Avery Brooks, now best known as Commander Benjamin Sisko on DS9, achieved his first national fame in 1985
as the hard-boiled character Hawk on the Robert Urich series Spencer for Hire. A 1989 spin-off series,
A Man Called Hawk, died an early death, although Brooks returned to play Hawk in a made-for-cable Spencer for
Hire TV movie in 1993. But viewers familiar with Brooks though the Hawk character are often surprised to discover
the breadth of his education and background.

Avery Brooks has degrees from Oberlin College and Indiana University. After attending these colleges he went to
the prestigious Rutgers University, where he was the first black to achieve a Master of Fine Arts degree in both
acting and directing. Ten years of his life after college were spent in a traveling production of the powerful play
"Paul Robeson," written by playwright Phillip Hayes Dean. Brooks performed the play all across the country,
from the Westwook Playhouse in Los Angeles to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., culminating on
Broadway.

Part of Brooks' qualifications for the role of this famous black singer, in addition to his great acting talent, was his
profoundly deep singing voice. This, it would seem, runs in the family. As Brooks once told TV GUIDE, his father
had a strong singing voice as well. My mother was a pianist, organist, choral conductor and one of the first black
women to get a master's degree in music from Northwestern.