist Church.

“Bob Booker and Bishop Brown and a few others were the leaders of the movement here and were continuous in their struggle to desegregate lunch counters, restaurants. It was done non-violently. It was done peacefully,” Middlebrook said.

Booker’s final role was as a historian, specializing in Knoxville’s Black history.

“He is constantly delving into old newspaper clippings, old books, talking to people, to really find out what happened when and how,” Middlebrook said.

Booker also served as the director of the Beck Cultural Exchange Center, a nonprofit organization preserving Black history and culture in East Tennessee.

There, he met Cynthia J. Finch, a vice president of the Knoxville NAACP. She said everyone can learn a valuable lesson from Booker’s work.

“It should be a work that should be revisited, never forgotten, used as a roadmap to learn, to grow and to be impactful,” she said. “If we had 100, 200, 300 Bob Bookers, that still would not be enough.”

Booker also supported the efforts of the MLK Jr. Commemorative Commission. Deborah Porter is the chair of the commission, and said he was always helping them behind the scenes.

“He was just a wealth of knowledge, and I think that would help us to understand, if you don’t know where you’ve been you don’t know where you’re going, as they say. So it would help us, or behoove us to know our history as well,” she said.

He also served as administrative assistant to Knoxville Mayor Kyle Testerman, but his influence in the Mayor’s office didn’t end there.

He worked with Mayor Kincannon during planning for Knoxville’s new multiuse stadium, which is being built in the area where hundreds of Black businesses and residences were wrongly displaced as part of Knoxville’s first urban renewal project decades ago.

“He talked to me a little bit about what it was like growing up here as a baseball fan as someone who would go to the games when they were still segregated, just starting to be integrated and helped me understand better the importance of baseball to the history of Knoxville,” Kincannon said.

Booker always stressed the importance of history, and now he is a part of it.

“Mr. Booker helped Knoxville to understand its history: good, bad, indifferent. He worked hard continuously, to make sure young people, adults didn’t forget where we’ve come from, how we’ve gotten where we are and to give some inkling of what we needed to do,” Middlebrook said.

Several other state and local leaders have also made tributes and told stories about Booker.