Dr. Benjamin Franklin Chavis Jr.

                                         Dr. Benjamin Franklin Chavis Jr.

Dr. Benjamin Franklin Chavis Jr. was born January 22, 1948. He is an African American civil rights leader, community organizer and faith leader.

Dr. Chavis grew up in the city of Oxford, North Carolina, Benjamin Chavis was a member of one of the most prominent African American families in North Carolina. His parents were well known educators and his ancestors included John Chavis, a Revolutionary War soldier with George Washington’s Army who became one of the first African Americans to attend Princeton University.  John Chavis later operated a private school in antebellum North Carolina that accepted both black and white students. John Chavis, according to Benjamin, was killed in 1838 for teaching slave children to read and write.

As a twelve-year-old, Chavis effectively desegregated his hometown's whites-only public library, becoming the first African American to be issued a library card in the town's history. Chavis graduated from Mary Potter High School in 1965 and entered St. Augustine College in Raleigh as a freshman. In 1965, while a college freshman, Chavis became a statewide youth coordinator in North Carolina for the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). He also joined CORE, SNCC and AFSCME.

He earned a Bachelor of Arts in Chemistry from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (1969).

After working in the civil rights movement and serving time in North Carolina's prison system as the leader of the Wilmington Ten, Chavis received his Master of Divinity (magna cum laude) from Duke University (1980) and a Doctor of Ministry from Howard University (1981). Chavis was admitted into the PhD program in Systematic Theology as a graduate student at Union Theological Seminary in New York City and completed all of the academic course requirements.

In 1968, Chavis also worked for the presidential campaign of Robert F. Kennedy. After his graduation from UNCC in 1969, Chavis returned to Oxford and taught at the Mary Potter High School, still all black even though the courts ordered school desegregation. In 1970 following the murder of 23-year-old Henry Marrow and the acquittal by an all-white jury of the two men who killed him, Chavis organized a protest march from Oxford to North Carolina's State Capitol Building in Raleigh. Following the Oxford to Raleigh march, Chavis organized a black boycott of white businesses in Oxford that lasted for 18 months until the town agreed to integrate its public facilities, including schools.

Ben Chavis was appointed as the Southern Regional Program director for the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice UCC-CRJ. Chavis’s work with this organization brought him to Wilmington, North Carolina in 1971 to assist in the campaign to desegregate the city’s public school system. In 1972 Chavis and nine other individuals were arrested and  later convicted of conspiracy and arson. They became known as the “Wilmington 10.”  Chavis’s eight year incarceration received international attention.  He also wrote two books there: Psalms from Prison and An American Political Prisoner.

In 1971 the Commission for Racial Justice assigned Field Officer Chavis to Wilmington, North Carolina to help desegregate the public school system. Since the city abruptly closed the black high school, laid off its principal and most of its teachers, and distributed the students to other schools, there had been conflicts with white students. The administration did not hear their grievances, and the students organized a boycott to protest for their civil rights.

Chavis and nine others were arrested in February 1972 charged with conspiracy and arson. Following a controversial trial, the entire group were convicted in 1972. The oldest man at age 24, Chavis drew the longest sentence, 34 years. The ten were incarcerated while supporters pursued appeals. The case of the Wilmington Ten received massive international condemnation as a political prosecution. In December 1980, the Federal Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered a new trial and overturned the original conviction because of "prosecutorial misconduct."

In 1978 Amnesty International described Benjamin Chavis and eight others of the Wilmington Ten still in prison as “American political prisoners” under the definition of the Universal Rights of Man and the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They were prisoners of conscience. From this experience Benjamin Chavis wrote two books: An American Political Prisoner Appeals for Human Rights (while still in prison) and Psalms from Prison. In 1978, Chavis was named as one of the first winners of the Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award.

Dr.Chavis received his ordination in the United Church of Christ in 1980.

In 1981, he coined the term environmental racism: “Racial discrimination in the deliberated targeting of ethnic and minority communities for exposure to toxic and hazardous waste sites and facilities, coupled with the systematic exclusion of minorities in environmental policy making, enforcement, and remediation.” To prove the validity of his definition, Chavis in 1986 conducted and published the landmark national study: Toxic Waste and Race in the United States of America, that statistically revealed the direct correlation between race and the location of toxic waste throughout the United States. Chavis is considered by many environmental grassroots activists to be the “father of the post-modern environmental justice movement” that has steadily grown throughout the nation and world since the early 1980s.

In 1985, Chavis became the executive director of the United Church of Christ and CEO of UCC-CRJ.   In 1993 Chavis was selected to become the Executive Director and CEO of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).  At 45 he was the youngest person to hold both posts.  During his brief controversial term at the helm of the NAACP Chavis called for programs that would address crime and economic issues that had been ignored by the group.  He also steered it toward the environmental justice movement that he had launched a decade earlier.   

Chavis was forced to resign his NAACP position sixteen months after he took office when it was revealed that he used NAACP funds for an out-of-court settlement of a sexual harassment charge.

He forged a close relationship with  Louis Farrakhan and was national director of the Million Man March, the huge civil rights rally that came to Washington,DC in 1995. After becoming a Muslim, Chavis was appointed the East Coast regional minister of the Nation of Islam.

"It's the same God," Muhammad said of his decision to switch faiths. "I just come at it from a different theological perspective."

His next career move came in 2001. With hip-hop celebrity Russell Simmons, Muhammad founded the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, a coalition of musicians, civil rights activists and others that aims to educate at-risk youth about important life issues, such as personal finance, through the musical language they know best. He serves as its president and chief executive.

On December 31, 2012, Chavis and the surviving members of the Wilmington Ten were granted Pardons of Innocence by North Carolina Governor Beverly Perdue. The New York Times editorialized for the pardons of innocence for the Wilmington 10 as the case had become an international cause celebre as a case of virulent racist political prosecution.

Chavis currently serves as the CEO and President of the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA).Dr. Chavis is based at his office in Manhattan, where he works with Russell Simmons, as well as his office in Washington, DC, the headquarters of the NNPA.

Information sorces:
  washingtoninformer.com/martha-rivera-chavis-53-wife-of-nnpa-president-ben- chavis-dies/
  solidarity-us.org/node/2960
  washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/13/AR2006041301825.html
  notablebiographies.com/Ch-Co/Chavis-Muhammad-Benjamin.html
  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Chavis
  blackpast.org/aah/muhammad-reverend-benjamin-chavis-1948

       The Wilmington 10: North Carolina Urged to Pardon Civil Rights Activists Falsely Jailed 40 Years Ago


                                Dr Benjamin Chavis on The Rock Newman Show

                      Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr. on BBC HardTalk in London


   Dr. Benjamin Chavis speaks at Washington DC Green Festival, Sunday September 30, 2012


                      Deep Speech from the movie Belly


             Blood Done Sign My Name with Nate Parker & Dr. Ben Chavis


         Dr. Ben Chavis, President of NNPA: The Power of the Black Press

The Greensboro Massacre Nov 1979

The Greensboro Massacre, a tragic event in the history of North Carolina.
Four Communist Workers' Party members and another person,student body president at local HBCU Bennett College;  were killed during a confrontation between anti-racist protesters and White supremacists, Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi Party members. The organizers were in the process of conducting a racially-integrated effort to organize a labor union in a local plant. At the time of the killings, they were leading an “Anti-Klan Rally” to “push back” against the Klan and Nazi effort to intimidate workers from joining the union.

Around 11 AM, this November 3rd, WVO members and supporters gather at two locations in the Black neighborhood. Some are gathering at the publicly announced assembly point, a Community Center that faces a well-traveled, four-lane highway. A larger crowd is gathering at the actual starting point for the march, Morningside Homes, a housing project surrounded by narrow, two-lane streets rarely travelled by whites other than the police.

Morningside Homes is in the center of an area known as “The Grove” which has a reputation as the roughest Black neighborhood in town. This assembly point obviously offered the potential for better security than the Community Center. WVO in publicizing one assembly point while actually using another apparently hoped to confuse potential attackers as well as perhaps other left political groups whose participation they did not want.

November 3,1979,  Klansmen and American Nazis drove an armed caravan into an anti-Klan rally and shot five protesters to death,stabed and beat other protesters. The crimes occurred in front of TV cameras, which filmed the KKK and Nazi assailants holding up photos of the persons to be assassinated and then shooting each organizer through the head.

Up to this point the police are almost totally absent. In fact, two police intelligence officers are parked a block down the street. They have followed the Klan caravan from the outskirts of town. Once the shooting starts, they call reinforcements but make no effort themselves to stop the shooting or arrest the attackers. Other police who are assigned to protect the march are at various staging areas, the closest 10 or 12 blocks away. Some are in a restaurant halfway across town eating lunch.

As the Klan and Nazis drive out of the neighborhood, a few police arrive, stop some of the cars and arrest some of the attackers. As WVO members lie wounded and dying in the grass the police arrest two other WVO members for inciting to riot and interfering with the police.

Within months, the Klan and Nazi assailants were acquitted of murder charges by an all-white State jury. Then, less than a year later, the killers were acquitted of civil rights violations by an all-white Federal jury.

In 1980, survivors filed a civil suit in Federal District Court seeking $48 million in damages. The Christic Institute led the legal effort. The complaint alleged that law-enforcement officials knew "that Klansmen and Nazis would use violence to disrupt the demonstration by Communist labor organizers and black residents of Greensboro but deliberately failed to protect them." Four federal agents were named as defendants in the suit, in addition to 36 Greensboro police and municipal officials, and 20 Klansmen and members of the American Nazi Party. Among the federal defendants was Bernard Butkovich of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, who had worked as an undercover agent in 1979 and infiltrated one of the American Nazi Party chapters about three months before the protest. He testified that a Klansmen had referred in a planning meeting to using pipe bombs for possible assaults at the rally, and that he took no further action.

The Christic legal team was led by attorneys Lewis Pitts and Daniel Sheehan, together with People's Law Office attorney G. Flint Taylor and attorney Carolyn MacAllister of Durham, North Carolina. A Federal jury in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, found two Klansmen, three Nazis, two Greensboro police officers, and a police informant liable for the wrongful death of Dr. Michael Nathan, a non-CWP demonstrator, and for injuries to survivors Paul Bermanzohn and Tom Clark, who had been wounded. It awarded two survivors with a $350,000 judgment against the city, the Ku Klux Klan, and the American Nazi Party for violating the civil rights of the demonstrators. The widow Dr. Martha "Marty" Nathan, was paid by the City in order to cover damages caused by the KKK and ANP as well. She chose to donate some money to grassroots efforts for social justice and education.

Several survivors joined a hundreds-strong march in 2004 to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the massacre. Without support or authorization from city government, a community group called the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission started an investigation that year. The conclusion? Police and the FBI knew about the possibility of violence ahead of time.

Please take time to watch the videos to get a real feel of what happened.

                     Greensboro Massacre 1979 (Short Documentary)


         The Greensboro Massacre Nov 1979


    Information sources:
   greensboro.com/news/nov-a-day-that-still-divides-city
   colorlines.com/articles/tbt-today-marks-37-years-greensboro-massacre
   romeroinstitute.org/project-greensboro-massacre
   wcax.com/content/news/Vermont-authors-tale-of-survival-from-the-Greensboro- Massacre-         457293493.html
   triad-city-beat.com/greensboro-city-council-apologizes-citys-role/
   en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greensboro_massacre 
   marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-5/greensboro/part1.htm


                CNN: Surviving a 'massacre'


               Greensboro: Closer to the Truth


                           30th Aniversary of Greensboro Massacre

     Greensboro Massacre Victim Reflects on Charlottesville Violence

Charlotte Hawkins Brown

                                                 Charlotte Hawkins Brown

Charlotte Hawkins was born in 1883 to Caroline Frances Hawkings and Edmund H. Hight, a brick mason, in Henderson, North Carolina. Charlotte never knew her father, therefore, she used her mother’s maiden name.  When Charlotte was about 7 years old, her mother took her to Massachusetts, where living conditions were better for blacks.  Charlotte blossomed in her new environment, showing enough early self-confidence and ability to be chosen speaker at her grammar school graduation ceremony in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  She would later recall that these years were unscarred by racial prejudice.  In fact, her high school principal remained a lifetime friend and supporter.

It was in 1901, when she accepted a position with the American Missionaries Association (AMA), to teach in a one room school house in rural Guilford County, North Carolina near Greensboro. While spending her formative years in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she became well acquainted with a classical education, which included the study of literature and the arts.

In 1902, Brown established the Palmer Memorial Institute in Sedalia,North Carolina. [Alice Freeman Palmer, first woman (white) to become president of a university in the United States].She named the school for Alice Freeman Palmer, , who was a friend and benefactor.

It first operated out of an old blacksmith shop, but eventually grew to house hundreds of students in more than a dozen buildings. Palmer grew to become known as an elite black preparatory school, hosting students from all over the country and world. During her tenure at Palmer, Brown actively toured, speaking on behalf of women’s suffrage and racial equality. She devoted her life to the improvement of the African American community’s social standing and was active in the National Council of Negro Women, an organization founded by celebrated educator Mary McLeod Bethune in 1935. As president of the North Carolina State Federation of Negro Women’s Clubs, Brown also directed African American women’s formal civic experiences for more than 20 years.

Married briefly to Edward Brown, who died, Charlotte "will inherit" nephews from her late husband, poor orphans including Maria Brown, future Mrs. Nat King Cole. Maria will be raised in the Palmer Memorial Institute, in the strictest discipline and we imagine the satisfaction of Aunt Charlotte when freshly graduated, Maria announced that she was going to marry a certain Spurgeon Ellington.

Things are not exactly going to happen as Charlotte would have liked. Soon, Maria will divorce but keep her married name, which she finds very practical for her new life choice: the song. Is it because they have the same name, she is in any case engaged as a singer of the orchestra of Duke Ellington, through which she will meet the charming Nat Cole,

More than 3000 guests, a religious service led by Hazell Scott and Adam Clayton Powell, thousands of curious around the church and later, a feast, unfolding, not at the Waldorf Astoria who refused to host a black wedding, but at the Belmont Plaza where Sarah Vaughan will be singing all night long.  Everyone will agree that Nat and Maria are the most charming couple in the world.

In addition to her work at the Palmer Institute, Brown was active in national efforts to improve opportunities for African Americans, including the Southern Commission for Interracial Cooperation and the Negro Business League. She was the first African American woman named to the national board of the YWCA. She was an honorary member of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.

              Treasures: Charlotte Hawkins Brown


             Palmer Memorial Institute Trailer


    Information sources:
    communitiesconnections.com/2014/09/08/charlotte-hawkins-brown-museum-by-tarriel-dubose-by-tarriel-dubose/
    radcliffe.harvard.edu/news/schlesinger-newsletter/pforzheimer-fellow-digitizes-charlotte-hawkins-brown-papers
    video.unctv.org/video/1940204967/
    soyons-suave.blogspot.com/2013/08/les-tres-suaves-heures-de-lhistoire.html
    www.ncdcr.gov/blog/2013/03/29/noted-black-educator-charlotte-hawkins-brown
    Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
    www.biography.com/people/charlotte-hawkins-brown-206525
    www.savway.net/charlotte-h.-brown.html 

Percy Lavon Julian

                            Percy Lavon Julian

Percy Julian was born in  Montgomery, Alabama, first child of six born to James Sumner Julian and Elizabeth Lena Julian Both of his parents were graduates of what was to be Alabama State University. His father, a railroad mail clerk, and his mother, a school teacher stressed education to their children. This emphasis would ultimately prove successful as two sons went on to become physicians and three daughters would receive Masters degrees, but it was son Percy who would become the most successful of the children.

Percy Lavon Julian  April 11, 1899 – April 19, 1975 was an African American research chemist and a pioneer in the chemical synthesis of medicinal drugs from plants. He was the first to synthesize the natural product physostigmine, and a pioneer in the industrial large-scale chemical synthesis of the human hormones progesterone and testosterone from plant sterols such as stigmasterol and sitosterol. His work laid the foundation for the steroid drug industry's production of cortisone, other corticosteroids, and birth control pills.

After college, Julian accepted a position as a chemistry instructor at Fisk University. He left in 1923 when he received a scholarship to attend Harvard University to finish his master’s degree, though the university would not allow him to pursue his doctorate. He traveled for several years, teaching at black colleges, before obtaining his Ph.D. at the University of Vienna in Austria in 1931.

In the 1930s chemists recognized the structural similarity of a large group of natural substances—the steroids. These include the sex hormones and the cortical hormones of the adrenal glands. The medicinal potential of these compounds was clear, but extracting sufficient quantities of them from animal tissue and fluids was prohibitively expensive. As with other scarce or difficult-to-isolate natural products, chemists were called upon to mimic nature by creating these steroids in the lab and later by modifying them to make them safer and more effective as drugs.

He later started his own company to synthesize steroid intermediates from the wild Mexican yam. His work helped greatly reduce the cost of steroid intermediates to large multinational pharmaceutical companies, helping to significantly expand the use of several important drugs.

Julian received more than 130 chemical patents. He was one of the first African Americans to receive a doctorate in chemistry. He was the first African-American chemist inducted into the National Academy of Sciences, and the second African-American scientist inducted (behind David Blackwell) from any field.

 Desiring to leave academia, Julian applied for jobs at prominent chemical companies, but was repeatedly rejected when hiring managers discovered that he was black. Ultimately, he obtained a position at Glidden Company as the lab director. There he invented Aero-Foam, a product that uses soy protein to put out oil and gas fires and was widely used in World War II, as well as other soybean-based inventions.

Julian continued his biomedical work as well, and discovered how to extract sterols from soybean oil and synthesize the hormones progesterone and testosterone. He was also lauded for his synthesis of cortisone, which became used in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis.

Julian left Glidden in 1953 and established his own laboratory, Julian Laboratories, in 1954. He sold the company in 1961, becoming one of the first black millionaires, before founding Julian Research Institute, a nonprofit organization that he ran for the rest of his life.


          PBS NOVA S34E08 Forgotten Genius


Information sources:
  www.sciencehistory.org/historical-profile/percy-lavon-julian
  blackinventor.com/percy-julian/
  www.biography.com/people/percy-julian-9359018
  Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia